Opinon on DRM seems to be formed. But I remain agnostic.

People appear to think that Digital Rights Management has been proven not to work. But it's important to remember that when you are trying something new, failing is easy. Succeeding requires insight and persistence, and usually some luck--succeeding is hard. I simply don't believe that enough options have been tried in using DRM, and with enough imagination. We want to try out some interesting ideas before giving up. Maybe we'll find that what our readers get outweighs the negatives.

I want to mention a few of these attractive ideas, but let me first say something about the reactions against Manning introducing any controls whatsoever. The current technical ebook market consists of Manning with unencumbered PDF ebooks, and all the other publishers with no ebooks.(+) Several offer the online web service, Safari. On a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being tyrannical DRM and 10 being complete freedom, Manning PDFs are a 10, Safari is about a 3. Our competitors with no ebooks at all are about a zero. :) We're seeking an alternative somewhere between those endpoints but still heavily favoring ebook freedom, maybe around an 8. Most realistic solutions in real life are in a gray zone between total black and total white.

Of course, Safari is an option, but we've decided against it. It is nice if you are online, but you cannot use it on the train like Manning ebooks. And the name wickedly favors one of the members of the Safari collaboration. Our participation would implicitly be promoting a competitor's brand.

The negatives of DRM are pretty obvious, so what are some interesting possibilities? One I love is the idea of using a timed key to allow people to come into our "store" and browse through the entire book for a certain time. Normally online you get unencumbered PDFs of one or two chapters. But with timed-key encryption we can give you the entire book for say an hour. Or two. That parallels the physical bookstore experience and is definitely better than what we can offer you now.

The timed key idea could be used for the actual sale too, although we're not actively thinking about that. For example, we could let the buyer tell us how long he wants the book for and a formula would tell him the cost; the timed key would enforce the agreement reached.

Another sequence of ideas applies to ThoutReader, deriving from the fact it's open source. TR already includes annotations, unlike Acrobat (although the new Acrobat 7 apparently will allow them). By analogy with the physical book I've always considered the capability to annotate an ebook a desirable feature. Thinking by analogy doesn't always work, but if the feature is well implemented it might help people find places they have read, a bit like finding the worn or dog-eared pages of the physical book. It could let them add and then find their own additions to the content, without limitation in size. And it would allow something Iain Shigeoka suggested, sharing of annotations between our readers. As Iain sees it, sometimes the shared annotations can be more useful than the original content itself. I doubt that could happen with Manning content :) but it's a great idea I'd like to see tried.

The TR option appeals to me because it is open source and pure Java. I think we should try it and maybe even some of the people now telling us not to will join in to develop exciting new features none of us can quite imagine now.
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(+) I've recently been made aware that the Pragmatic Programmer does offer
unencumbered PDF ebooks. The above statement is in error, but it remains
that they are a rarity.