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Friday, February 15, 2002 |
The Death of Digital Rights Management?
“ 'It’s very difficult to sell [digital-rights] technology to companies that are no longer trying to sell content,' observes Schreiber. In a way, it’s a classic chicken-and-egg question: is the digital rights management industry hampered by a failing market, or are e-books floundering for want of better digital-rights technology?" [at Technology Review, via Tomalak's Realm]
How about both are hindered by usability problems and a focus that is decidedly not on the consumer?
"Analysts say the content protection companies left standing, including Alchemedia and SealedMedia, have technologies that may break the usability barrier, finally enabling the serious online sales providers envision. “There are some extremely bright people working in this space who will be able to figure out what the consumer is willing to put up with,” says Letts. Alchemedia’s “Mirage” system, for example, does away with the requirement for special viewer software by making sure the decrypted form of a protected file appears only on-screen, never in random-access memory, where a computer looks for any data it’s trying to print or copy. That way, publishers can put content out in a format compatible with a regular Web browser, and “the fear about the save and copy buttons is neutralized. We don’t have to block those doors because the data in [memory] is still encrypted,” says Schreiber."
"SealedMedia’s system, on the other hand, does require a special two-megabyte browser plug-in, but it stores decryption keys on a central Internet-accessible server, meaning that if you have the right password, you can access content from whatever machine you happen to be using. SealedMedia’s viewer can also handle audio and video content. 'SealedMedia is providing us for the first time with a robust, convenient way to deliver multimedia e-books,' says ipicturebooks’ Preiss."
Here again, I hope they're thinking of more than just B2C sales (business-to-consumer) and that these technologies will work with items circulated by libraries. See why we need to be in on the debate and the development cycle?
10:18:33 PM 
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Audible Books on MP3
"This almost has to be a e-Book killer for the masses. Don't get me wrong, e-content will still have it's place. I just see the mainstream grabbing hold of *this* digital techology much quicker and in greater numbers than e-books as imagined to date." [LibeTech Weblog]
Eric comments on my Audible post from yesterday, and he seems as enthusiastic about them as I am. I agree with him that MP3 audiobooks are a killer app and that they will be adopted by the mainstream faster than eBook devices will. I've always believed that most Americans will experience new technologies in their cars first, and that this will ease widespread adoption into other areas.
OnStar is a perfect example of this. It's GPS sold as a safety feature, and it introduces the concept of location-based services in a non-threatening, non-techie way. I think we'll see the same thing with satellite radio and MP3s. You can already buy both types of players for your car, but they haven't taken off yet because they don't come pre-installed the way OnStar does. Once they do, however, there will be no going back, and once someone has had the thrill and ease-of-use of listening to MP3 audiobooks in the car, they'll realize they can do this anywhere and the technologies will become ubiquitous and pervasive.
Which is one reason why I really want to see Audible succeed. They're the major player in the game right now, which means we don't have to muck about with a dozen different standards and formats. They also understand the user's desire to own what they purchase, and they're trying to work closely with libraries.
So Eric, "me too!"
8:05:19 AM
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Comments by: YACCS
© Copyright 2002 Jenny Levine.
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