There’s a lot of news about the iPad, and a lot of news about the e-book reader part of the device in particular. So I decided to gather as much information as I can and make a “combination-post”. Turns out there will be three parts.
In this second part I’d like to discuss the way newspaper publishers feel about the iPad. It seems they are not very keen on the iPad. There’s also a discussion about the security measurements of the e-books in the iBooks Store of the iPad. They are DRM protected, something most people using iTunes are not unfamiliar with.
Apple and the publishers
Newspaper publishers see the number of customers diminish worldwide. It looks like iPad could be the saviour. If publishers bring their content to the iPad, a new source of income can be created. Unfortunately the negotiations can not be called positive so far.
Apple wants 30% of the sales, which means the publishers can keep 70%. This is the same business model as the App Store, but it will not work for the publishers the same way it did with developers. “Thirty percent forever changer the economics,” says one of the publishers.
The newspapers are also not happy about the fact that Apple doesn’t share much information about its users. To newspapers that kind of information is crucial to them. They can easily get an insight in their user’s behavior and show specific ads for them. If Apple doesn’t share information, the personal contact between the newspapers and their readers would be lost.
The iBooks Store and DRM
What is DRM? According to Wikipedia DRM is the following:
“Digital rights management (DRM) is a generic term for access control technologies that can be used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals to try to impose limitations on the usage of digital content and devices. It is also, sometimes, disparagingly described as Digital Restrictions Management. The term is used to describe any technology which inhibits uses (legitimate or otherwise) of digital content that were not desired or foreseen by the content provider.”
A huge amount of e-books in the iBook Store will get a Fairplay copy protection (DRM). This kind of protection was also integrated in the songs people can buy through iTunes, but a year ago Apple removed the DRM protection. Movies, tv-shows and applications are still protected. And now e-books can be added to that list as well.
Apple seems to try and keep their relationship with publishers as good as possible. The e-books in the iBook Store are allowed to be priced higher than the books on Amazon’s Kindle. And to try to prevent piracy a huge amount of e-books will be protected with DRM. The books will be released in the open ePub-format, but publishers can choose wether they want to protect the books or not.
