Digital rights management on ebooks

DRM also allows libraries to lend ebooks by managing the loan expiry. As well as giving some protection against copying, DRM will affect where your ebooks can be sold. DRM is usually applied by the retailer and requires complex and expensive technology. This makes it difficult if you want to sell your ebooks through smaller players such as local booksellers, bloggers or, indeed, your own website. Because sales dropped so low, her publisher cut the upcoming print run of her book.

But the fantasy novelist found forums online where readers discussed her forthcoming novel and how to get it without paying for it. However, authors and publishers who depend on sales to make a living contend otherwise. But how can DRM help? Digital rights management services help protect e-books and other digital content from piracy. When e-books are difficult to access because of anti-piracy security precautions, consumers must either purchase a legitimate copy of the book or not read it at all.

Password Protection Password protection is a straightforward means of blocking access to unauthorized users. Passwords can deter users from trying to access content that they have not purchased.

However, it is not the most effective means of e-book security because many services and solutions can remove password protection. Overall, password protection is a smart preliminary step to protect content, particularly for self-published authors or those who want to offer e-book sales on their personal or brand websites. For more established brands or publishers, a more comprehensive security solution works best. Although digital watermarking does not add any additional steps to the purchasing and downloading process, users must enter their personal details before accessing the e-book.

When users receive their digital copy of the book, their personal information is embedded inside. Although readers may still be tempted to share an e-book with friends and family, for example, if their email address and phone number are embedded in the e-book, they are far less likely to mass-distribute the content online.

Digital watermarking for e-books works much the way that watermarking does for photographs. The way things are set up, you kind of need to protect the digital books you buy from the companies that sell them. There are a growing number of ways and reasons why Amazon, Google, or a book publisher might strip you of your digital library. The best way to protect yourself is to break the DRM on your ebooks for the purpose of keeping a local, personal backup.

And it allows you to read your ebooks on any device since the software can also convert file types. However, here are five really good reasons to do it, anyway. This affects people traveling internationally as well as those who move from one country to another. Still, until you know for sure, it seems a good idea to backup your ebooks before you cross the border.

One recent alternative to DRM put forward is digital watermarking, which makes it easier to read and distribute ebooks. Because ebooks which fall under this alternative are not affected by DRM schemes, they are easier to copy and distribute. Although it made them easier to pirate and upload elsewhere on the internet, the digital watermarkings still showed the original owners of the pirated versions. With all these pros and cons in mind, there is plenty for authors and publishers to consider before placing ebooks online.

Although the books, themselves, remain protected and virtually piracy-free, it does mean greater restrictions for consumers and how these ebooks can be used. It may mean that DRM schemes and the way they work in terms of distribution and readability, rather than their ability to protect work, need to be revised to better suit our digital age. How to edit EPUB books manually. How to create an interactive ebook: A step-by-step guide.

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