Digital Rights Management and eBooks

EBooks are continually evolving. As they are now, most eBooks are a file you download and keep on your eReading device. With this setup there is a whole world of questions regarding Digital Rights Management (DRM). What is the best way for publishers (and designers) to protect their digital products from theft and piracy? One possible solution would be to have eBooks stay permanently on the internet, hosted on a website. This cloud-based service would allow the consumer to access the eBook with just an internet connection. The advantages are explained further in an article by Martin Taylor, the director of the New Zealand Digital Publishing Forum.

"...cloud-based eReading approach has several advantages over today’s eBooks which work primarily with downloaded files. First, the only thing you need to read these eBooks is a web browser. This covers every device from PCs to smartphones to tablets, even the Kindle which has an in-built browser. The Booki.sh reading experience is surprisingly good (try it on an iPad or smartphone). Secondly, because you can’t download these eBooks, you won’t need DRM. That should be a benefit for a lot of consumers and publishers.

Contrary to what you’d expect, you don’t actually need to be permanently online to read them. Modern browsers support an increasing range of HTML 5 features, including “offline caching”, a temporary way to store files on a local device such as a PC or smartphone so they can be accessed securely when you’re offline. This feature isn’t quite ubiquitous yet but there are plenty of browsers that already support it, including Apple’s Safari and Google Chrome, and Firefox. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer will also provide support for it."

Read the full article here.

This seems like a good way to address several issues regarding eBooks. Will this be the way of the future? Will eBooks just become websites? Will book designers become eBook designers become web designers? In the meantime, we are learning code as fast as we can.