publishing - What are the advantages and disadvantages of digital rights management for self-published authors?

DRM (digital rights management) is being used in just about every electronic format, including files used in electronic readers. My question is whether this is a good thing or a bad thing for writers, or does it really matter?

Since an author with a "traditional" publishing contract really has no control, this is really targetted more towards self-published authors who are also responsible for doing their own promotion and marketing.

I would like to know if not using DRM can result in your work being pirated or will it be a non-issue? If people do end up giving away copies, does DRM have the potential to lead to others buying the work out of guilt or possibly buying one of your other books? From a marketing perspective, does this make good business sense?

Answer

This is basically a question of marketing strategy.

The major pro of DRM is that it helps avoid pirating; the major con is that it limits accessibility and portability, and can annoy readers and users.

So it seems to me that the primary consideration should be: "Is pirating going to cost me so much, that I'm better off risking limiting and annoying users?".

For most independent, self-publishing authors, I think publicity is the biggest concern. If you're popular enough that pirated copies are really costing you, that probably means you're doing astoundingly well. Whereas finding readers is tough; you don't want to turn anybody off because of incompatible readers or annoying registration processes - they might easily skip your book entirely. So by default, I'd lean towards DRM free. But here are some additional considerations:

• For publishers, DRM probably makes a lot more sense than it does for a single author. If your own personal titles are being pirated, you might not be losing a lot; if you've got hundreds of titles being pirated, that might be more of a dent.


• You may have certain idealogical preferences - about pirating, or copyright, or current DRM practices - which you'd like to reflect by your choice of whether or not to use DRM.


• You may want to use a publishing platform which does or does not utilize DRM; if you don't have strong preferences on DRM, this issue may be secondary to publishing on the best platform you can.