Lately there’s been talk around certain parts of the web about an “innovative” use of Digital Restrictions Management – disappearing textbooks. This, of course, isn’t really anything new; proprietary software makers have offered “limited trial editions” of their software for years. At the end of the trial, the software would cease to work. Now, ebook publishers are applying this concept to textbooks. After about 5 months, you can no longer read or do anything else with the DRMed textbooks… well, other than delete them.

The idea behind this doomed business plan is that by offering these inferior books at a cheaper price than normal textbooks to students, who are by nature poverty stricken, the students will flock to the time-and-use-restricted texts instead of picking up someone else’s used textbooks. That’s not going to happen, and here’s why:

First off, what fair use rights do the students have when they use a DRMed textbook? Can they copy from it? That’s up to the publisher. If so, how much can they copy from it? That’s up to the publisher. Can they print out pages of the book to read away from their computer? That’s up to the publisher. If so, how much can they print? That’s up to the publisher. Can you even use the search feature? That, too, is up to the publisher, and as we’ll see in a second, publishers haven’t exactly been liberal with the rights allowed to their users.

Let’s take a look at a DRMed eBook, shall we? How about Aristotle’s Politics? This is a book that is in the public domain, and has always been in the public domain. What rights have users been allowed in this case? Well, as you can see, you cannot copy from the book and you cannot print from the book, but you can use the “Read Aloud” feature. Why anyone would want this locked down rubish when there is a truly free version over at Project Gutenberg is beyond me, but you can make at least a little money selling anything I suppose. The point, of course, is that given the amount of restrictions on a book that should have no restrictions at all, you can imagine the types of restrictions that would be put on a work that is NOT in the public domain. It’s conceivable that you might even be restricted to reading only a certain number of pages a day. It’s all up to the publisher.

Secondly, what happens if something happens to your computer? What if it’s stolen? What if your harddrive fails? What if your system files are corrupted (say, by a virus, perhaps?) and you are forced to reinstall everything? Tough luck, buddy. You want another copy? You’ll have to pay for it, just like the last one. You want to use it on a different computer? Tough, buy another copy. You want to make a backup in case something happens to it? Hah. Do it and we’ll sue you into the ground.

And at the end of the class, can you resell the book? Can you give it away? Of course not, it just disappears. This is actually being touted as a benefit by DRM proponents. They claim that offering you the book on the cheap entitles this kind of treatment. That might be understandable, until you take into consideration the amount of money THEY save by selling only digital copies, and not physical objects. No printing costs and no chance of a second-hand market for the books (as they’ve finally eliminated that pesky first-sale doctrine) equals a much higher profit margin, even if they are charging you less overall.

The internet was designed to facilitate the spread of human knowledge by increasing the ease with which information can be communicated. Instead of embracing this and enabling virtually all the world to leap forward, DRM proponents are pushing the restrictions of the physical world (and more) onto the digital world and threaten to drive us into a digital darkage. It is at moments like these that the need for Free and Open textbooks becomes clearly apparent. The projects have been started, but they are still in their infancy and need our help. Wikibooks, a sister project of the wildly popular Wikipedia, has started work on a series of Free textbooks, and many other kinds of books, while Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders continue to make the literary works of the public domain accessible to all of mankind. Instead of paying for restricted information in proprietary formats and making a few already wealthy publishers wealthier, we should all be contributing, whether with our time or our money, to the projects that serve to enrich all our lives.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 13th, 2005 at 4:06 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.