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• • December 1, 2014 at 7:04 am #71920
    Elisabeth Straumoey

    Member

    A client for whom we made our and their very first e-book just asked what steps we had taken with regard to Digital Rights Management. We hadn’t thought of it to be honest, and when I tried to do some research I couldn’t quite make sense of it.

    Wikipedia says: “When present, DRMed EPUB files must contain a file called rights.xml within the META-INF directory at the root level of the ZIP container.”

    But what should a correct such rights.xml file contain? A certain piece of code or just text informing about the publisher …?
    And could such a file potentially cause problems for readers buying the book – as in it not being compatible with certain e-readers?

    :)

  • December 1, 2014 at 9:06 am #71923
    Anne-Marie Concepcion

    Member

    When you publish through an ereseller like the iBookstore or Amazon, you have the option of adding DRM or not. I’ve never heard of an ebook designer or creator adding it themselves.

    The eResellers, libraries, and large publishers selling epubs from their own site typically have an account with Adobe, using the Adobe Content Server, which costs thousands of dollars. This is the mechanism that DRM is added.
    https://www.adobe.com/solutions/ebook/content-server.html

    There are many people including myself who are against DRM in ebooks, because it makes it hard for the user to move books to different ereaders and read them. In other words it punishes the most innocent user — the buyer — and offers little impedance for the pirates who can easily crack DRM (look it up on YouTube) and then redistribute through filesharing sites. It’s an ongoing debate.

    Hope this helps!
    AM

  • December 4, 2014 at 12:35 am #72025
    Elisabeth Straumoey

    Member

    Thank you so much for your reply, Anne-Marie (and sorry for my late response). The iBookstore or Amazon is out of the question for now, I think; this is a small publisher just getting started with e-books in Norwegian, and they sell all their books exclusively from their own webshop (and ordinary shop in a Norwegian city centre).

    I read somewhere that not having an e-book filename that could be guessed might help a little – like if your book is called “Lovely Images” you shouldn’t publish it as “lovely_images.epub” but something like “1226543167.epub”.

    I’m not convinced piracy will be much of a problem at all for this publisher with its pretty narrow target group in a small country. Do you agree …?

    Thanks again! :)

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