DRM – Adam Hyde

When all the activities and practices that we now call “publishing” exist in a networked environment, something radical changes – affecting creators, content, ownership, and trust. That might sound like the end of publishing as it is now, but it also sounds like the beginning of something exciting. And of course, it is argued that this future is already here, but, to paraphrase William Gibson, perhaps a little unevenly distributed.

Responses to these new challenges are already partly in motion inside the industry (e.g., the work Safari Books is doing with bibliographies connected to their ‘cloud library’) and outside (too many to mention but one example is the very interesting Open Oil book project) and as we move forward I firmly believe these futures will become increasingly present and their economics more mature.

Where does that leave the publishing business? Well, it might be better to ask yourself, ‘where does that leave business?’ Forget capital P, ‘Publishing’, for a moment. What are the skills necessary to survive here, what will you be doing, and what is the economy?

People are going to continue to require services that deliver and produce information. Finding ways to create information and finding someone to pay for it is the heart of the matter. That is not going to change anytime soon. The need for information won’t change, but how information is produced and delivered will change. In fact, I believe the demand for content is going to rise (it is already rising rapidly), and the demand will increasingly be for more individualised, customised content and it will need to be delivered faster, much faster than today.

So, what would the world look like when the walls that contain the publishing industry fail and spill their innards onto the web? Or to see the same question through the lens of Eric Raymond, what is the essential difference between the cathedral and the bazaar?

Let’s quickly look at the environment of this particular kind of “bazaar” – the web – for a few clues. The most important issue at play is that the web always appears to find a way to route around arbitrary constraints. People, processes, and information route their way around unnecessary blockages looking for and finding the most efficient and least resistant paths. So what would happen if publishing was immersed in that environment? What are the containers, the constructs of the publishing industry, that would be routed around and may break down and fail? Here, I want to explore four main issues pertinent to this discussion – Books, Ownership, Authors and Authority.

Books: In this environment content containers, like books, lose the definitiveness of their boundaries. What is separating an EPUB, which is made of HTML, from the web? As Hugh McGuire has said many times, this differentiation is arbitrary. Arbitrary containers like zip files (EPUBs, which we might call portable websites) might assist in the transport of curated content, but, in the long run, they will be under a lot of pressure to remain contained and will increasingly become unbound.

Ownership: Another “container” that will come under increased pressure from these forces. If the mere fact of copyright ownership protected their content then publishers wouldn’t be looking to DRM (digital rights management). We know that the way in which book content is owned and licensed will change dramatically. Protecting ownership will increasingly become an impediment to business as it decreases the utility of information (something that O’Reilly was smart to recognise early on and perhaps reflects Samuel Johnsons’ famous quip regarding his writings that “I have been paid for them, and have no right to enquire about them”).

Authors: Also an arbitrary construct, in as much as both the realities of book authorship, and its production, are more collaborative and iterative than commonly perceived. This is another dimension that will be radically transformed by the new collaborative possibilities opened up by digital technologies. Indeed, perhaps the cultural construct of isolated genius will remain only as a brand. In reality, people are less and less isolated on the web and there is more genius out there than you can imagine. I would argue here that the concept of the author will also become more “porous”. We will be looking at a world of “networked genius” rather than the traditional standalone kind. This has been discussed in fascinating detail by Martha Woodmansee and Jack Stillinger.

Authority: The web doesn’t seem to allow anyone to merely assert ‘authority’ – such notions are subject to the ebb and flow of public web “opinion”. Publishing as an authority will certainly come under immense pressure and one possibility is the move to “distributed opinion networks” built and mediated by technologists. We have already seen this on the web, and the question of authority in these networks is well articulated in commentary surrounding Wikipedia vs Encyclopedia Britannica, for example.

When paper fails, it affects creators, content, ownership, and trust in radically transformative ways. Production processes change, content is both harvested and produced, contributors are corralled and facilitated, books become individualised ‘outcomes’. We might say the engine this “new” publishing economy revolves around includes two critical factors:

(1) content production, harvesting and curation for increasingly individualised contexts; and (2) speed of delivery.

Helping people to get what they want, their outcome, is going to be the bread and butter of this economy. This is a move from selling the artifact, to developing and selling a service, or towards providing services to help others produce and distribute content. The faster you can deliver it the more competitive you will become. People, businesses, governments, schools, etc., are all going to be very happy to pay for that.

*Please note the Open Oil project is a small project and not provided here to illustrate this kind of model at scale but to point at a very interesting and important emerging model.

Many thanks to David Berry for improving this post. This post and all others by Adam Hyde are CC-BY-SA

Originally posted on 13 Feb 2013 on O’Reillys Tools of Change site: http://toc.oreilly.com/2013/02/when-paper-fails.html

Most of us know an ebook is a digital file that can be read by devices such as iPads and Kindles. There are many different kinds of ebook formats and each has its own strengths and weaknesses. Some ebooks made to be viewed on the Kindle, others on the iPad, still others for reading online via a web browser. Kindle, for example, works with the MOBI format, whereas the iPad-iBook reader works only with iBook or EPUB formats. EPUB is one of the most popular formats because no one owns the format as compared to, for example, the way Microsoft owns the .doc format. Anyone can produce an EPUB without having to pay royalties. That makes EPUB a popular type of ebook format for publishers.

What is important here, is that many of these ebook formats share a lot in common with the web page. EPUB, for example, in the words of the International Digital Publishing Forum (the group taking responsibility for managing the development of the format), is:
“…a means of representing […] Web content — including XHTML, CSS, SVG, images, and other resources — for distribution in a single-file format.”

EPUB pages are made of HTML, the language of the web. EPUB pages are web pages.

The change of carrier medium for books, from paper to HTML, changes everything. Publishers appear to believe that just the format of the book (from paper to electronic) and the distribution process (from bricks and mortar to net) have changed. These are enormous changes indeed, but what about everything else? What about the rest of the book’s life?

To get an understanding of how this transformation of the content medium from paper to web page affects things, let’s first take a bird’s eye view of the current life cycle of a book. Painting it with broad strokes, the book life cycle (still) looks something like this:

Text Production – production of the book. Most recently it has become a very linear workflow with text originating with authors. Editors, proofreaders, translators, researchers, and designers are all involved with very clearly demarcated roles.
Object Production – the creation (typesetting, printing, binding) of the paper book
Market – distribution to retail outlets and sales through those outlets
Life – after being read, the book becomes an archive. The shelf life is connected to the value to the reader or owner (shelf life).

Digital networks and digital books, of course, have changed how publishers work. The disruption, however, has really been limited to the steps of object production and marketing strategies. Many publishers of genres from fiction to scientific journals do not have a workflow for the production of electronic books, they simply send their MS Word files to an outsourced business for transformation to EPUB. In their world, paper books are easier to produce than digital books. Even so, much has changed and can be captured in brief by the following:

Text Production – no change
Object Production – electronic books added
Market – online sales, devices
Life – no change or reduced (shelf or digital equivalent)

Arguably, the life of a book has been reduced, as many book formats cannot be transferred from one device to another and so have only limited visibility. Books, for example, produced in Apple’s iBook Author do not follow the standard way of making EPUB and are often unreadable on non-Apple devices. This is changing a little with developments such as the Kindle app which can be installed on iPads and computers for reading books purchased on Amazon. However, there are still many issues.

What is most astonishing to me, is that there has been little or no innovation regarding the production of books. Sure paper and pen were replaced by typewriter and then a computer and word processing software. But these technologies largely support the same methods for making books. In 2013, many years into the digital media and digital network world, there is little change. We are still producing books as we did back in the days of handwritten manuscripts, except these days we can email the file to someone to check. It is as if the digital network is just a faster postal service.

There are some notable exceptions. For example, OReilly is experimenting with some networked and ‘agile’ (fast-moving and iterative) production processes, but overall, the innovation and change happening now within the publishing industry is constrained to everything that happens after the text is produced and before the book is archived by the reader.

As it happens, this is about as far as the publishing industry can innovate. They are too heavily invested in production workflows, tools and methodologies to change the production process. In addition, it is too difficult for publishers to consider changing as there is the fear such disruption could break things on a much deeper level. Single author works, for example, are an important part of reputation-based sales and you can’t change one without the other.

In many ways, it is simply bad business and logistically too hard for publishers to innovate around production as it cannibalises their existing models. At the other end of the cycle, publishers do not seem to be interested in the life of the book beyond purchase, except where they retard life expectancy with DRM, delete the book file or link from your device, or surveil your reading habits in order to offer the next book for your consumption. After reading the book on your reader, it sits there as it would on a bookshelf.

Ironically for the publishing industry, the biggest opportunities are in the areas they are not addressing. The new publishing world, which might be populated largely by those individuals, collectives, ‘groupings’ and organisations that are currently not publishers, looks like this:

Text Production – collaboration and social production
Object Production – paper and electronic books
Market – distribution to retail, sales, online sales, devices
Life – living and growing books

The beginning of this cycle and the end are intimately linked. The conditions for collaboration have a lot in common with the conditions for extending the life of books.

The life cycle of a book is changing because books are web pages and production is coming online. Collaborative production is one very rich opportunity and it looks very unlike linear production models. In intensive collaborative or open collaborative environments, roles are concurrent and fluid. It is possible for one person to write original material, borrow material, improve another’s material, then proofread others’ work, edit and comment on design. This is all possible because the production environment is the browser. At its most intense, collaborative browser-based production becomes transparent. Anyone can look at the evolution of the book and witness the changes as they occur. In this kind of process, discourse becomes necessary and collaborators open up rich and valuable discussions which become part of the book. The book becomes a product of collective discourse and the discourse is often as rewarding as the book that comes from the process.

These conditions often lead to the book having an extended life as communities of collaborators form around the book and carry the book forward, amending and improving the work. The life of the work is then connected to the health of the connected networked community.

As the new production and carrier medium for books, HTML transforms everything. It leads naturally to collaborative production and the extended life of content. However, most of these transformations are occurring outside the existing publishing industry, leaving the future of publishing in your hands.

[Produced sometime in 2011]

Tag: DRM

When Paper Fails

A Web Page is a Book