Summary

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a general term for any mechanism used to prevent the unauthorised sharing of digital content. In the specific case of self-published authors, it aims to prevent somebody from purchasing a copy of your eBook, and then sharing it with others without your permission. I have written a more in-depth analysis of DRM as part of my recent eBook post, but I will provide a quick summary here.

DRM is a controversial topic, mainly because it tends to be an ‘all or nothing’ restriction. Most of us would not think twice about lending a paperback to a friend, but DRM on eBooks makes the digital equivalent either onerous (essentially requiring permission from a third party like Amazon), or impossible. There are reasonable arguments on both sides. On the pro-DRM side, if you lend a paperback to somebody, for the time that they have it, you do not, so there is only ever a single copy of the work; with an eBook, you are duplicating the file, and could in principle share it with the whole internet (either for free, or charging for somebody else’s work). On the anti-DRM side, the mechanics of how the most common forms of DRM work mean that you essentially do not own the book that you have purchased — each time you open it, the device asks some third party (e.g. Amazon, as part of their Kindle offering) whether or not you have permission to read the file, and that third-party could, in principle, unilaterally decide to revoke your access, or update the work after you have purchased it. DRM is therefore a moral and practical question, that each self-published author ought to consider for themselves, and it is not for me to make any particular suggestion. For my work, I have chosen to use Social DRM, and in this article I will explain how it works, and how I have incorporated it into my workflow, as well as its benefits and drawbacks.

It is worth mentioning at this point that all common forms of DRM can be removed from a file reasonably easily, and in many cases automatically. Ultimately, if you publish your work, you will have to provide it in a manner that people can read, and if they can read it, they can copy it, given sufficient motivation. DRM exists primarily to dissuade people from sharing your work, but it cannot stop them.

Idea

Unlike ‘harder’ DRM solutions such as those baked into the Kindle ecosystem, social DRM does not require the ongoing involvement of a third-party. When an eBook is sent to a customer, some details about the order are baked into the file (there are several options when it comes to which information is included, and where it is placed, which I will cover later in this article), with the aim that this particular copy of the work be visibly associated with this particular person. The idea is that the loss of the anonymity usually associated with file-sharing will dissuade the person from sharing the file in an inappropriate way. On the face of it, this might seem naive, but in fact, human behaviour is often influenced by such small nudges. An amusing example is a study that placed participants alone in a room with a poster, and later asked them to help a researcher with a tedious, unpaid task. Participants that sat in a room containing a poster of Superman were significantly more likely to help than those who sat in a room containing a poster of a bicycle. Perhaps an even more relevant example is one that studied the amount of money placed into an ‘honesty box’ left to collect payment for drinks — above the box, researchers placed an image, alternating weekly between a picture of flowers, and a picture of a pair of eyes. During weeks in which eyes were displayed, researchers collected three times as much money as they did during other weeks. It would appear that feeling observed (having your name on the work that you are about to share), and being reminded of morality (seeing “please do not share this work — thank you for supporting independent authors” in the file) does encourage people to behave!

Implementation Decisions

In determining the implementation, you will need to choose which information to include, and where to put it. I will cover these both in turn.

In terms of the information that should be embedded, it is worth separating the DRM into two purposes. The first is to prevent people from sharing work in the first place, and the second is, having found a copy of your work on a file-sharing site, to be able to determine who shared it. In the first case, we rely on people preferring to remain anonymous when engaging in activity that they know is immoral, and consequently, the information ought to contain the purchaser’s name (ideally as provided by the payment system), or their email address. In the second case, an order number will do, since you will be able to demonstrate from your own records who placed a particular order. My advice is to do both, but to focus on the first purpose, since the effort required to sue somebody, even if you can provide that the copy on the file-sharing site is their copy, is enormous, with no guarantee of success.

The data associated with social DRM can be placed either in visible text, or in metadata (data that is stored in the file, but that is not ordinarily displayed by eReaders). For the first of the purposes described above, the data must be embedded in visible text, as the idea is for somebody to be uncomfortable sharing a file emblazoned with their name. It is up to you how aggressive you wish to make this, from a simple one-page This copy was licensed to NAME. Please do not disseminate it without permission from the author to printing the customer’s name at the top and bottom of every single page. Personally, I chose the former, but this is, of course, an aesthetic decision. Order numbers are better placed in metadata — they lack the personal impact of a customer’s name, and are also often rather ugly.

Workflow

As part of the website that I have built, the social DRM is an automated part of the sales pipeline. The ‘raw’ eBook file contains placeholders, formatted as {{ CUSTOMER_NAME }} and {{ ORDER_NUMBER }}. When a copy of the eBook is purchased, the website runs some code that searches the raw file for placeholders (anything in ALL_CAPS wrapped in double brackets {{ }}), and swaps it out for the customer name and order number associated with that particular order. As an example, This copy was licensed to {{ CUSTOMER_NAME }} as part of order {{ ORDER_NUMBER }}. becomes This copy was licensed to Joe Bloggs as part of order 1234. The ‘stamped’ copy is then made available to the user for download.

Automation

If you sell a huge volume of eBooks, it is absolutely worth your time to automate this process, or perhaps more sensibly, to use a third-party provider (like BookFunnel) which handles this for you, as distributing files is not entirely trivial. They will take the ‘raw’ file, stamp it with the customer details, and make it available for download. If you sell relatively few eBooks, however, you can absolutely just open the file in your editor of choice and swap out the placeholders manually. There is also a third option — I have built a free social DRM tool: Colophon that will allow you to stamp a raw EPUB file with customer details. You choose your raw EPUB, and the software will search it for placeholders (e.g. {{ CUSTOMER_NAME }}). You then specify which values you want those placeholders replaced with (e.g. Joe Bloggs), and it will give you a stamped copy to download and send to your customer. This tool runs entirely in your browser, so your raw file never leaves your computer, and is never shared with anybody. No details of your placeholders/values are stored, and nothing extra is inserted into the stamped copy.

Conclusion

For me, social DRM is a good compromise. It allows me to dissuade lazy would-be pirates, and for the not-so-lazy, it is not any easier to strip than standard third-party DRM (it arguably requires more effort, since it cannot be readily automated). Crucially, it does not ruin the experience of owning and reading my work for my customers, which to me, is the most important thing.