Tor Books says cutting DRM out of its e-books hasn’t hurt bu

[frigidmagi]

Arstechnica

Early this week, Tor Books, a subsidiary of Tom Doherty Associates and the world's leading publisher of science fiction, gave an update on how its decision to do away with Digital Rights Management (DRM) schemes has impacted the company. Long story short: it hasn't, really.

Tor announced last April that it would only retail e-books in DRM-free formats, because its customers are “a technically sophisticated bunch, and DRM is a constant annoyance to them. It prevents them from using legitimately-purchased e-books in perfectly legal ways, like moving them from one kind of e-reader to another."

This week, Julie Crisp, editorial director at Tor UK, wrote that the publisher has seen “no discernible increase in piracy on any of our titles, despite them being DRM-free for nearly a year.”

Tor's 2012 decision was largely applauded by its customers, who enjoyed being able to share e-book files among various devices, and by Tor's authors. “All of our authors including bestsellers such as Peter F. Hamilton and China Miéville were incredibly supportive when we asked them to consider removing DRM from their titles,” Crisp wrote. “All of them [signed] up without hesitation to a scheme which would allow their readers greater freedom with their novels.”

Not everyone was on board with Tor's decision, however. In August 2012, a leaked letter from Hachette UK to a number of authors suggested that Tor's DRM-free e-books strategy would “make it difficult for the rights granted to us [Hachette] to be properly protected.” The letter urged authors to push pack against Tor's DRM-free policy.

This reaction was more of a flash in the pan, and Tor says it will continue to publish e-books DRM-free. “The move has been a hugely positive one for us, it’s helped establish Tor and Tor UK as an imprint that listens to its readers and authors when they approach us with a mutual concern—and for that we’ve gained an amazing amount of support and loyalty from the community,” Crisp wrote.

It's unclear whether Tor's success will sway other e-book publishers toward offering DRM-free titles. As Forbes contributor Suw Charman-Anderson points out, Tor has a unique customer base, with readers who are more engaged with authors than readers of other genres are. Still, one common argument is that DRM can be easily removed with a little know-how, so blocking a reader from sharing a book across multiple devices ends up being an inconvenience rather than a deterrent.

[Josh]

We very explicitly went no-DRM for ours, along with the lending option. Mind you, they incentivize the lending option so that made it a bit easier, but that had been our intention from the beginning.

By the time I got my very own Nook 1.0, Calibre was already out and it was very obvious that DRM schemes would work as well with ebooks as any other commercial production, so what's the point? It's irritating enough that Kindle is sticking with the fuggin' mobi format when the rest of the world is going epub, but neither format is resistant to being cracked like an egg so that the soupy literary contents can be poured out. In the meantime going no-DRM makes it certain that the paying customer can transition the file to any device or reader they damn well please without hassle.

I will admit that I'm in a position of some strength in taking my stand as compared to other media distribution- piracy just doesn't seem to be a broad-scale issue in literature the way it has been in other fields. I don't have any data on the topic, but I expect it's because readers in general are more content to pay for their entertainment than people in other fields. Furthermore because of the length of books and the nature of reading there doesn't seem to be the huge disparity in actual value vs. paid value that comes with music or TV shows. Especially given that ebooks in new release tend to be significantly cheaper than hardcovers in new release...

(Hardcovers are utter ripoffs, if you get the choice take the ebook.)

...people don't seem to mind dropping eight or ten or twelve books on an ebook, the way they might feel price-adverse to dropping the cash for a DVD set.

(The actual price points probably also help with that.)

TL;DR: Yup, epub doesn't need DRM. Also, Baen's been DRM-free since day one and it doesn't seem to have hurt them at all. (Only selling through their proprietary store, on the other hand, probably has.)

[B4UTRUST]

I would have to disagree with Josh at a few points here. Now, this is strictly from consumer side, not from publisher or writer side so there is obviously going to be large breaks in view point. And that some of my viewpoints probably make me sound like an asshole.

1) Paying $10-12 for an ebook isn't really that exciting to me, honestly. I'm not getting a physical product I can hold in my hand. I'm not getting the sensation of holding a book or being able to enjoy it from a tactile perspective as you do with dead tree format. I'm getting a half meg to one meg .epub file. From my perspective there is very little difference here between buying dead tree/digital and buying CD/digital for music. Look at iTunes. Average price per song is about $.70 to $1.30. Yes, I understand the difference is a whole novel vs one song, but most people only ever really want a few songs on an album anyway as the rest is really just filler and not worth it. Cost of a CD is $16-25 give or take. I can grab the 3 songs I actually want online for about $3. Money saved. Selling me an epub format for roughly the same price of the physical copy of it isn't a bargain.

If I'm going to drop $12 for a book the publisher gives me a tangible physical product, something I can point to and say 'why yes, there was a significant cost involved into producing this.' The equipment to mass print and bind the book, the people to run it, shipping the book, etc. All this in addition to paying the author. There is a justifiable cause for the price point there. However, a digital file that is easily converted into a dozen different popular formats within seconds, tossed up on a server and involves little to no additional cost(server maintenance and hosting of service divided across an entire publishing house's catalog is going to probably be fairly small in comparison to costs of book printing I would think). There isn't a physical product to justify the increased cost. Now sell the book for $5? Sure, we're talking closer to what would be a good price point, to me. And some books sell for that. But I don't see paying the same price for a small digital file when compared to a physical book.

This is still one of my pet peeves of the digital distribution system of video games through Steam. I'm saving you money by not making you produce a DVD of the game along with manual, box, shipping costs, etc. In turn there should be some sort of price difference accordingly. Why do I have to pay the same price as the guy who gets the entire nice shiny wrapped box? I get less, save you money but you still end up making more overall money off of my sale than his when you start factoring costs. Now, sometimes this isn't the case and it's a great way, I admit, to get indie games out there to a large audience where otherwise they'd be dead in the water. So it's not completely bad. But from the perspective of buying from the big studios when they're not on sale, I'm usually paying the same costs as I am going to the store to buy the same product but getting nothing physically to show for it. But that's just my viewpoint.

2) Due to the ease of making digital files now, it's easier for people to self-publish and get their stuff out there to buy. That's great! Sometimes. If I go to a Barnes and Noble store and buy a book, it's usually not self-published and on their bookshelves in dead tree format. There's usually at least one or two sets of eyes other than the author's reading through it before it hits shelves. Someone, somewhere, has determined that its not complete and utter absolutely unreadable shit. So you plop down the cash and get the book. Is it guaranteed to be brilliant? Absolutely not. Is there a chance it's complete crap anyway? Of course there is. But I don't usually end up with that sort of experience because of the thousands of grammatical and spelling errors in every chapter. I may not care for the author's ability to tell a story(or pretend to tell one) but usually an editor has reviewed it and somewhere down the line the majority of obvious problems have been rectified. In mass digital distribution? This doesn't always seem to be the case. I've grabbed books from no-name random authors who did the self-publishing route who continue to shock me by being able to spell their own name, given the amount of misspellings. Not everyone is like this, of course. And there are some pretty good writers out there who have a real talent that would not be seen otherwise. But for every one of them, you get two dozen people who can barely string together a sentence but insist their masterpiece is worth that $8-12 point. In a store, I can flip through the book(usually) and take two minutes to glance through and see if it's going to be something I'm interested in. This isn't the case with digital books through some distributors. You can't always read a sample chapter before laying out the cash. With a physical book I could return it and probably get my money back. Digital files don't have such return policies due to the ease of simply copying it and saying 'Oh, I didn't like it so I deleted it can I have my money back now, please?'

3) Is ebook piracy as far-reaching as as music or movie or game piracy? Not even close. But it is there and growing. There's several sites out there now devoted heavily to doing just ebook piracy. So I don't expect the lack of DRM to last forever, sadly.

[Josh]

Taking it in order:

1) Dead tree expense is largely reflected in overhead of editing, marketing (directed to the catalogs and distributors mostly, very little marketing goes to the end-user excepting for the top ten bestsellers), and also so the publishing company brass can afford gold toilets and yachts. The actual printing process is faaaaar cheaper than all that, and with hardcovers it's a massive ripoff. The reason they'll charge thirty bucks for a new-release hardcover is because they know that the series they're releasing it for has desperate fans willing to pay an inflated amount in order to get the next book in the series. It's pure 'charge what the market will bear' dynamics at work, and we've seen a very similar pricing trend happening in ebooks. Right now the book on self-pub is to run at about eight bucks (7.99, naturally) because the publishers have made bullshit noises about production costs meaning that the low-end ebook price should be 11.99 for a traditionally published book. The thing to remember is that the publishers are trying to eradicate the mass market paperback altogether, in favor of a transition to trade paperbacks that let them charge even more inflated rates, and they're also moving in that direction to use TPBs and hardcovers as loss leaders for what then appear to be bargain-priced ebooks.

My (admittedly anecdotal) experience of the market is that the price point of five to eight bucks does seem to be what people are most comfortable with, and when they're hooked on a series from a traditional publisher then they're readily willing to kick out the twelve bucks for the new ebook, especially when it's set against the thirty dollar hardcover.

Also forget about writers making money in the traditional publishing business. Advances have dropped from thirty to fifty to seventy-five K down to five to fifteen thousand over the past few years. Publishers took a hard hit with the unforeseen rise of epub and the economic downturn, so they slashed advance rates. Then they found out two things- readership didn't actually decline much if at all during the downturn, and there were plenty of desperate writers who'd take a pittance to get into print. So now that they're back firmly in the black, the advances aren't coming up. That five to fifteen is all you'll see on a three book deal for the typical mid-list writer, because they'll roll the advance over to the next book if the previous one didn't 'earn out'. Given that this is an industry that refuses to open the books on the royalties and earnings process and will flat-out refuse a contract including language for fairness and transparency in the accounting process, it means that unless you're rolling somewhere on the bestseller list you're not going to make enough income to make a decent living as a company writer these days.

(And that's not even getting into the extortionate noncompetes and other bullshit they're pulling to constrict their writers these days.)

2) This one's been an ongoing topic in the self-pub market for a while now, the gatekeeper argument. What I'll argue is that yes, while there is a crapflood in the indie world out there these days, there's also been the positive effect of jarring the writing business away from the mass marketing model that started infesting the business back in the seventies. The publishers may (may!) offer better copyediting than most indies will get, but they will also choke the life out of anything that comes their way. I used to think that writers who kept repeating the same themes over and over in their stories were just getting lazy and cranking books for cash, but now I've seen some of the sausage being made and I'll bet you anything that more often than not when they did try to go in a new direction the editors had kittens and told them to go back to what worked before. Publishing is a screamingly conservative business- one of the agency editors we dealt with kept comparing Warpworld to A Clockwork Orange...

(Yeah, I don't see it either)

...but kept wanting us to tone it down and make it more... friendly, I guess. Nice guy and all, but I still wonder what sort of lovely ribbons he would've cut his precious A Clockwork Orange into of it had crossed his desk. I also bet that if JK Rowling wasn't richer than the Queen they'd be trying to force her to keep cranking out Harry Potter sequels until she died, too.

We're in the midst of a paradigm shift in the industry, a singularity if you will. What it's going to come back to is reading the blurbs and word of mouth recommendations. Thing is, the big publishers aren't going away. Sure, one or more of them might fail to adapt and get absorbed, but they're huge money-making conglomerates and they will continue to loom large over the industry. Furthermore Amazon is busy consolidating as much control as they can over the business- they've got Barnes&Noble on the death march, Nook sales aren't even a blip these days (we've sold one Nook copy since release in October and about three hundred from all other sources.) So I don't expect the current Wild West atmosphere to last, though I do expect it to kind of settle back toward a corporate/freelancer relationship instead of the shackles that the big publishers are currently throwing down. They're making it too egregious for quality writers with readership to endure, which is why you keep seeing big names jump ship.

Furthermore if you go to our Amazon page, you can read the first six pages of Warpworld for free, which is the standard page-percentage excerpt for Kindle Direct Publishing. Barnes and Noble gives you the first twenty-one pages, I'm not sure how many you get with Kobo because you have to download the preview instead of reading online, and Lulu is the only outfit we're distributing through that doesn't offer an automatic preview function. I totally get you on dealing with the crapflood, but you should be able to get an idea from the first few pages if it's going to be grammatically acceptable.

3) They already have laughable DRM through Amazon and B&N, though in both cases the publisher can opt out like we did. It's just such pathetic DRM that anybody who wants to spend five minutes look for Caliber or a similar converter can crack it wide open. I still don't expect it to ever become the sort of issue it became in music or movies, excepting the potential of hyperventilating company reps screaming about money losses. The way I look at it with our books is that anybody who pirates a copy probably wasn't going to pay for it in the first place, so it's not going to keep me up at night. The funny thing is that there used to be some pretty bitter diatribes against used bookstores too, because every sale at a used bookstore was a sale that didn't get the author a royalty. As I used to point out on that score, I discovered most of my favorite writers through used books, so the royalties they eventually did get to me (at a whopping fifteen cents a copy) were due my picking up the taste on the cheap.

[Josh]

Correction, we did upload a separate preview file for Lulu. So previewing is available throughout the business, and if I was looking at dropping real money on a self-pub I probably wouldn't touch it without going through the preview unless the author was an extremely charming, witty, good-looking fellow who often demonstrated a masterful wit and a charming turn of phrase as well as a real talent for masturbatory run-on sentences.

[B4UTRUST]

To respond

1) Fair enough. As I said, my viewpoints are strictly from consumer side and are bound to be widely different than yours from the publishing side. You know far more about that aspect of the business than I do so I can't really argue against what you're saying. I can only express my misguided opinions and notions based on a consumer viewpoint. As I said, I know I come off as a cheap asshole on this point.

2) It's been awhile since I've gone back through and started trying to preview books on my nook. If the industry has gotten better about it, great! It wasn't always like that that I saw. Some I could, some I couldn't. I also hope that the crapflood does taper off.

3) The hyperventilating higher up is usually how horrible DRM ideas get made anyway. And pretty much any DRM is going to be broken inside of a few days of release regardless so it's not so much an issue as an annoyance. But I still foresee a point where someone says 'Well we're losing hundreds of millions a year to piracy, we need to join up with the MAFIAA!' Of course that would kill the MAFIAA acronym and give us something horrible instead. Ah wel.

[Josh]

I don't think you're a cheap asshole or misguided. We're dealing with perceived values, and everyone has their own perceived value. When you're dealing with intangible labor, it's all about perceived value and that's one of the reasons the record industry took such a beating. When you can get the content 'free' over the radio, people don't see such a far span from there to downloading, especially when the prices were so unnecessarily inflated (mid-nineties, six cents to produce a music CD vs. eighteen to nineteen dollars on the shelf.)

There's not really a good answer to this- obviously when you add in top-heavy industry profiteering the prices will be inflated, and then when you take us struggling indies we're going to use the price points created by the industry as our own guidance. If we do take the level of price above the commonly perceived value of our works, then we're going to expand piracy and that's really on our own heads.

[Josh]

Really, in it's way I kind of like that bargain. As uncomfortable as it may be to content creators that people can just take our work without any sort of compensation, I do like that it puts power back in the hands of the consumer. We have to create a value that you feel is worth the money you pay in. In this day and age of overpowered megacorps, it's nice to have at least some part of the market have to be responsive to its consumers even if it means it might actually cost me a couple bucks here or there.

[Norseman]

I would think that the biggest problem for epublishing would be getting a decent editor to go over your work. I mean even if you're willing to pay for his or her work, how do you know how good they are? I've gone to the 'hire an editor' websites and it's just a big list of editors with some mention of what their specialities are, not so easy for someone getting into the market.

[Josh]

Any freelance editor worth a crap will be willing to take a sample of your work and do story, line, or copy edit on it to give you an idea of their style and competence.

Basically you treat it like you do any job interview with a freelancer and accept that any time you're dealing with a freelancer there's a level of risk involved.

One of the big issues that a lot of writers run into with making the transition to self pub is that they really have to treat writing like a business. Traditional publishers (and their running dog scum agents*) have long worked to cultivate the attitude that writers should just write and not worry their pretty little heads about business-y stuff. For the career writers this can be nigh-debilitating because they've had decades of shipping manuscripts in, getting them shipped back for necessary revisions, shipping them back and then going on to the next project for the next pile of advance money. They're used to paying based on percentage rather than straightforward payment for services rendered, and the various vultures involved in the process have gotten extremely good at cultivating their helplessness in that area.

* Not all agents are scum, but as in any business where you have a pool of people who basically beg to have responsibility for their financial dealings handled without disturbing them, vultures swoop in to 'help' them. Many, if not most, agents these days are a plague on the industry. We got very lucky with ours, though he no longer represents us because as indies we don't need his services.

Postscript for those who still want to send material to Big Pub- don't worry about 'needing an agent' for submissions. Editors still largely work the way they did in the halcyon slush pile days, so just send your properly-formatted manuscript far and sundry and don't spend your time trying to attract an agent. Most agents who'll sign newbies are full of shit when they talk about getting you in with an editor or whatever, they're just going to send it like you would and hope that the spec pays off so they'll get their percentage. Agents definitely can't guarantee anything about improving your work and will waste your time with unnecessary revisions that get in the way of your productivity. You're really better off just shipping it in straight and then getting an IP lawyer to assist you with contract negotiations if it comes to it, because agents are not lawyers no matter how much they pretend to know contract law.

[Josh]

Kris Rusch, who has forgotten more about the actual business of writing than I'll ever dream of knowing, has an excellent post about hiring editors.