Are book publishers shooting themselves in the foot by insisting on draconian rights management for their e-books? Many readers responded to my recent column on the subject that they think that’s the case, but one reader had some inside knowledge as to how the situation came about.
"I can testify that the fault lies squarely with the book publishers, not platform vendors like Adobe, Microsoft, etc.," wrote the reader, a CTO who helped launch the e-book business of a major online retailer several years ago. "Publishers are irrationally paranoid about ‘illegal’ use of their content. But the truth is one of the former platform vendors does carry some responsibility for fanning the flames.
"Gemstar, which used to be a player in the e-book space with their Softbook and Rocketbook reading devices, always touted the fact that their platform had a major advantage over Palm, Adobe, MS, etc," the reader continued. "This was because only they had a hardware platform, whose DRM was ‘impossible’ to break (turned out not to be true, in any case). Gemstar spent a lot of time trying to scare the publishers away from the Palm, Adobe, MS, software-based readers, claiming that the content would soon be public domain.
"I remember trying to convince publishers how irrational the fears were," the reader continued, "considering the fact that anyone with a $99 scanner, the ‘lite’ version of an OCR package bundled with it, and a little knowledge, could produce a credible e-book in a couple of hours. Why would a budding pirate bother to try to break DRM? No chain is stronger than its weakest link. So why waste all that money and effort -- and antagonize customers -- with draconian DRM schemes? But the publishers preferred the Gemstar argument, and the result is the kind of DRM problems you wrote about. The irony, of course, is that both Gemstar e-book platforms were market failures and Gemstar is now out of the e-book business entirely."
12:21:48 PM 
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