eBooks and Mobile
May 4, 2010
“Paper View”, which appeared in Mobile Entertainment, provides an interesting glimpse of eBooks in the UK market. For me, the most telling comment in the article was this passage from the CEO of Mobcast:
There was a good deal of support for the no-DRM idea at the Mobcast event. Tony Lynch, CEO of Mobcast, was quite forthright. He said: “The current level of DRM is problematic. But ultimately, obscurity is a bigger problem than piracy. People need to be able to find what they want, and if they can they will buy. The single biggest complaint we get is about availability. That’s what we need to focus on.” Evidence suggests that removing DRM can work and may indeed become the norm in e-books as it is in music. In the 18 months since O’Reilly, the world’s largest publisher of tech books, stopped using DRM on its e-books, sales increased by 104 per cent. Hard to assess how much of that growth was organic, but it’s still a thought-provoking figure.
Common sense may not prevail. The stakes are sufficiently high that companies perceiving themselves as kingpins want control. Right now, I am looking at any reference to open, open source, and standards to try and figure out if these are marketing words or something else.
Apple is the poster child for control. When Apple talks about “standards” and an “open Web”, I have some disambiguation to do.
Stephen E Arnold, May 4, 2010
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