BPN 1620: Dutch e-book publishers: from Adobe DRM to watermarking

Today the Dutch add an new aspect to their speciality of water management: watermarking e-book.  Today 8426 e-books with Adobe DRM will be converted to watermark. It will be easier to the 20.000 available e-books to the Dutch readers.

Most of the e-books in the Netherlands are distributed by CB, the former book media distributor Centraal Boekhuis (Central Book House), which recently turned into a multi-product logistics operator. So far CB has offered e-books with three types of rights management: Adobe DRM, watermarking or no right management at all. The type of rights management is indicated by the publisher and recorded by the Bureau ISBN, the book number institute. Once the type of rights management has been recorded it cannot be changed.

Many publishers like to change Adobe DRM as the rights management is consumer unfriendly. In order to suit the publishers CB has pushed the international ISBN organisation to convert titles with Adobe DRM to watermarking. It is only a one time conversion.

Before the conversion no less than 66 per cent of the e-books were Adobe DRM protected. After the conversion the percentage will drop to 26 per cent. The majority of the Dutch publishers has chosen for watermarking; only a minority of DRM protected e-books will remain available.

This watermarking change in the Netherlands does not mean that e-books will become DRM free, as retailers such Apple and Kobo still can use their own security measures.

 

From today onwards, of e-books in EPUB format, 57 per cent of the total amount of deliverable e-books will be watermarked, 20 per cent with Adobe DRM and 6 per cent will have no rights management. Of the e-books in PDF format, only 1 per cent of the total amount of deliverable e-books will bear a watermark and 5 per cent will be secured by Adobe DRM, while 10 per cent will have no security at all. Of course the percentage watermarked EPUB e-books will increase, when publishers see the watermarked e-books sell better.

Although the Dutch e-book publishers have been rather liberal so far by using Adobe DRM which allowed the buyer to copy the e-book to four different platforms (PC/sun notebook, e-reader, smart phone, iPAD/tablet), they are still seeing resistance to the DRM limitation. By introducing watermarking as a norm, they expect to sell e-books easier. 

The turn-over of e-books in the Netherlands is now almost 2,2 per cent of the total book market. This market has a turn-over of  557 million euro, earned with 44,7 million copies.

 

Personal note: on august 18, 2008 I wrote the blog posting # 1191: e-Books can not be secured.