This is a recurring question in ebook circles, particularly for authors — are people going to pirate my book, and how can I stop it?

One technical “solution” is DRM — digital rights management. And to know if DRM is right for you, the context is probably best understood in comparison with the music industry’s success and failures.

You may recall a small ruckus re: iTunes about 18 months ago when they removed DRM from their MP3s, at the industry’s request actually, not just customers. Customers who buy MP3s want portability across devices, and some aspects of DRM prevent that — it is designed to prevent rampant pirating but generally speaking, it can be bypassed by those likely to pirate rampantly, and those who would abide have no idea what to do when their legitimately purchased MP3 that they had been listening to on an Zune can’t be easily copied on to their new iPod (DRM tries to lock a file to a single user, or, in the past, often to a single device as well).

For ebooks, you have three barriers to rampant pirating — first, the price point. As with MP3s being dropped to 99 cents by iTunes, and the ease of finding almost anything at once, a lot of the pirate shops lost their edge (don’t get me wrong, they’re still there, just not with the same number of customers).… Read the rest