[x-pubpol] E-Book Watermarking Gains Traction in Europe

[Joly MacFie]

E-Book Watermarking Gains Traction in
Europe<http://copyrightandtechnology.com/2013/10/03/e-book-watermarking-gains-traction-in-europe/>

Posted: 03 Oct 2013 03:23 AM PDT

The firm Rüdiger Wischenbart Content and Consulting has just released the
latest version of Global eBook, <http://www.wischenbart.com/page-4> its
overview of the worldwide ebook market.  This sweeping, highly informative
report is available for free during the month of October.

The report contains lots of information about piracy and rights worldwide —
attitudes, public policy initiatives, and technologies.  A few conclusions
in particular stand out.  First, while growth of e-book reading appears to
be slowing down, it has reached a level of 20% of book sales in the U.S.
market (and even higher by unit volume).  This puts e-books firmly in the
mainstream of media consumption.

Accordingly, e-book piracy has become a mainstream concern.  Publishers —
and their trade associations, such as the Börsenverein des Deutschen
Buchhandels in Germany, which is the most active on this issue — had been
less involved in the online infringement issue than their counterparts in
the music and film industries, but that’s changing now.  Several studies
have been done that generally show e-book piracy levels rising rapidly, but
there’s wide disagreement on its volume.  And virtually no data at all is
available about the promotional vs. detrimental effects of unauthorized
file-sharing on legitimate sales.  Part of the problem is that e-book files
are much smaller than music MP3s or (especially) digital video or games;
therefore e-book files are more likely to be shared through email (which
can’t be tracked) and less likely to be available through torrent sites.

The lack of quantitative understanding of infringement and its impact has
led different countries to pursue different paths, in terms of both legal
actions and the use of antipiracy technologies.  Perhaps the most
surprising of the latter trend — at least to those of us on this side of
the Atlantic — is the rapid ascendancy of watermarking (a/k/a “social DRM”)
in several European countries.  For example:

   - Netherlands: Arbeiderspers/Bruna, the country’s largest book
   publisher, switched from traditional DRM to watermarking for its entire
   catalog at the beginning of this year.
   - Austria: 65% of the e-books available in the country have watermarks
   embedded, compared to only 35% with DRM.
   - Hungrary: Watermarking is now the preferred method of content
   protection.
   - Sweden: Virtually all trade ebooks are DRM-free.  The e-book
   distributor eLib (owned by the Swedish media giant Bonnier), uses
   watermarking for 80% of its titles.
   - Italy: watermarking has grown from 15% to 42% of all e-books,
   overtaking the 35% that use DRM.

Meanwhile, there’s still a total absence of data on the effects of both DRM
and watermarking on users’ e-book behavior — which is why I have been
discussing with the Book Industry Study Group the possibility of doing a
study on this.

The prevailing attitude among authors is that DRM should still be used.  An
interesting data point on this came back in January when Lulu, one of the
prominent online self-publishing services, decided to stop offering authors
the option of DRM
protection<http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/content-and-e-books/article/55431-lulu-drops-drm-for-e-books-sold-natively.html>(using
Adobe Content Server, the de facto standard DRM for ebooks outside
of the Amazon and Apple ecosystems) for ebooks sold on the Lulu site.  Lulu
authors would still be able to distribute their titles through Amazon and
other services that use DRM.

Lulu announced this in a blog post which elicited large numbers of
comments, largely from authors.  My pseudo-scientific tally of the authors’
comments showed that they are in favor of DRM — and unhappy with Lulu’s
decision to drop it — by more than a two-to-one margin.  Many said that
they would drop Lulu and move to Smashwords, which continues to support DRM
as an option.  Remember that these are independent authors of mostly “long
tail” titles in need of exposure, not bestselling authors or major
publishers.

One reason for Lulu’s decision to drop DRM was undoubtedly the operational
expense.  Smashwords’ CEO, Mark Coker, expressed the attitudes of ebook
distributors succintly in a *Publishers Weekly*
article<http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/content-and-e-books/article/55431-lulu-drops-drm-for-e-books-sold-natively.html>covering
Lulu’s move when he said, “What’s relevant is whether the cost of
DRM (measured by fees to Adobe, [and for consumers] increased complexity,
decreased availability, decreased sharing and word of mouth, decreased
customer satisfaction) outweigh the benefits[.]”  As we used to say over
here, that’s the $64,000 question.


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