Amazon, free with the DRM
A lot has been made of the Amazon deal with NBC. After leaving Apple and iTunes it seems that Amazon welcomed NBC with a lure of flexible pricing and a more restrictive DRM.
Now there’s been talk about their latest project Kindle. I’m interested to see the e-book platform take off and Amazon seems well suited for the task of distributing e-publishing. With their device having the ability to grab content over the air, if a few stars align, they could become the iTunes of e-publishing.
I would love to have a small e-reader with a nice high resolution passive screen. I should be able to pull down print content - magazines, books, whatever and store them on the device. Then I’m just walking around with a stack full of reading material that weighs a few ounces, nice! I think the key here is having enough compelling content, a good form factor and a good distribution system. Assuming that the screen is close to print quality, if their store is easy to browse and use, this could be big.
One interesting thing here, though, is that they are also using a restrictive DRM on the content - rather than using the open standard format for e-books they are using their more proprietary mobipocket format. Amazon bought Mobipocket so it has ultimate control of it - the good news is that it is pretty widely spread now with many devices and software capable of reading it. The bad news is that it seems to be a server based DRM system, a server that has gone down in the past - the results of which were inconvenient but not catastrophic as when that Microsoft WGA system went down.
Obviously DRM is friendly to the content producers not the content consumers. The most consumer friendly stance to take would be completely open format and DRM free content. As you move away from that, more and more restrictions are placed on what you are and are not allowed to do with the content you ostensibly own. Although I love Amazon, I think they err on the side of far too much DRM. Just looking at Unbox, they have crazy things like you can only view it on two portable and two non-portable devices. Beyond that because they’ve chosen to use a more restrictive DRM (WMA) they have completely boxed out all MacOS and iPod users. Weighed down by DRM, the whole Unbox experience seems to be very clunky as evidenced by countless postings and very little uptake.
On the other hand, Amazon’s supposed music store seems to be going in the other direction and is reputed to be completely DRM free. This is probably the only option they had - with the iTunes Music Store dominating the market so completely, any new entrants need to distinguish themselves somehow. If this comes out and gains some success, perhaps the various industries will learn that DRM doesn’t actually help them very much, it only hurts their consumers.
Anyhow, we’ll see. Hopefully, the trend will reverse and the DRM free movement will gain a little headway. At any rate I’ve been looking forward to the Kindle hitting the scene for a looong time now. I hope it lives up to it’s promise.
