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Hi. I'm one of your customers -- I've spent $44 on Manning ebooks over the past week or so, for something that really amounts to a hobby project, but only after I verified that the file format was plain PDF, for which I already had a viewer. If they were DRM-encumbered, depending on the details, I most likely wouldn't have bought either one. Nor would I have gone to file-sharing networks; I just would have done without. And you already have evidence that there are other customers with preferences similar to mine. So, if DRM makes any sense as a business decision, it has to capture more revenue from readers who aren't paying now than it would lose from the existing customers who would be driven away. And here, it seems, you don't have much hard evidence. Nor do I -- but just intuitively, it seems unlikely to me that a truly effective DRM solution would convince anyone who was pirating ebooks on Kazaa to pay for them. They'd more likely just find something else to pirate. What I can say is that the most successful ebook program I'm aware of is unencumbered -- and in entertainment, a domain where you might expect piracy to be more of a problem than for technical books. I'm referring specifically to Baen's program of publishing ebooks of science fiction novels in unencumbered formats. Baen knows full well that they're getting shared -- in fact Baen gives some of them away for free as loss leaders for the hardcopy. The program has been going for years now, long enough for them to get numbers on it, and they're convinced that it works; see here for hard numbers. I'd urge you to talk to them, and review published SF author Cory Doctorow's thoughts on the topic, before doing anything that would turn existing customers away. Moreover, I'm not sure I see how the kind of DRM solution you outline does a whole lot to reduce piracy. If what you need to read the ebook is a specific crypto key, then what prevents the pirates from distributing ZIP files containing both the reader and the key? The most you'd gain from imposing this kind of system is knowing the identity of the person to whom the pirated copy was originally sold (who may or may not be the pirate, computer security being what it is these days). But you're already baking that into the footer of every page of your PDFs. This is on top of the generic problem with all DRM schemes that the reader software is under control of, well, the reader, who can modify it to defeat the security, by, e.g., saving out an unencrypted copy. Having the source code available makes this easier, but not by as much as you'd think. If you tried to require physical books to be glued to a desk to keep people from sharing them around the office, you might get an extra sale or two from former "office pirates". But nowhere near as many as you'd lose because of the inconvenience. I'd urge you to do a little more research before concluding that ebooks are all that much different.

Manning has, to me, replaced O'Reilly as the definitive technical publisher. It used to be that if I needed a technical book, I bought whatever O'Reilly had on the subject. Now, it's Manning. The ebook program is great. I've bought four ebooks (soon to be five when I get finished writing this comment). If the files aren't in a simple PDF format any more, then this will be my last ebook from Manning. Manning won't lose a customer, though, I'll just buy the dead tree version from now on.

Hi, First, thanks for the kind words about Manning books. A quick question; did you try the OSoft ThoutReader and decide you would not use it as an alternative to the Acrobat Reader or are you refusing any alternative to the PDF format? Or are you opposed to DRM and don't care whether a book is in PDF or ThoutReader format as long as the DRM is absent? Manning is developing a close working relationship with OSoft and have had several in depth discussions with them on both a business and technical level about DRM options. The basic thought is that we (Manning) know that we don't fully understand what DRM scheme (if any) will work for both us and our customers. OSoft is interested in working with us and our customers to explore the DRM spectrum to find the best solution. We all gain the benefit of being able to try one scheme, decide that it doesn't work, and try something else. We'll make every attempt to allow you to move from an old abandoned DRM scheme to a new one as we change (aka go from a hardwark locked book, to a periodic server re-authorization, etc). In addition, the process of exploring DRM options will rely on customers like you telling us what works, what doesn't, and offering suggestions on other possibilities to try. We believe our legitimate customers would like to have a convenient and powerful ebook experience while allowing Manning authors to get paid for their hard work. We need help in coming up with a new solution because the current unproctected PDFs fail to treat our authors fairly. -iain

If you have to restrict access to your books theough a reader, please make sure it runs on non Microsoft operating systems.

iain, I've never tried ThoutReader, but your comment has at least caused me to read about it now. :-) Anytime I hear about alternative documentation formats, I immediately jump to the conclusion that support for alternative platforms (like the ones I use, Linux and Mac OS X) will be non-existent. Call it conditioning! Looks like the OSoft people are pretty savvy and wouldn't have that problem. I still like PDF because I know the reader(s) and I know how they work, how to bookmark, etc. I like OS X's Preview and like Acrobat Reader on Linux. But, I'll concede and say that I'm willing to at least give it a go on a ThoutReader-published book. Thanks for your insight!

Hi Eric, We're very aware of the fact that our readers are on a wide variety of platforms so that was one of the first things we made sure was supported. Many of the Manning staff is on OS X so we also have personal reasons for making sure alternative platforms are supported. The one missing 'platform' is J2ME (PDAs like palm pilot). OSoft has said they would be willing to investigate a J2ME version of the ThoutReader if enough readers requested it. I'm glad you're willing to give ThoutReader a spin and see if it will work. Hopefully it does, and if it does not, we always have other options or hopefully OSoft can modify or extend the reader to accomodate our needs. It's starting to feel like maybe we need to have a more organized way of receiving and discussing feedback since this could be an iterative process... -iain

I also object to DRM-encumbered books. I've been thrilled that Manning has used a non-encumbered format to date. I've already been through the DRM nonsense with fiction books and it was an unpleasant experience. My response there has been simple: pirate a scan or a copy that's had the DRM removed, and buy a paper copy of the book to throw in the closet and never look at. It's a waste of resources and more expensive than an e-book, but it lets me read my books the way I want to and gives the author the money I feel he deserves. (In many cases way too much goes to the publisher, but that sacrifice was the author's decision. At least authors generally get to retain their copyrights, unlike musicians.) If Manning were to move to an encumbered format, I'll snag a "fixed" copy off a p2p network when I find I need it at 3am, buy the dead tree version the next time I'm at the bookstore and toss it on the shelf where it will look nice. Please don't let OSoft or anyone convince you that DRM will stop even the most casual of piracy. Existing efforts have succeeded only in stopping legitimate use (this is backed up by as much evidence as can be expected, but of course it's not conclusive), and there are solid reasons--theoretical and practical--why new efforts will not be able to do any better.

Any particular reason that a Safari-style online reading service is not an option? The obvious downside is that you have to be online to read. In my humble opinion, this has not been a problem for me since I read at work or home -- both places with a high-speed internet connection. If I must take something on the go, I can download an individual chapter as PDF. I've been a happy safari subscriber for 3+ years now. Just a thought.

I'm just finishing up writing "Perl 6 Now" for Apress and a small mystery was solved for me - where do all of those clean PDFs circulating on file-sharing networks come from? Apress is sending out a batch of CD-Rs with production proofs of the chapters to people to review while the book is at the press. When it comes to people trading binary copies of information the mantra to recite is "it only takes one leaked copy". In Hollywood, the guys working the vault for post production were stealingt copies. Then celebrities themselves were trading promo copies of films (and then were caught by water marking). I've scanned out of print books, OCR'd them, and put them on the net. I've carefully proofread them and the quality is quite good; they're in HTML format with the diagrams as GIFs. Again, it only takes one leaked copy. If people are allowed to print copies of ebooks, they'll print to a file as PostScript and have a perfect copy. Only one person once has to figure this out (say it with me - it only takes one). The pandoras box is open. I know shrinking profits hurt but DRM amounts to a futile effort to turn back the clock to a "better time" when people couldn't copy things or find things. Screw that. Taking advantage of easy copying and easy dissimination of knowledge, you can hire stay-at-home-moms to telecommute, get more feedback from people in the trenches to improve the quality of books in production (think of how Perl Cookbook harnessed the power of perlfaq combined with how C2 and Wikipedia harness the spare time and knowledge of people browsing the web, this combined with your early access program). The only way to beat the curve is to stay *ahead* of it - trying to flatten it is doomed to tragic or humous failure - but always failure. The wave is technical - the financial return has been squandered by small minded paranoid men who want control, and I'm not talking about the publishing industry. Unemployment in the United States for programmers is above average, the average is at a high since the great depression. We're feeding monopolies as fast as we can, pumping billions of dollars out of the free market and into initiatives that amount to trying to flatten the curve and protect the old world from new technology. This is why people are poor and can't afford your books. This is why *I* can't afford books. Still, I've "wasted" hundreds of dollars I really can't spare on books. I think people are spending a dispropotionate amount of money on books considering both the economy and file trading. Don't blame yourself and don't blame your readers - just do what you have to do and cut back peoples hours, try crazy things, cut costs, get rid of offices, move to print on demand and publish half assed first editions (people talk about ORA as the pinnacle of quality but forget their origins - doing ebooks, print on demand, and publishing not entirely polished first editions). I finished _Perl 6 Now_ not knowing what my competition looks like. If I weren't writing a book and didn't have a moral duty to my fellow authors, I'd have downloaded a copy of _Perl 6 Essentials_ 2nd ed in a heart beat. But I consider this borrowing on good will when I trade - all of us - especially the kids in highschool without jobs - *want* to speak with our money, so to speak. We want to support our favorite artists, and we want to give them warm fuzzies with their record/book/whatever sales. We want to influence the economy. We want to see more of whatever kind of book or music we like in store isles and we want it to be there because we're spending money on it. We're very captialist, in the best sense of the word, we people at home. It's the capitalists in government and big business who give the culture a bad name. It's a crime that our culture has been priced at a level we can't afford and we've been improverished so we can't afford it; it isn't a crime to charge for access to culture as long as a healthy public domain exists. But when you feel entitled to make a living, or entitled to stay in business, or entitled to have a copy of the latest Emenim CD that things start to break down - bad things happen when people feel entitled. File traders shouldn't blame the artists (it isn't their fault that the music industry is broken or the economy is rotten) and arists shouldn't blame file traders (ditto). Speaking of culture, whens the last time you've been to the library? They have CDs and books, but mostly books, and they represent the pinnacle of our culture (or perhaps colleges do, in which case college libraries are the place to be). People read books for free all day long. Books and CDs are more popular than they ever were, but libraries are in decline. Reading a book at a library is just like downloading a book off the net - you have it, in every sense of the word, but you don't own it. And if you don't own something, you don't value it, and you don't use it, and people know this. No one wants to borrow their friends car whenever they want to go somewhere; theres bad will from the friend, and you just don't feel like you're driving _your_ car while you're driving it. The psychology is huge. ebooks aren't as popular as paper books still because people have a hard time translating feelings of ownership onto magnetic charges, photos, and electrons. I "have files" on my harddrive in the same way as I have a few piles of books next to me right now (entering them into bookcrossing.com - woo!) - it's a temporary arrangement but a useful arrangement and like the piles is nothing but structure and is otherwise ethereal - non-existant. If at the library you have something but don't own it, here's the converse: how bad would it suck to pay for something and not even have it? That's DRM, and it sucks beyond words. It sucks Dark Ages bad. The back of the curve isn't where you want to be. I'm not saying you should encourage people to trade books online. Here's a suggestion: get a fast network connection, run eDonkey, gtk-gnutella, Kazaa, and the rest of them, and distribute a copy of the book on all of the networks that's perfect in every way but contains some interesting information (and it is interesting) on how few actually sell (I'm told a moderately successful technical book will sell 20,000 copies), how much authors make (not much), point to your permissive DRM-free ebook policy, list topics you'd like to print books on but had to reject because the market can't currently bare them, and encourage the reader to buy the book if she enoys it and finds herself reading more than a few chapters or referencing it more than a few times. But that's not all. I'm not a hopeful idealist. Watermark all of your downloads. This will have a double effect of fragmenting the copies on file sharing networks as there will be hundreds of copies of the same thing, each different, and this will make searching, ratings, and swarming difficult. And then make it very clear as people go to download that the cost of the ebook is actually $100 more than what they've been charged at checkout but the last $100 is forgiven as long as their watermarked copy doesn't appear anywhere. Then write some software and start collecting. There are Perl modules to speak popular peer protocols and Perl modules to interact with common payment gateways. Coincidence? I think not. Human behavior can largely be explained by greed and generosity; the old "gift cultures" of native American indians strongly resembles the file trading culture which resebles the Free Software culture. This stems from a desire to gain value in the eyes of the men we respect the most. Greed stimulates people to pay for works-for-hire and to hoard. Hoarding information is no longer possible. So it's all works-for-hire from here on out. -scott

To date, I have purchased five eBooks and either two or three dead tree versions from Manning. I sincerely appreciate the fact that the ebooks have been unencumbered with DRM. I have only a couple concerns regarding a mechanism such as OSoft's Thoutreader: I frequently copy my PDF-formatted ebooks to my PocketPC to read when I can't drag my laptop or a paper copy with me. I would want any alternative solution to be supported on Windows, Linux and PocketPC. My other conern is that I'd want the reader application to have similar features (such as search), display quality and render speed as PDF. I have no problem with positively branding a book with my identity, as long as the format NEVER locks the document to a single machine. I have several machines, and I make significant hardware changes on a regular basis, so losing an entire library after a hardware upgrade would ruin my whole day. I have paper books that have resided on my bookshelf for well over 20 years. I'd probably be quite upset if my ebooks couldn't be read some day because the company providing the format vanished and the reader tool should stop working with a future OS upgrade. So, the bottom line for me - I'll continue being a happy customer as long as the issues above are addressed with any format changes.

Another very important issue for me is the possibility to be able to "fulltext-index and search (and preview with search-term-highlighting)" the ebooks. With (unencumbered) pdf, this is possible today with some of the "personal desktop search-tools", which are introduced these days from many companies (google [http://desktop.google.com/], Microsoft [soon], Apple-Spotlight [soon, see: http://developer.apple.com/macosx/tiger/index.html], X1 [my favorite at the moment, see http://www.x1.com/]). So, I don't know if this will be possible with the ThoutReader-format...

Yes, I do use peer-to-peer software to get books -mainly to see if they are good enough, but not to read them. Good books are the ones that you come back to, and Data Munging with Perl is one of them. I got a copy from the web but ended up buying a paper copy because I was always getting back to it. My O'Reilly books? those are fun, but not as practical as the Manning ones. And I don't own any in print.

I recently purchased Spring Live by Sourcebeat. Their "protection" is awful. First piece is that the pdf's are password protected. This is fine by me, I can still read the pdf anywhere and on anything. I understand that I could easily offer my password out but still it's okay protection for the nice guy. Their second approach is that they removed copy/paste. This SUCKS!!!! Now all the code snippets I find in the book, I have to type in manually. For this reason, I will never buy another Sourcebeat book. Manning, please don't go down this path!

Wouldn't it be better to simply not publish books in PDF format? Why risk losing money. What do the authors of the books that get pirated think?

Well, I'm very sorry to see your initiative to DRM. I've been a reader of your books, but I can see that will change soon.

If you think less of DRM in the future I will be back.

Thanks!