DRM for books?
A recent column in the New York Times considers whether the ease of finding used copies of books is causing - or at least contributing to - the cratering of the publishing business.
Although there has always been a used book market - and there is a specific provision in the copyright law that allows such sales - the columnist, David Streitfeld, makes the point that for the first time in history it is possible to find almost anything you want via the internet. Up until now, the ability to buy specific used books was limited by the physical location you were in - a used book and buyer had to be close enough geographically that they might actually encounter each other.
The internet, of course, makes all of us in close proximity, and Google makes it simple to connect, leaving almost nothing to chance. I myself belong to the Paperback Swap club, a site that works like a bunch of friends holding a book swap, only if you collected all the people and books in this club into one space you could never fit into anyone’s living room.
And I just opened a Barnes and Noble e-newsletter a few minutes ago that boasts they have “millions of used textbooks at savings up to 90%.” What student could possibly pass that up?
The used book market is obviously huge, but it can exist only if there is also a new book market. The number of titles of new books put out by big publishers may in fact drop as the amount of new sales necessary to service the used market adjusts, but it will in fact do just that - adjust. And if we have smaller runs of a larger number of titles because smaller publishers can stay in business as the large publishers become less able to dominate the market, isn’t that a good thing?
Perhaps we’ll eventually see DRM-like tools in books, where they self destruct after a certain number of years to cut down on the used sales life. Maybe that’s why so many of my paperbacks these days have pages falling out before I’ve even finished reading them.
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