00/01/13 - OEB and XML and DRM, oh my!There's been a lot of talk recently about the Open eBook specification and Digital Rights Management. These two relatively new technologies are absolutely crucial to the success of eBooks as a mass medium, so I thought I'd spend a little time talking about them. Open eBook, or OEB, is a dialect of XML. XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is in turn a derivative of SGML and a cousin to HTML. OEB combines the best of both worlds by allowing you to create your own tags (stored in a DTD, or Document Type Definition file) while remaining backwards compatible (with a few minor exceptions) with HTML 4.0. It's very easy to convert an existing (clean and well written) HTML document to OEB format, and I have several on my website under the "Jeff Recommends" page. These are not complete OEB packages, as they don't have the supplementary files the OEB spec recommends, but they are good examples of OEB format documents while remaining readable in newer HTML browsers and any XML browser. What does that all mean? It means that the industry players (everyone from Project Gutenberg to Microsoft) got together and decided to make one standard format for eBook content, in order to simplify writing, editing and distribution. No longer to you have to convert files from HTML to RTF to PDF to... You get the idea. Like Java, it's "write once, read anywhere." Unfortunately, OEB isn't taking off quite as well as we'd all hoped, mostly because there's a grass-roots movement of (ahem) people (see how civil I'm being?) trying to stop it. Some are the typical, afraid-of-change, "I'm doing fine with what I've got" crowd, and some noticed that the OEB committee includes companies like Microsoft and Random House and figures that anything the megacorps are interested in has to be bad for the consumer. That's the whole reason Bill Gates gets out of bed in the morning, to screw ignorant consumers, right? Wrong. Despite Microsoft's support and involvement, OEB is open. It's based on XML, so there's nothing stopping you from writing your own DTD if you want. There is no way for Microsoft or anyone else to "co-opt" the standard into something proprietary they can use to lock them into their own system (you'd think Microsoft wouldn't even try it if it were possible, with all the scrutiny on them recently for exactly this sort of thing). Because the format is extensible, you can bet that Microsoft (and NuvoMedia, makers of the Rocket eBook reader, and anyone else, really) will create their own tags, in order to differentiate their stuff. But that's the beauty of using XML as the base of all this. If you don't like the stuff they come up with, don't use it. The core OEB spec is all you need to make and read a full-featured eBook. So get the facts for yourself and don't buy into the anti-OEB propaganda. Check out openebook.org for more details. DRM: The Scary StuffOEB on its own is nice, and all folks like me really need, but before eBooks become commercially viable there will have to be some token security. Digital media is much easier to pirate than print, and the publishing companies are scared to death of it for that reason. They want the content secure, and that's were DRM comes in. According to some, Digital Rights Management will be Big Brother on your Palm. Several of the DRM schemes announced thus far have the ability to lock things down pretty tight, including:
This "pay-per-view infotainment", as it's been called, is very different from buying a paper book. You can't lend it out, you can't resell it, in some cases you can't even read the whole thing. More than that, the publisher (and by extension, whoever they sell the information to) knows what books you buy, how often you read them, and all kinds of other personal information about you. Intellectual privacy could go right out the window. Big Brother, indeed. DRM: The likely realityWhile the above scenario is possible, it's highly unlikely. DRM runs the full gamut. While it can (and should, in special cases like classified information) be used for near total lockdown, consumer eBooks will be much freer. It's not necessarily bad just because it can be used badly. The market has already spoken on the subject of pay-per-view media. DVD beat DIVX hands down. No mater how attractive it might be to ePublishers to have a steady stream of income by “leasing” books to consumers, they won't push what they can't sell. If people want to buy portable media that they can access whenever they want without restriction, then that's were the market will go. Simple supply and demand. If there's no demand for pay-per-view eBooks, the supply is irrelevant. A more likely scenario is the sort of DRM used by Peanut Press. For those who haven't been to their site yet, Peanut Press sells contemporary eBooks (Star Trek, Angela's Ashes, Stephen King) for PalmOS and WinCE handhelds. They secure the eBooks by encrypting them using as the key the name and last eight digits on the credit card used to purchase the eBook. That's it. They don't tie it to a hardware serial number, they don't prevent copying, they don't lock it down in any way, other than requiring essentially a userid and password to open it for the first time (once you've unlocked it, it stays unlocked as long as it's on the same machine). It's simple, unobtrusive, and it respects the reader's privacy while protecting the writer and publisher from piracy. In the long run, hard DRM does more harm to writers than good. Information wants to be free, and I mean that in terms of “free speech” rather than “free beer”. The more people exposed to your work, the more honest ones that will compensate you for it. Let's face it: any security measure only keeps honest people honest. People who are going to steal your book are going to steal your book no matter what you do. Any draconian DRM scheme will, that's right, WILL, be cracked. Better to save the honest people the annoyance in hopes that a pleasant buying and reading experience will help them do the right thing. I'll be incommunicado next week, so expect the next column on or about the 24th of January, 2000. See you then. Jeff Kirvin |