eBook DRM and Blockchain play CryptoKitty and Mouse. And the Winner is...

If you want to know how blockchain relates to DRM and ebooks, it helps to understand CryptoKitties.

 CryptoKitties are essentially numbers that live in a game-like environment which renders cats based on the numbers. Players can buy, collect, trade, and breed their kitties. Each kitty is unique. Players let their kitties play games in the "kittyverse". Transactions involving CryptoKitties take place on the Ethereum blockchain. Use of the blockchain make CryptoKitties different from other types of virtual property. The kitties can be traded outside of the game environment, and the kitties can't be confiscated or deleted by the game developers. In fact, the kitties could easily live in third-party software environments, though they might not carry their in-game attributes with them. Over 12 million dollars has been spent on CryptoKitties, and while you might assume they're a passing fad, they haven't gone away.

It's weird to think about "digital rights management" (DRM) for CryptoKitties. Cryptography locks a kitty to a user's cryptocurrency wallet, but you can transfer a wallet to someone else by giving them your secret keys. With the key, you can do anything with the contents of the wallet. The utility of your CryptoKitty (your "digital rights") is managed by a virtual environment controlled by Launch Labs, Inc., but until the kitties become sentient (15-20 years?) the setup doesn't trigger my distaste for DRM.

Now, think about how Amazon's Kindle works. When you buy an ebook from Amazon, what you're paying for is a piece of virtual property that only exists in the Kindle virtual world. The Kindle software environment endows your virtual property with value - but instead of giving you the right to breed a kitty, you might get the right to read about a kitty. You're not allowed to exercise this right outside of Amazon's virtual world, and DRM exists to enforce Amazon's control of that right. You can't trade or transfer this right.

Ebooks are are different from virtual property, in important ways. Ebooks are words, ideas, stories that live just fine outside Kindle. DRM kills this outside life away, which is a sin. And it robs readers of the ability to read without Big Brother keeping track of every page they read. Most authors and publishers see DRM as a necessary evil, because they don't believe in a utopia where readers pay creators just because they're worth it.

But what if were possible to "CryptoKittify" ebooks? Would that mitigate the sins of DRM, or even render it unnecessary? Would it just add the evils of blockchain to the evils of DRM? Two startups, Publica and Scenarex are trying to find out.

Depending on implementation, the "CryptoKittification" of ebooks could allow enhanced privacy and property rights for purchasers as well as transaction monitoring for rights holders. If a user's right to an ebook was registered on a blockchain, a reader application wouldn't need to "phone home"
to check whether a user was entitled to open and use the ebook. Similarly, the encrypted ebook files could be stored on a distributed service such as IPFS, or on a publisher's distribution site. The reader platform provider needn't separately verify the user. And just like printed books, a reader license could be transferred or sold to another user.

Alas, the DRM devil is always in the details, which is why I quizzed both Scenarex and Publica about their implementations. The two companies have taken strikingly different approaches to the application of blockchain to the ebook problem.

Scenarex, a company based in Montreal, has strived to make their platform familiar to both publishers and to readers. You don't need to have cryptocurrency or a crypto-wallet to use their system, called "Bookchain". Their website will look like an online bookstore, and their web-based reader application will use ebooks in the EPUB format rendered by the open-source Readium software being used by other ebook websites. All of the interaction with the blockchain will be handled in their servers. The affordances of their user-facing platform, at least in its initial form, should be very similar to other Readium-powered sites. For users, the only differences will be the license transfer options enabled by the blockchain and its content providers. Because the licenses will be memorialized on a blockchain the possibility is open that they could be used in other reading environments.

Scenarex's conservative approach of hiding most of blockchain from the users and rights holders, means that almost all of Scenarex's blockchain-potential is as-yet unrealized. There's no significant difference in privacy compared to Readium's LCP DRM scheme. License portability and transactions will depend on whether other providers decide to adopt Scenarex's license tokenization and publication scheme. Because blockchain interaction takes place behind Scenarex servers, the problems with blockchain immutability are mitigated along with the corresponding benefits to the purchaser. Scenarex expects to launch soon, but it's still too early to see if they can gain any traction.

Publica, by contrast, has chosen to propose a truly radical course for the ebook industry. Publica, with development offices is Latvia, doesn't make sense if you think of it as an ebook store, it only makes sense if you think of it as a crowd-funding platform for ebooks. (Disclosure: Unglue.it, a website I founded and run as part of the Free Ebook Foundation, started life as a crowd-funding platform for free ebooks.)

Publica invites authors to create "initial coin offerings" (ICOs) for their books. An author raising funds for their book sells read tokens for the book to investors, presumably in advance of publication. When the book is published, token owners get to read the book. Tokens can be traded or sold in Ethereum blockchain-backed transactions.

From an economic point of view, this doesn't seem to make much sense. If the token marketplace is efficient, the price of a token will fluctuate until the supply of tokens equals the number of people who want continuing access to the book. Sell too many tokens, and the price crashes to near zero.  In today's market for books, buyers are motivated by word of mouth, so newly published books, especially by unknown authors, are given out free to reviewers and other influencers. To make money with an ICO, in contrast, an author will need to limit the supply so as to support the token's attractiveness to investors, and thus the book's price.

In many ways, however, book purchasers don't act like economists. They keep their books around forever. They accumulate TBR piles. Yes, they'll give away or sell books, but that is typically to enable further accumulation. They'll borrow a book from the library, read it, and THEN buy it. Book purchasers collect books. Which brings us back to CryptoKitties.

In May of 2018, a CryptoKitty sold at auction for over $140,000. That's right, someone paid 6 figures for what is essentially a number! Can you imagine someone paying that much for a copy of a book?

I can imagine that. In 2001, a First Folio edition of Shakespeare's plays sold for over $6,000,000! Suppose that J. K. Rowling had sold 100 digital first editions of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in 1996 to make ends meet. How much do you think someone would pay for one of those today, assuming the provenance and "ownership" could be unassailably verified?

CryptoKitties might be cute and they might have rare characteristics, but many more people develop powerful emotional attachments to books, even if they're just words or files full of bytes. A First Folio is an important historical artifact because of the huge cultural impact of the words it memorializes. I think it's plausible that a digital artifact could be similarly important, especially if its original sale provided support to its artist.

This brings me back to DRM. I asked the CTO of Publica, Yuri Pimenov about it, and he seemed apologetic.

Even Amazon's DRM can be easily removed (I did it once). So, let's assume that DRM is a little inconvenience that [...] people are ready to pay [to get around]. And besides the majority of people are good and understand that authors make a living by writing books...

Publica's app uses a cryptographic token in the Blockchain to allow access to the book contents, and does DRM-ish things like disabling quoting. But since the cryptographic token is bound to a cryptographic wallet, not a device or an account, it just papers over author concerns such as piracy. Pimenov is correct to note that it's the reader's relationship to the author that should be cemented by the Publica marketplace. Once Publica understands that memorializing readers supporting authors is where their success can come from, I think they'll realize that DRM, by restricting readers and building moats around literature, is counterproductive. To make an ebook into a collectable product, we don't need DRM, we need need "DRMem": Digital Rights Memorialization.

So, I'm surprised to be saying this, but... CryptoKitties win!

More Links:

• Can Blockchain Disrupt The E-Book Market? Two Startups Will Find Out - Bill Rosenblatt
• Blockchain Comes to E-Books, DRM Included - Bill Rosenblatt
• London Book Fair 2018: Meet the World’s First #1 Bestselling ‘Blockchain’ Author - Andrew Albanese
• The Content Blockchain Project
• BitRights - Blockchain Digital Content
• Civil - The Decentralized Marketplace for Sustainable Journalism

Readium's New Licensed Content Protection May Result in Better Reader Privacy

CC BY

Libraries offering ebook lending are between a rock and a hard place. They know in their heart of hearts that digital rights management (DRM) software is evil, but not allowing users to borrow the ebooks they want to read is not exactly the height of virtue. Saintly companies like Amazon will be happy to fill the gaps if libraries can't lend ebooks. The fundamental problem is that "borrowing" is a fiction, a conceptual construct, when applied to the ones and zeroes of a digital book. An ebook loan is really a short-term license. Under today's copyright law, a reader must have a license to read an ebook, and ebook rights-holders don't trust users to adhere to short-term licenses without some sort of software to enforce the license.

Unless the rock becomes a marshmallow, libraries that want to improve the ebook lending experience are hoping to make the hard place a bit softer. The most common DRM system used in libraries is run by Adobe. Adobe Content Server (ACS) is used by Overdrive, Proquest, EBSCO and Bibliotheca's Cloud Library. Adobe Content Server is a hard place for libraries in two ways. First, a payment must be made to Adobe for every lending transaction processed through ACS. Second, use of ACS affects reader privacy. When ACS first came out, Adobe got to know the identity of every borrower. Adobe says this about these records:

"Adobe keeps internet protocol (IP) address logs related to Adobe ID sign-ins for 90 days"

I wish they also said they destroyed these logs. Their privacy policy says:

"Your personal information and files are stored on Adobe’s servers and the servers of companies we hire to provide services to us. Your personal information may be transferred across national borders because we have servers located worldwide and the companies we hire to help us run our business are located in different countries around the world."

... and generally says that reader should trust Adobe to not betray you.

Thanks in part to demand from libraries and the companies that serve them, Adobe changed ACS so that borrower identities could be de-identified by intermediaries such as Overdrive. So instead of relying on Adobe's sometimes lax privacy protections, libraries could rely on vendors more responsive to library concerns. But still, the underlying DRM technology was designed to trust Adobe, and to distrust readers. Its centralized architecture requires everyone to trust participants closer to the center. A reader's privacy requires trust of the library or bookstore, which in turn have to trust a vendor, who in turn have to trust Adobe.

This state of affairs has been the motivation for the Readium Foundation's new DRM technology, called Readium Licensed Content Protection (LCP). LCP's developers claim that it offers libraries a low cost way to improve the library ebook lending experience while providing readers with the privacy assurances they expect from libraries. In addition, Readium describes LCP as Open Source... except for a few lines of code. To understand LCP, and to see if it delivers on the developer's claims, I took a close look at the recently released spec. The short description of what I found is that it can do what it claims to do... but everything depends on the implementation. Also, DRM may be a Hofstadter-Moebius loop.

Now for the longer description:

Every DRM system uses encryption and secrets. Centralized DRM systems such as ACS keep a centralized secret, and use that secret to generate, distribute and control keys that lock and unlock content. LCP takes a somewhat different approach. It uses two secrets to lock and unlock content, a user secret and and ecosystem secret. An "ecosystem" is all the libraries, booksellers, and reading system vendors who agree to interoperate. Any software that knows the ecosystem secret can combine it with a user's secret to unlock content that has been locked for a user. This way multiple content providers in an ecosystem can independently lock content for a user- there's no requirement for a central key server.

The LCP DRM system has some interesting usability and privacy features. If you want to read on several devices, you just need to remember your encryption secret, and you can move files from one device to another. If you want to share an ebook with a family member or close friend, that's ok too, as long as you're comfortable sharing your encryption secret. If you want to read anonymously, can have have a trusted friend borrow the book on your behalf. But to get publisher buy-in for these usability features, the system has to have a way for content providers to limit oversharing. Content providers don't want you to just post the file and the password on a pirate file-sharing service. So ecosystem software applications are required to "phone home" with a device identifier and license identifier when they are connected to the internet.

As you might imagine, the LCP phone-home information could have an impact on reader privacy, depending on the implementation. So for example, if you borrow a book from the library, and your reader app contacts the library to say you've opened the book, your privacy is minimally impacted since the library already knows you borrowed the book. But if the phone-home transaction is unencrypted, or if it contains too much information, then your employer might be able to find out about the union-organizer book you're reading. If the libraries or booksellers can aggregate all their phone-home logs, then your detailed reading profile could be compiled and exploited. Or if users are not permitted to select their own encryption secret, it might be much harder to read a book anonymously. (Note: my suggested changes for improving these parts of the spec were accepted by the spec's authors.) But if everything is implemented with a view to reader privacy, LCP should offer much better reader privacy than possible with existing systems.

There's some bad news, however. Because the ecosystem secret has to be protected, the openness of the reader software is not quite what it seems. The code will need to be obfuscated before distribution, and the secret will only be available to developers and to distribution channels that are willing and able to "harden" their software. If you want to fork the software to add a feature, your build will not be able to unlock ecosystem content until the ecosystem overlords deign to approve your changes. So don't expect reader software with lots of plugins and options. Don't expect a javascript web-reader.

The code obfuscation raises another issue: it will be difficult to audit reader software to make sure it doesn't harbor spyware, even if the source code is open (except for the ecosystem secret). You still have have to trust app provider, your library and the people who sell you books. But it's hard to get far without trusting somebody, so this isn't a new problem, and when was the last time anyone audited library software? And because the ecosystem overlords distribute the ecosystem secrets to trusted developers, the topology of trust and accountability is very different from Adobe's centralized system.

If you didn't like that bad news, that cloud may have a silver lining, or maybe a lead lining, depending on your perspective. If LCP becomes widely used, the ecosystem secret will inevitably leak, and an anti-ecosystem could form. There will be a Calibre plugin to strip encryption. There will be grayware that does everything that the ecosystem software isn't permitted to do. And it might even be sort-of legal to use. Library ebook lending might flourish. Or collapse. Because in the end, ebook lending requires trust to flow in both directions; while it's not perfect, LCP is a baby step in the direction of mutual trust between readers and content providers.

In Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, the computer HAL 9000 goes insane. The reason:

HAL's crisis was caused by a programming contradiction: he was constructed for "the accurate processing of information without distortion or concealment", yet his orders, directly from Dr. Heywood Floyd at the National Council on Astronautics, required him to keep the discovery of the Monolith TMA-1 a secret for reasons of national security. This contradiction created a "Hofstadter-Moebius loop", reducing HAL to paranoia. 

Readium LCP software is sort of like HAL 9000. It's charged with opening up information to readers, with expanding minds everywhere, transporting them to worlds of new knowledge and imagination, yet it must work to keep a secret and prevent users from doing things that copyright owners don't want them to do. Let's hope that the P in LCP doesn't stand for "Paranoia".

Correcting Misinformation on the Adobe Privacy Gusher

We've learned quite a lot about Adobe Digital Editions version 4 (ADE4) since Nate Hoffelder broke the story that "Adobe is Spying on Users, Collecting Data on Their eBook Libraries". Unfortunately, there's also been a some bad information that's been generated along with the furor.

One thing that's clear is that Adobe Digital Editions version 4 is not well designed. It's also clear that our worst fears about ADE4 - that it was hunting down ALL the ebooks on a user's computer on installation and reporting them to Adobe - are not true. I've been participating with Nate and some techy people in the library and ebook world (including Galen, Liza, and Andromeda) to figure out what's really going on. It's looking more like an incompetently-designed, half-finished synchronization system than a spy tool. Follow Nate's blog to get the latest.

So, some misconceptions.

1. The data being sent by ADE4 is NOT needed for digital rights management. We know this because the DRM still works if the Adobe "log" site is blocked. Also, we know enough about the Adobe DRM to know it's not THAT stupid.
2. The data being sent by ADE4 is NOT part of the normal functioning of a well designed ebook reader. ADE4 is sending more than it needs to send even to accomplish synchronization. Also, ADE4 isn't really cloud-synchronizing devices, the way BlueFire is doing (well!).

On the legal side:

1. The ADE4 privacy policy is NOT a magic incantation that makes everything it does legal. For example, all 50 states have privacy laws that cover library records. When ADE4 is used for library ebooks, the fact that it broadcasts a user's reading behavior makes it legally suspect. Even if the stream were encrypted, it's not clear that it would be legal.
2. The NJ Reader Privacy Act is NOT an issue...yet. There's been no indication that it's been signed into law. If signed into law, and upheld, and found to apply, then Adobe would owe a lot of people in NJ $500.
3. The California Reader Privacy Act is NOT relevant (as far as I can tell) because it's designed to protect against legal discovery and there's not been any legal process. However, California has a library privacy law.
4. Europe might have more to say.

The bottom line for now is that ADE4 does not so much spy on you as it stumbles around in your closet and sometimes tells Adobe what it finds there. In a loud voice so everyone around can hear. And that's not a nice thing to do.

Update 1PM: Galen Charlton of Equinox Software has now reproduced the scanning behavior reported by Nate Hoffelder. This is important because there was always the possibility that Nate, whose reporting on ereaders has him trying out a lot of stuff, had some strange and unique system configuration.

Magic Rights Management for eBooks

The Fraunhaufer Institute in Germany is apparently marketing some "new" technology they're calling SiDiM which embeds digital data into texts by changing words in the text. They're telling publishers that it will fight piracy by making it easy to track files uploaded to torrents and file lockers back to their reprehensible sources.

It sounds kinda dumb, doesn't it?

The internet has over-reacted of course. Perhaps everyone is hypersensitive because of the revelations about the NSA and its data collection practices. Nick Harkaway jumped the shark a bit and called it "surveillance". The idea of changing words in books is easy to ridicule and deserves to die, but let's please take a deep breath.

There are lots of ways to put information in an ebook file, and license information is no different. For example, I've been advocating that Creative Commons licensed books should embed a digitally signed license so that the license can be relied upon. When you buy an ebook, an embedded license could protect you from accusations of infringement. Digital signatures can also tell you that a books content hasn't been tampered with.

When you buy a Harry Potter ebook direct from Pottermore, your identifying information gets digitally stamped into the ebook. According to the The Digital Reader, Pottermore uses watermarking technology from Booxtream, and I've been evaluating this technology myself for an Unglue.it project. So far, I'm impressed.

The rationale behind Pottermore's watermarking is that it prevents people from sharing the book beyond what their license allows. If the book gets on a public filesharing site, it can be traced back to the purchaser, and consequences could ensue.

Booxtream claims to be using 9 different watermarking techniques to make the embedded data hard to remove. For example, Booxtream adds digital codes to the names of the content files inside the EPUB, and adds data into image files. Although it's straightforward to strip some of the embedded info, Booxtream needs only to make it uncertain that stripping has been complete to retain some deterrence value.

For the user, the bottom line is that nothing the purchaser does or would want to do is impeded by the Booxtream watermarking. Nothing visible to the user is altered except for an ex libris page that tells the user that the copy has been personally licensed to him or her- it's customizable by the vendor.

A close analogy to ebook watermarking is the bullet serialization that's been proposed as an alternative to gun control. If every bullet was traceable to a purchaser, investigation of weapons related crime would be reduced to finding the bullet and looking it up in a database. Law abiding gun owners shouldn't notice the difference. Or maybe it would be de facto ban on ammunition. YMMV.

The argument against digital watermarking is that there will always be ways to remove the embedded data, no matter how clever you are at hiding it. Someone will make a one-click watermark stripper, and the value in watermerking will be diluted. But almost two years after Pottermore launched their digitally watermarked ebooks, it's quite hard to find watermark stripping tools. Why would anyone bother? There's nothing that the vast majority of ebook purchasers want to do that's impeded by the watermarking. Contrast that with the ease of finding tools to strip PDF watermarks, which are annoying.

You might wonder why SiDiM would be selling their technology with such a scary-dumb sounding marketing pitch. It's because publishers are the customers. I've been talking to a lot of publishers, and they're very clear that they want DRM. Or at least they THINK they want DRM. What they really want is magic. The want their ebooks to come with a magic bullet that stops piracy and over-sharing dead in its tracks. They don't understand the technology behind DRM, but many of them swallow the story that comes with it- that nobody would pay for digital files if they can get them for free from piracy sites.

The truth is that if there's magic in the kind of DRM that comes with Adobe, Apple and Kindle, it's of the variety that Voldemort would use. If there's magic in the watermarking techniques used by Pottermore, it's of the Dumbledore variety. If there's magic in SiDiM, it's like Neville Longbottom's Switching Spell that put ears on a cactus.

I'm here to tell you that magic is real. There's real magic in the stories that authors tell. There's real magic in communities and in relationships between people, between authors and readers. There's real magic in libraries. It's that real magic that will stop piracy and help authors earn a good living in the digital future.

Dumbledore's fictional magic can help make the real magic manifest, and that's what we should work towards

Related articles

• Social DRM Provider BooXtream Can Now Add Watermark DRM to Kindle eBooks
• Pottermore Wins Digital Strategy of the Year Award
• New German DRM Named SIDIM Will Stop eBook Piracy
• New DRM Changes Text of eBooks to Catch Pirates
• New DRM Promises to Ruin a Good eBook in the Name of Protecting It

No-Return eBook Lending

CC BY-NC by RoadSidePictures

When I was a kid, glass bottles were sold with deposits- a few pennies each. As a six year old I would help my dad collect our bottles and put them in the huge trunk of our car. I got to keep the change that the grocery store gave us in return for the "borrowed" bottles. This racket was foiled by new technology: the bottle companies figured out how to make bottles so cheap that returning them didn't make sense any more.

Library books, in a funny way, are like deposit soda bottles. We borrow the bound paper objects and consume the stories and knowledge they contain at home. Then we return the book to the library so someone else can drink deeply at the same fountain. The technology is changing, and the books have become ebooks.

So why do these library ebooks, which cost nothing to duplicate, need to be "returned"? It's only the license that gets returned; the bits themselves just get deactivated (via some form of digital rights management, DRM). The reason for the return is market segmentation. Publishers want to make their books available in libraries, but not in such a way that the library book substitutes for a consumer book purchase.

How does this market segmentation come about? You buy print books instead of borrowing them from a library for two reasons:

1. buying the book is more convenient.
2. if you buy the book, you get to keep it.

Whether you get the book from the library or buy it from a bookstore, you get to read the same book.

Library ebooks have so far tried to create both of these distinguishing factors. If someone else has an ebook on loan, you can't read it. Just try borrowing a popular ebook from your public library. Chances are you'll have to wait in a long queue before it's your turn. There are also usability barriers caused by the library's DRM that add "friction" to the lending process. When the lending period expires, the ebook vanishes from your ebook reader. That's more convenient than with print, because you don't have to go back to the library to return the book.

If you think a bit more deeply about the ebook, you'll realize that purchased-book attribute #1, ease of acquisition, is a completely separate thing from attribute #2, getting to keep it.

Imagine two new types of library books: one that's super-easy to acquire, but it vanishes after two weeks. With a second type, you have to wait your turn to get the ebook, but you get to keep it.

What? Impossible, you say?

Au contraire!

This past week, we witnessed the world's first example of an easy-to-get-but-vanishing library ebook. It's titled The Four Corners of the Sky and it's the ebook being offered in over 4,500 public libraries around the world through Overdrive, the dominant vendor of ebooks for public libraries. On June 1, or thereabouts, all these magic copies will vanish.

The other type, the one-user-at-a-time-but-you-get-to-keep-it library ebook, has actually been around for a while, in a very below-the-radar way. I think it's time to turn on the klieg lights. Because unlike the vanishing ebook, the get-to-keep-it ebook doesn't depend on DRM for its reality.

Publishers such as Carina Press have been allowing Overdrive to sell their ebooks to libraries without DRM. When lent, these books don't get returned, and the DRM doesn't vanish them, but the library doesn't lend the book to another patron until the end of the lending period. So the borrower doesn't have to return the ebook, except on the honor system.

When a library licenses a Carina Press title, what they get is a lending-rate-limited ebook, rather than a one-user-at-a-time book. It's my hypothesis that lending-rate-limits are responsible for the vast majority of library-ebook market segmentation today, and that the return requirement is relatively inconsequential. If that's true, we can eliminate DRM for library ebooks.

In Italy, a company called Medialibrary has done exactly that. They work with about 40 Italian publishers and a network of 2,500 libraries. Libraries pay the standard market price of the ebook to get an "archival copy" (for ever). Then they pay a fee for each lending. The ebook downloaded by patrons has a digital watermark identifying the user and the library. There's a limit of 60 downloads per copy, after which the library has to buy a new copy.

And I'm not saying there's never value in "keeping" an ebook. A cookbook, for example, is not something you're done with after a week. Libraries aren't about these books, for the most part. So the conclusion still holds: libraries can eliminate usage restricting software from most of the ebooks they lend.

The end of deposit bottles changed the workflow of households, retailers and the beverage industry, and created other changes, good and bad, that required a lengthy period of adjustment. Today, thanks to a more efficient and convenient delivery system, we spend more money on bottled liquids than ever.

I think it’s worth working on better ways to distribute the stuff inside books as efficiently as possible. And I think libraries can help make it happen. With no-return ebooks lending.

What do you think?

Can Libraries Lend eBooks Without DRM?

Last week I sat through a talk titled "What is a Book?". The speaker was making the point that digital books don't have to be any particular length, so books could be really short or even really really long. The talk then went down a rabbit's hole of ebook technology. That evening, in the hotel bar, the assembled wisdom came to a different conclusion. "The book is a social construct" we declared, and we promised to write blog posts to that effect. Software can try to make the book into something new and more wonderful, but the social construct is more powerful than the technology. Sure, you can copy a digital book endlessly, but people will still think of it as something you buy in a bookstore. You can use "Digital Rights Management" (DRM) software to stop people from making copies, but people will find ways to share it with friends, because that's the social construct built around books.

Libraries have built another powerful social construct around lending books. You would think that libraries would be able to think of a way to do this for ebooks without resorting to DRM software. But noooo! Here's the problem: ebooks aren't print books, and the most popular model for library lending of ebooks is what I call "Pretend It's Print". Only one person can use the ebook at a time. So when one person is "borrowing" the the book, everyone else has to wait their turn. The reason that libraries accept this model is that it would be prohibitively expensive to license a popular book for the use of all of their patrons at once. The downside is that the fictional scarcity of the ebook has to be enforced somehow. Most publishers don't trust that libraries have the technical expertise to securely encrypt files, manage keys, and track licenses to enforce the print-ness of an ebook. So libraries end up lending ebooks only via "platform vendors" such as Overdrive, 3M, EBSCO, ebrary, EBL and others.

There must be a better way.

When the Harry Potter books came out in digital form, it did come out in a better way. If you buy a Harry Potter eBook from Pottermore, it comes as an unencrypted ePub. But your name and purchase info gets embedded in the file as a way to discourage you from posting it on file sharing sites. ("fingerprinting" and "watermarking") As long as you use the ebook the way you would use a book, no software gets in your way. This is commonly known as "social DRM". Unfortunately, to my mind, the "social DRM" label has besmirched a good idea with the stink of a bad one. Cory Doctorow has called social DRM "delusional".  O'Reilly's Joe Wikert compares social DRM to being "a little bit pregnant"  which might seem "a little bit" hypocritical, as O'Reilly's venture with Pearson, Safari Books Online, requires DRM for O'Reilly ebook subscriptions sold to libraries.  uses social DRM for PDF downloads. (updated 2/18/13 based on comments) A more practical view was expressed by Feedbook's Hadrien Gardeur, who suggests that we think of social DRM as "personalization".

Librarians against DRM (Wikipedia)

Librarians are nothing if not practical but the strong DRM that's been imposed on them by the incumbent ebook platforms is in conflict with many of the core beliefs of librarianship. (The platform vendors, are in turn required to use strong DRM by the publishers who offer their books for library licensing.) DRM degrades accessibility, fair use, and privacy. Is there a way to use the strength of the library lending social construct to enable an ebook lending system that works without DRM?

The difficult part of this is not so much preventing illegal distribution, but getting users to accept limited lending periods for digital objects. After all, libraries need late fines to enforce limited loan periods even for printed books. With personalization of ebook files and cooperation with reading environments, this could be easily achieved. A "loan certificate" could be inserted into the ebook file, and the reading environment could remind and assist the user to "return" the book. Reading environments could also offer the user a chance to purchase a permanent license for the ebook.

Of course, a knowledgable user could easily circumvent loan expiration, or choose a reading environment that ignores loan certificates but that's beside the point. As long as most of the users respect the social construct of the library, they'll respect their obligations to their library, and the world will be better for it. Many of the expenses and inefficiencies of the current system would disappear. I think it's worth a try.

Overdrive has tried. In June of 2011, they announced a DRM-free lending program, with DRM-free publishers such as O'Reilly and Carina Press. The Overdrive program deals with the "return" issue by not dealing with it at all. It's not possible to return a DRM-free title early, so no one else can "borrow" a DRM-free title for the standard loan period. The effect is to replace the one-reader-at-a-time restriction with a lending-rate restriction. Overdrive seems to have de-emphasized this program. In December of 2011 they notified customers that "DRM has been applied to select DRM-free eBooks" and the announcement of the program has disappeared from their blog.  There's also no indication in the borrowing UI that a title is DRM-free; epubs are just labeled "Adobe EPUB ebook", presumably to prevent users from discovering how easy these files are to use or misuse.

A lot of mainstream publishers would never let libraries lend "unprotected" ebooks. There are exceptions. Springer's ebook collection is available to libraries without DRM. This makes sense because none of the included books are likely to be heavily used- the audience for an academic book is usually quite small. On the other hand, there are DRM-free publishers such as Baen and Tor that currently do not allow library lending at all; they seem to be good candidate for a no-DRM library solution.

I've started talking to people about how these ideas might be implemented- if you have ideas of your own, please let me know.

Notes:
1. An IDPF working paper has promoted "lightweight content protection" as another way to address the needs of libraries.  The idea in this proposal is to apply just enough DRM to trigger the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA and similar provisions in other countries.
2. Bookshare has used fingerprinting and watermarking as key components of their "Seven Point Digital Rights Management Plan", with good success.
3. Liza Daly has a list of DRM-free publishers.  Now that she's at Safari, maybe something will happen there. you should read her comments. (update 2/18)
4. Unglue.it is another way to remove the need for DRM in libraries.

Copyrighting the Number 42: a Stunt

The funny thing about licensing digital files is that they're just numbers. Really big numbers. So when you buy a song from iTunes, you're buying the right to use a particular number for your personal enjoyment. When you buy an ebook from Amazon, what you're really buying is the right to use another number on your Kindle or on one your Kindle Apps.

Before you get all information-wants-to-be-free on me, you need to realize that really big numbers are so profoundly outside of our experience that our intuitions about them fail. For example, Oral Literature in Africa, the ebook that 259 supporters helped to "Unglue" (i.e. make it free to the world) is a binary number 21,422,526 digits long. That's a trillion trillion...(775,304 more trillion's)...trillion trillion. If every particle in the universe contained another entire universe, and each of those universes contained an entire universe, and so on, you'd need to recurse down through 9,691 universes before you'd need a number as big as the Kindle version of Oral Literature in Africa. (Go ahead and download it, it's free!).

Imagining the number corresponding to a typical ebook is even harder than understanding digital copyright, so the idea that you can copyright and get exclusive rights to a universe or two of the more creative numbers doesn't seem completely weird by comparison. But what about a smaller number?

Consider a tweet- 140 characters. That's a number at most 2240 bits long, and it seems pretty clear that a single tweet can be considered a creative effort. It's still a very big number. We'd still need to recurse through every particle in the universe about 12 universes deep to get that big a number.

So what about a number small enough that we can almost wrap our brains around it? Can we still copyright it? The string "Harry Potter", expressed as 7 bit ascii, is only 84 bits long. I can write that number in decimal: 10,995,909,510,979,633,909,936,882. Or about 11 trillion trillion. And yes, Jo Rowling has that number trademarked on its own and copyrighted as parts of much larger numbers.

Well not really. That number is an idea, and ideas can't be copyrighted or trademarked. It's fixed expressions of ideas that can be copyrighted. So, the number, together with the ascii character table, flipped onto electron spins on your hard drive, can be an expression of "Harry Potter" which is arguably copyrightable as part of a creative work.

Get 42, the ebook, NOW.

So how far can we take this? Can I copyright the number 42? Sure I can. I just have to express it in a fixed form, in a creative way. And so I present, for your approval, my new ebook, Forty Two, now available for Kindle and other ereaders and downloadable from Github.

You may argue that 42 has made appearances in other ebooks, most notably in Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. You can get the Wikipedia article about the number 42 as an epub file. These are books about the number. My ebook (spoiler alert!) is the first ebook ever whose complete text is the number 42. Of course there's a cover, front matter, metadata, a table of contents and a dedication. There's even an index. You need these things to make it a properly expressed ebook.

I don't what to be a hog, I want to share the number 42 as book with others. That's why I've applied a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 license to this book. You can distribute it for free, without my permission. You can print it and sell it. I invite anyone and everyone to create derivative works. For example, I've sure that among the 17,472,032 bits used to express 42 an an ebook, there are creative bits to flip. And no, flipping the bit that makes 42 into 41 doesn't count as a creative contribution, so I own that one too! But go ahead, experiment, you can fork it on Github.

But woe unto those who try to distribute 42, the ebook, on platforms that use restrictive digital rights management. That would be a violation of the terms of the Creative Commons License, and I could sue you for a lot of money. As you probably know, the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to five years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

Enjoy!

Portability is Amazon's Kryptonite

Red Kryptonite

If you've been reading the blogs and the papers, you probably know that the US Department of Justice has bestowed super-powers on that web-shopping-site based in Seattle. Sure, they're soul-crushingly competent, but take away their Starbucks coffee and expose them to a smart start-up, and they'll probably become as threateningly geriatric as that code shop in Redmond.

So if you're Lex Luthor, CEO of Penguin, what do you do when Superman is flying loops around your latinum supply chain? You reach for a supply of kryptonite, of course.

It's easy to forget that not too long ago, Apple was left for dead and every startup presenting to a VC would dread the inevitable question: if you succeed, how will Microsoft crush you? How things change in the tech world! Microsoft's desire to collect a toll on everything proved to be its weakness. Microsoft is still a big player, but it's not the monster it used to be.

So what is Amazon's weakness in the book business? Has it become an unstoppable monopoly?

The "Collusive 5" publishers thought that the way to thwart Amazon's monopolism was to impose the "Agency Model" which allowed them to dictate retail prices. One problem with this strategy (apart from the illegal thing) was that their agency was a sham. In a true agency model, retailers would act as "sales agents" for the publishers, who would be the real sellers, setting prices and providing products. But what the Collusive 5 implemented was sham agency, in that they relied on the retailer (Amazon, Apple, Nook, Kobo) to do everything with the books except set the price. The retailer does customer service, fulfillment, rights management, viewing platform, even file integrity. The "seller" just pours content into ebook molds and props up the retailer margin, giving lots of other companies the chance to feed at the ebook trough.

This bean-counter's view of innovation mistook the real source of Amazon's growing market power. Barriers to entry, not profit margin, are the pillars that would sustain an Amazon ebook monopoly. And the biggest barrier to entry is the investment that consumers make in the Kindle platform. If it was just the reader device, it would be a temporary investment. Kindles are cheaply made, and they die  after a few years. It's the books on the e-shelves that consumers are loathe to toss in a digital trashbin. If consumers could take their purchases to any platform, Amazon's putative monopoly would melt away the moment some startup figured out how to build a better reading environment. Remember when no one could imagine a search engine competing against the likes of Yahoo, MSN and Alta Vista?

eBook portability is Amazon's kryptonite. If the vaunted Agency Model were not a sham, publishers could simply make portability a standard provision of their agency contracts: "Thou shalt enable portability". And that would be it. No collusion around pricing or discounts would be needed. Amazon could discount the living daylights out of their ebooks, but customers would still judge its competitors on their merits.

Some words about how portability could be implemented: It's been widely discussed that DRM is the biggest impediment to ebook portability. But portability can be implemented without eliminating DRM.  All that's needed is a digital-signed-receipt system. No difference if DRM were set aside for something more magical, morepotterish. Customers would receive a proof of purchase that could be presented to any authorized reading platform. It's not comic-book science, it's mundane coding stuff. I mean, you've hired some great techies, big publishers, why not listen to them for a change? Plus, coders are a lot cheaper than the antitrust lawyers you're not listening to.

So there's this little problem with ISBN assignment. ISBN gets used to identify ebooks, and BISG, in its standardized wisdom, decided that different ISBNs are given to Kindle ebooks and EPUB ebooks. So many people are unsure how to fulfill a consumer's ebook receipt for a book identified with ISBN. There's some work to do, but not anything you need superpowers for. It's muggle technology powering Pottermore, not magic.

Sweetbreads at Picholine
(CC BY-NC-ND by roboppy)

One more thing, big publishers. When you regrow your agency testicles, would you please tell your fruity Agents how you feel about reading platforms that pervert your content and think they know where your books can link to? I can think of all sorts of ways to make new monopolies out of that.

Oh, and when unglue.it colludes with y'all to achieve ultra-portable world domination, it doesn't count unless we do it at Picholine.

Creative Commons - ND (No Derivatives)

When I was a sophomore in high school, I read Catcher in the Rye. To me, the amazing thing about this book was the language. It seemed like every other word was "bastard", "goddam" or "sonofabitch". What were my teachers thinking?

Imagine if the Salinger estate decided to release a Catcher in the Rye ebook with a Creative Commons License so that 10th graders around the world could read it for free. What sort of license would they choose? In particular, would they choose a "No Derivatives" license?

Here's the "legal code" of the No Derivatives (ND) restriction in the CC BY-NC-ND license:

The [granted] rights include the right to make such modifications as are technically necessary to exercise the rights in other media and formats, but otherwise you have no rights to make Adaptations.

"Adaptation" means a work based upon the Work, or upon the Work and other pre-existing works, such as a translation, adaptation, derivative work, arrangement of music or other alterations of a literary or artistic work, or phonogram or performance and includes cinematographic adaptations or any other form in which the Work may be recast, transformed, or adapted including in any form recognizably derived from the original, except that a work that constitutes a Collection will not be considered an Adaptation for the purpose of this License. For the avoidance of doubt, where the Work is a musical work, performance or phonogram, the synchronization of the Work in timed-relation with a moving image ("synching") will be considered an Adaptation for the purpose of this License.

The advantage of allowing derivative works (Adapations) is that people would be free to use Catcher in the Rye for all sorts of amazing things. There would be a thousand YouTube dramatizations of Catcher in the Rye, free to all. There would be fan fiction. There would be novels about Holden as a homeless person, Holden as a Wall Street tycoon, or as President Caulfield. There would be translations, graphic novels and operettas. Best of all there would be versions of Catcher that would have all the goddams replaced by gosh darns and bitches replaces by guns, and that's what 10th graders would read in Texas. Imagine what they'd read in North Korea: Brother Ho Gathers Rice.

J. D. Salinger is rolling over in his grave even as we ponder the scenario. I think it's safe to say that Catcher in the Rye will not see a license allowing derivatives in my lifetime or in yours. It's not about generosity at all, it's about the artistic vision of the author. And J. D Salinger is not alone in wanting to ensure the integrity of his works. That why Creative Commons offers the "No Derivatives" option for its licenses in the first place.

There are lots of cases in which it's valuable to be able to change a work. As much as it hurts when your edit is reverted, the most amazing feature of Wikipedia is that anybody can change it. For a jazz singer, a song that you can't riff on is not jazz at all. For a teacher, a textbook that you can't adapt to your curriculum is just wrong. In these and many other applications, an ND license seriously reduces the value of a work.

But to date, most books have been written with the expectation that the the version that goes out to the printers is more or less the version that will be read. Authors have not incorporated the possibility of remixing and read-write literature into their creative visions. Certainly this will change as new forms and conventions emerge. But for now, most authors want to control the expression of their creations, even if they're willing to set them free. For the purposes of Unglue.it, we have to respect these wishes if we are to convince authors to release their works into the public commons. Money is not the issue.

As Mike Taylor, a long time friend of this blog, commented on a previous post, the ND aspect of our "standard" license clashes somewhat with the second two bullet points of Creative Commons'  "Share, Remix, Reuse" slogan.  It's important to recognize that even the CC BY-NC-ND license that Unglue.it will use by default unlocks "Remix" and "Reuse" activity that falls under "Fair Use".  The Creative Commons licenses leave untouched the fair use rights of users, and are hostile to Digital Rights Management (DRM) software that in practice impedes these rights. DRM typically blocks many types of fair use, and in the US, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) criminalizes the circumvention of this DRM.

Many of the derivative works that have Salinger spinning are allowed under fair use no matter what the license. But an ND license lets an author keep potentially valuable movie rights and translation rights. The value of these would be enhanced by letting everyone in the world read the book for free through ungluing, and this incentive will benefit the public by reducing the authors' ungluing price.

It's hard to know what sorts of "adaptations" of a work will be possible in the future. However, the Creative Commons licenses, including the ND licenses, make it clear that users have the right to migrate the work to new formats for the purposes of accessibility and compatibility with new media and technology. This is important to all of us, because without this right, it's quite possible that many of the ebooks we use today will be unreadable 50 or a hundred years from now.

Notes:

1. As always, don't confuse this blog with legal advice.
2. According to Wikipedia, Catcher in the Rye continues to sell 250,000 copies a year. 
3. The Catcher in the Rye is #410 on Amazon's best-seller list. 
4. A fair "ungluing price" for Catcher in the Rye would be at least $4,000,000.
5. I've previously posted about the Attribution and Non Commercial attributes of Creative Commons Licenses
6. It's funny. Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

EPUB Really IS a Container

"It's OK for libraries to put things in their EPUB books." That's what Bill Kasdorf, a member of the EPUB Working Group, told me last week at the IDPF Digital Book 2011 Meeting. He checked with EPUB Revision Co-Editor Markus Gylling to make sure. I had been curious if libraries could put all their cataloging information inside an EPUB file instead of siloing it in their catalog system.

It may seem an odd question if you don't know a few things about EPUB. EPUB is a standard format for ebooks. It's used by Apple, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Overdrive and many others not named Amazon. EPUB is near the end of a revision process that will result in EPUB 3.0.

The EPUB specs define a lot more than just a file format. Both EPUB 2 and EPUB 3 define a container format (in EPUB 3 it's called the EPUB Open Container Format (OCF) 3.0, and then go on to define a number of file formats for files that go inside this container. These files are the resources- texts, graphics, etc. that make up the ebook.

OCF uses the ubiquitous ZIP format to wrap up all a book's resource files into a neat, transportable package. That's pretty much standard these days. Java ".jar" and ".war" files use the same mechanism, as do MacOS' ".app" files.  As a consequence, you can use any unzip utility to look inside an EPUB file and manipulate its contents.

There's even a reserved name for a file to contain book level metadata in OCF: META-INF/metadata.xml, as well as another file for rights information, META-INF/rights.xml. Another file, META-INF/signatures.xml can be used to prove who made parts of the file and determine whether anyone has mucked with them. When Gluejar issues Creative Commons editions of newly relicensed works, we'll use the rights.xml file to make sure the CC declaration is explicit.

The new EPUB revision is coming fast. Last Monday, Bill McCoy, Executive Director of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) announced the release of the full EPUB 3 proposed specification. My guess is that when we look back on this event 10 years hence, we'll recognize this as the moment EPUB began to revolutionize the world of information, and with it, the book industry.

Although Amazon still uses the aging MOBI format on its kindle devices, it seems only a matter of time before the infrastructure accumulating behind EPUB pushes them into the embrace of the IDPF. Already, most of the content flowing into the Amazon system is being produced in EPUB and converted to MOBI. Don't expect this shift to happen soon though; in his IDPF presentation, Joshua Tallent of eBook Architects described rumors that this would happen soon as "bunk"- but it will happen sometime.

EPUB 3 comes with lots of goodies. The revision adds several modules of sorely needed capability. It includes MathML, SVG and JavaScript over a substrate of HTML5 and CSS2.1. While MathML and SVG are essential for education and technical markets, JavaScript has been somewhat controversial because of the difficulty of making sure things work securely and without connections. Most of the reading systems inherit javascript capability from the WebKit rendering engine they're based on, so a lot of javascript functionality will work in ebook readers regardless.

(left) Autography Founder and Author  T. J. Waters

All this capability will remain latent unless people find compelling uses for it. I'm not worried. As the BookExpo itself got started, I met two different companies who were manipulating ebook files to solve the same problem: how can an author sign a book when the book is digital? Both companies, Autography and InScribed Media, create personalized experiences that leave artifacts of an author-consumer interaction inside ebook container files. Both of these companies have compelling solutions; they differ in their business models. Autography is structured as an author focused bookstore; InScribed is developing partnerships with existing bookstores.

InScribed Media Founder and Author Alivia Tagliaferri

To some extent, InScribed and Autography are forced to be a bit convoluted in the way they deliver their product because they need to live inside DRM green zones; users don't have access to the files inside books without cracking the DRM (which is rather easy, by the way!). It's unfortunate, because personalization of ebooks could be a good way to encourage responsible use. I certainly don't want that picture of me torrenting around the world!

Libraries face a similar dilemma. The insides of an EPUB file could be greatly enriched by  libraries, which have every motivation to enhance discovery both of the book and the information inside of it. But DRM gives the publisher and its delivery agents the exclusive ability to build context inside ebook containers. Libraries and readers are locked out. I think that for DRM systems to survive they will need to accommodate a more diverse set of user manipulations; author signatures are just the tip of the iceberg.

Coming soon, I'll report on EPUB 3 metadata.

Where English is Spoken

According to Wikipedia, the countries with the most English speakers are

1. United States, 251 million English speakers
   
2. India, 232 million English speakers
   
3. Nigeria, 79 million English speakers
   
4. United Kingdom, 60 million English speakers
   
5. Philippines, 50 million English speakers

The US and UK, of course, are wealthy countries with strong publishing industries, but it would be a big mistake for English language publishers to ignore the possibilities for growth in the other three. India in particular already supports a billion dollar publishing industry.

The coming transition from print to digital books will cause significant upheaval for distribution of books from the US and UK in countries like India. This is because India and other developing countries are "price-sensitive". The idea of selling a popular western novel for $30 or so is seen as outrageous price-gouging from the Indian point of view. The book industry has historically worked around this issue by carving up rights to books into regional pieces. An Indian publisher can thus bring out an inexpensively manufactured edition of the book and sell it at a 20% of the price it fetches in its home market. The regionality of the selling rights protects products being sold in the developed market from competition with products priced for sale in developing countries.

With digital products, this practice becomes complicated. The DVD industry for example, uses region coding to prevent DVDs sold in one region of the world from being played on players sold in another region of the world. They have managed to do this by building a type of DRM into almost every DVD player sold.

This promises to be much harder to do for digital books; that's not to say that the book publishing industry isn't trying to do it. [Insert here your favorite argument against applying DRM to books]

Nonetheless, certain aspects of ebooks seem ideal for developing countries with large populations. The cost of creating an additional copy of an ebook is almost zero; and the cost of reader devices, which has finally cracked the $100 barrier in the US, continues to fall. It's not far fetched to think of generating significant revenue by selling millions of copies of popular ebooks for 10-25¢ a copy. Libraries could play an important role in helping to enable this sort of distribution securely.

One possible stumbling block to realization of this fantasy is ebook piracy. While no reproducible research has been able to show that ebook piracy is a significant issue in the US and UK markets, all the available data indicate that demand for pirated material is quite strong in developing markets. Publishers that ignore these markets because of their small economic value today are throwing away huge potential future markets by training consumers that if they want to obtain ebooks they need to avoid legitimate markets.

Bounty markets for ebooks could play an important role in monetizing large numbers of people who can only pay small amounts for ebooks. Because bounties are posted for open access release of ebooks, it doesn't work unless all global rights holders agree and get a share of the money. A credible market of this type would thus have to start out with a truly global presence. That's one reason I've just arrived in snowy London for a short visit and also a reason I'll be heading to balmy India this weekend.

Wish me luck.

Overdrive to Offer Honor System eBook Lending for Libraries

Newark, New Jersey's most populous city, has many profound problems, including poverty, crime, decaying infrastructure and a history of political corruption. It has a great subway, though. The Newark City Subway is safe, clean, runs on time, and was recently extended. Perhaps most surprising is the ticketing system. You buy your ticket at a machine, get it stamped, and you get on the train (it's technically a light-rail system, but everyone calls it by its old name.) Theoretically, someone might ask to see your ticket (and give you a $74 fine if you don't have one), but I've never seen one of these ticket inspectors. It's basically an honor system.

That's right, 8 miles west of New York City, the turnstile-jumping and publishing capital of the entire known universe, there exists a subway system where the practice of turnstile jumping is nonexistent because there are no turnstiles.

As publishers transition their business models from print to digital, they are faced with the incredibly hard task of establishing new economic models and social practices. It's more than a matter of legal agreements, copyright laws, and digital right management software, it's establishing a social contract around a new technology. To establish that contract, they need to obtain assent from readers, authors, and society itself. That's one reason libraries could be very valuable to ebook publishers. Over the years, libraries have built social capital far in excess of their economic impact and they have a unique ability to shape readers' expectations for how ebooks could work.

Even so, I was surprised to learn that this week, at the Public Library Association Meeting in Portland Oregon, Overdrive, Inc. is announcing a program which will allow libraries to lend DRM-free ebooks. Overdrive is the leading provider of ebooks to public libraries in the US, with over 10,000 libraries in its network.

I had thought that libraries couldn't possibly lend ebooks that weren't wrapped in some sort of digital rights management system. The concept of "lending" DRM-free ebooks just didn't make a lot of sense to me. So I talked to David Burleigh and Angela James about the program. Burleigh is Overdrive's Director of Marketing, and James is Executive Editor at Carina Press, a digital-first division of Harlequin Enterprises Ltd. that's just starting operations. Carina is one of three publishers whose participation in the DRM-free program has been announced. (The others are Saddleback Educational Publishing, and Rourke Publishing).

Overdrive is already providing 30-40% of its audiobooks to libraries without DRM. (This makes them much easier to load onto an iPod!) These are handled within the Overdrive Media Center pretty much the same way audiobooks with DRM are handled; although all the details are yet to be determined, the DRM-free ebooks will likely be handled using procedures similar to those used for DRM-free audiobooks.

Carina, which expects to launch this summer, will be selling DRM-free ebooks through its own website and "the usual suspect" distribution partners, according to James. Since they plan to be DRM-free in their direct-to-consumer channel, the lack of DRM in the Overdrive library program is not such a huge step for them. While consumer pricing for Carina ebooks will be $2.99 to $6.99, the pricing for libraries hasn't been decided yet.

The purchase and usage model for DRM-free ebooks, at least to start, will be almost the same as for DRM ebooks. The library will be able to purchase one or more licenses for use by a single user of the book at a time. In other words, the patron will be able to borrow the ebook for a set borrowing period, during which time other patrons will not be able to read the ebook. At the end of the borrowing period, the patron will be reminded to delete the book from their computer or reading device. With DRM, the ebook "self-destructs" on its own, which might be viewed as a convenience if not for the headaches DRM can impose on users. Without DRM, the patron is on the honor system.

Yes, you read that correctly. The ebook borrowing will use the honor system.

Many other details, such as library licensing terms, are as yet unclear. I will be interested to see whether the downloaded ebook files contain serial numbers or watermarks that could be used to monitor files that escape from the library lending environment. I also wonder whether ebook lending will be tied to ecommerce opportunities- if the patron hasn't finished the book by the end of the lending period, they should be offered a chance to purchase the book, I would think. According to James, much that Carina is doing is being done with the consideration that readers will purchase books. They might borrow an ebook from the library and then buy the rest of the series to read on the airplane.

As I tried to imagine how honor-system ebook lending might work in practice, I began to think about the many opportunities that libraries and librarians have to engage patrons and set expectations on their behavior. That could be very poowerful. It takes me a fraction of a second to dismiss a dialog box informing me of terms and conditions that I have no intention of paying any mind to. But if a librarian looks me in the eye and entrusts me with a valuable manuscript, you can bet I'll defend it with my life. Imagine getting a Facebook message from your smiling librarian letting you know that it's time to delete your borrowed ebook. Damn right you'll delete it!

Honor system ebook borrowing could even evolve into a reimagining of DRM. Instead of digital RiGHTS management (DRiM), it would be digital ReSPONSIBILITY management (DReM). A user could commit to deleting an ebook after a while, and DReM software could assist the user in executing and documenting the deletion.

It seems that whenever a DRiM discussion arises, it devolves into pronouncements about the evils of DRiM, the mortal threat of piracy and conflicting lessons from the napsterization and itunesification of the record industry. In the absence of a generally accepted social contract surrounding ebooks, it's no wonder that user compliance is in doubt. By contrast, the honor system for library borrowing is crazy enough that it might actually work, and both libraries and publishers ought to support this program to see if it does work. Like the Newark City Subway.