There is an excellent paper linked to on Boing Boing about the fools gold that is DRM…

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/28/drm-versus-innovatio.html

And the dirty little secret of DRM is that it’s a technical impossibility to implement DRM in any form with transmitting the encryption key to the user’s computer—meaning that any reasonably tech-savvy consumer can break any DRM scheme with a little bit-sleuthing. It remains to be seen what Lulu’s policy will be toward those who hack its DRM scheme. Are you going to drag them into court, or have them imprisoned under laws based on the new WIPO treaty?

Making breaking copy-protection illegal will simply alienate consumers, just as it has in the music business. And requiring authors who do not need or want DRM to pay an extra fee for ‘hosting charges’ is just plain unfair. Let the authors who want to stigmatize their work with DRM pay for the extra cost of its implementation.

We happen to be one of the publishers who, like many musicians nowadays, distributes music and books for free to promote our work and act as free advertising for our other services. This business model works very well in an age of essentially free copying made possible by computers. The old business model of scarcity is dead. Let it go! If someone really wants to publish a premium product for a limited audience, there are plenty of vanity presses, including Lulu, that will happily print you a limited-edition hardcover book.

Thanks to everyone who has posted a comment on this topic as it is an interesting debate. But let’s not kid ourselves – it is a debate. The facts are not in. Whether or not DRM contributes to more books being written is an open question that will not be resolved for many years, if ever.

Meantime it is not up to me or Lulu to tell our authors whether or not DRM tools will help or hurt their books sales. That is up to the author and will vary from book to book and market to market.

Your feedback is helping our authors better understand this issue.

Cheers, Bob.

I’m glad that your company offers the DRM option. I’m in the process of adding an e-book format for the 22 print books I already have listed on Lulu.

In a way, I look on this process as no different than when a library buys one of my print books; the initial purchasers pay me, then allows anyone to read the book they bought.

For the past 35 years I have worked as a free-lance writer and for the past five years I have published through Lulu Press. I like your company much better than the traditional publishers I’ve worked with in the past. With them, I often found I spent more effort collecting my money than I did writing the material in the first place!

Yet, I understand that many people can not afford to buy books. To help these folks out, the sidebar on my own storefront (http://stores.lulu.com/bluefish tells readers that if anyone honestly can not afford to buy one of my books and tells me, then I will e-mail them a pdf copy without cost.

Hardly anyone takes me up on this.

That may mean that readers scrape together the money needed to buy—or that my books aren’t worth giving away free. I like to think it’s the first option.

Anyhow, I really like the services your company offers.

Thanks.
John

And yes, I have found some of my products on bit torrent sites. But I don’t consider these “lost sales.” Most of these people would not have bought the product anyway. I’ve found educating buyers on why piracy is bad for the hobby does more to reduce piracy than DRM.

There’s not much hope that you and DRM opponents will comprehend each others’ positions as long as you insist that it’s about whether authors get paid. It’s also unfortunate that you apparently think DRM actually works. You won’t be taken seriously as long as you cling to that.