“The ebooks will stop working.”
“The ebooks will stop working.” I gasped when I first read that.
Last week, I was doing some research and surfing twitter on my cell when I saw a spine-tingling tweet with a sentence that made me stop in my tracks: “The books will stop working.” After re-gaining consciousness, I stewed and mulled and collected my thoughts. Then I wrote my most popular tweet ever. It practically went viral! It got more than 31,000 click-thru engagements and nearly 150 likes and 130 retweets. I’m still recovering. . . .
What a horrifying sentence, I thought. As someone who has worked with digital libraries and archives, I’ve been thinking about ebooks not working and about digital rights for a long time. This disturbing news was gratifying and reminded me of the inspiring science fiction writings and non-fiction articles by Cory Doctorow.
DRM
So here’s the story. In April, Microsoft announced that they will shut down their ebooks store and grant refunds. The FAQ page states “your books will be removed from Microsoft Edge when Microsoft processes the refunds.” In other words, they will refund purchases and then remove their DRM books. They are eliminating their whole e-book ecosystem!
In 2004, science fiction writer Cory Doctorow warned us about ebooks. His speech is still available freely online (through the public domain) in many formats, I can still remember the thrust of his argument:
- DRM systems don’t work.
- DRM is bad for society.
- It is bad for business.
- It is bad for artists.
- DRM is bad business for Microsoft.
Originally intended as an anti-piracy measure, DRM has changed. Now it primarily functions to lock customers into a specific ecosystem. This restricts our ability to read or view or listen to purchases wherever and however we want. This cycle has persisted for decades and it shows no signs of abating.
However, at present we may not have all the information nor terminology to discuss this vexing issue in pragmatic terms. In some ways this shares similarities with technological or format obsolescence issues. DRM is more complex because it represents a time-based and privately-owned security mechanism.
Obsolescence Learned
Technological obsolescence often furthers a carrier format improvement. For example, the sound quality recorded on analog vinyl LPs were improved by digital re-engineering and noise reduction. Digital optical CDs captured recordings that sound cleaner and, some say, more sterile. But the market was built upon persuasive promises that compact discs provide “perfect sound forever.”
In the case of DRM, though, there is a more appropriate example of format obsolescence. This one hits closer to home in the born-digital world. In the late 1990s, Macromedia Flash became the new killer app. It was a frame-by-frame animation tool that simplified vector animation and interactive publishing for the web. The software enabled users to create interactive animations on a timeline and to capture and upload moving images files. This was a huge improvement on static HTML pages of yesteryear!
The ebooks: After-Flash Math
Adobe bought Macromedia and Flash in 2006. Things got rough for Flash when the iPhone was released in 2007 without Flash player support. Then, a few years later, just prior to releasing the iPad, Steve Jobs stuck a dagger when he announced Apple was stopping support for Flash. This exclusion of the Apple ecosystem was deadly for Flash.
With advances in open standards and exclusion from Apple ecosystem, Flash languished. Its software usage and proprietary formats became less ubiquitous. HTML5, a new open standard, became the go-to replacement. YouTube, the largest provider of Flash video, was one of the first to migrate content to the new standard. In July 2017, Adobe announced they too would end support for Flash player and software in 2020.
Digital Rights Management represents a new structural threat to accessing our content. This example of Microsoft removing ebooks and evidence of books from people’s libraries, is horrifying. This is the tyranny of DRM and it illustrates the grave threat of additional proprietary algorithms.
So next time you’re downloading some music or purchasing an ePub, you may want to ask yourself, “Will the ebooks stop working too?”
Check out the Cory Doctorow speech from 2004 on Craphound: https://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt
Or if you prefer a fancier format, check it out here in glorious PDF.