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The long and winding road to DRM-free ebooks in academic libraries
November 8, 2018 Mirela Roncevic 1 Comment

The issue of Digital Rights Management (DRM) has been around for as long as ebooks have been around—and not only ebooks, but digital content in general, including online journals, movies, TV shows, games, and software. DRM is usually discussed in the context of copyright and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which makes circumvention of measures that control access to copyrighted works a civil offense (in some cases even a federal crime). But DRM isn’t copyright. It refers to actual technology—a code or a set of codes—applied to restrict the digital use of copyrighted materials. In the publishing world, it is a way of ‘protecting’ digital books against copyright infringement and piracy, which have been a major concern to publishers since the advent of the Internet. By using protection—usually via three DRM types, Amazon for Kindle, Apple’s FairPlay for iBookstore and Adobe’s Digital Editions Protection Technology—publishers (or copyright holders) are able to control what users can and cannot do with digital content.
ns that people buying ebooks, whether for personal or institutional use, are paying for usage, not possession (as has been the case for centuries with print books). When encrypted with DRM, ebooks cannot be easily (if at all) copied or printed, viewed on multiple devices, or moved from one device to another. Further, they can only be downloaded a certain number of times (even when legally bought online) and, if necessary, blocked in certain territories around the world (or made invisible to users in certain countries). Such restrictions have given publishers and authors some peace of mind over the past two decades, but they have resulted in many inconveniences for legitimate users, including lay readers who purchase digital content on sites like Amazon and researchers who access digital content through libraries.
These same restrictions, many believe, are one of the essential reasons for the popularity of ebooks in the consumer market is stagnating. Apart from the fact that users tend to prefer print over digital when reading for pleasure (vs. when doing research), various DRM-related limits placed on ebooks— including territorial restrictions and inability to copy, print, and share—have only contributed to the overall decline in consumer ebook sales in recent years. According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in January 2018, only seven percent of Americans read digital books exclusively, while 39 percent read print books, and 29 percent read both print and digital.
Despite declining ebook sales in the consumer market and an inferior user experience all around, many publishers still maintain that DRM is vital to protect the rights granted to them by law to control how content is sold, copied, repurposed, modified, and publicly performed (Dingledy and Matamoros, What Is Digital Management?). That said, some trade publishers have been embracing the concept of DRM-free ebooks from the very beginning, including technology publishers like O’Reilly and Microsoft and genre fiction publishers like Carina Press, and Tor.com. On the academic side, many publishers have been providing DRM-free titles on their own platforms for a number of years—including Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, SAGE, Springer/Palgrave, Elsevier, Wiley, De Gruyter, Brill, and Emerald, among others—but, until recently, they have not been giving large aggregators like EBSCO the option to distribute their titles DRM-free.
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In the world of research and academic libraries, the main issue has not been the preference of one format over the other, if for no other reason than for the fact that the sheer volume of academic titles published every year, is overwhelming. Based on the number of titles profiled by GOBI Library Solutions, a major library services vendor, at least 70,000 academic titles are published annually in the English language alone. Since the advent of the first library ebook platforms and subscription databases about 20 years ago, academic librarians have had their ‘hands’ full keeping up with the onslaught of digital resources, while experimenting with ever-evolving ebook business models and understanding their short-term and long-term repercussions. Indeed, the key ebook issue in academic libraries has to this day revolved around the effects of various business models on budgets and libraries’ ability to build sustainable digital collections for their institutions.
Not until recently have publishers started to pay closer attention to the feedback provided to librarians by end users, including students and faculty. A survey published this spring by Library Journal—whose goal was to investigate academic student ebook experience in four-year colleges, universities, graduate programs, as well as two-year or community colleges—found that 74 percent of students accessing ebooks through libraries believe there should be no restrictions placed on ebooks; 66 percent prefer to use ebooks with no restrictions; and 37 percent have taken a principled stand and only use ebooks that have no restrictions when conducting research. Given the relatively low number of DRM-free ebooks available to users through libraries in recent years, these stats lead to some worrisome conclusions: The vast majority of scholarly ebooks in U.S. academic libraries are never used by a large number of patrons—according to this Library Journal survey, over one third—because the vast majority of scholarly ebooks continue to be distributed to libraries with DRM encryption.
DRM-related matters have been the topic of countless articles, case studies, online discussions, and conference panels in the past decade. Academic librarians do not shy away from expressing their concerns over the adverse effects of DRM, questioning whether it successfully combats piracy in the first place and pointing to the difficult ‘middleman’ role libraries must play in their efforts to meet the demands of their patrons on the one end and remain respectful of the publishers’ ‘rights’ on the other.
As the Digital Content and Libraries Group of the American Library Association explains in its online Tip Sheet, DRM is what enforces the license agreement that libraries make with publishers or ebook aggregators, particularly when it comes to pay-per-use business models like Demand-Driven Acquisition. As libraries see it, fair use and other exceptions to copyright law that libraries have relied on for decades to be able to loan titles to readers may be blocked by DRM, which has led many to take a firm stand against DRM and put pressure on publishers to come up with better solutions.
Further, libraries oppose the uses of DRM that lock readers to specific ebook formats, arguing that any institution that lawfully acquires content should be able to allow its patrons to read that content on any device and on any technology platform. Libraries also oppose DRM used to track reading patterns, giving insight into what people read, when, how and where, which jeopardizes patrons’ privacy. And, as stated on the American Library Association’s web site, “preserving, archiving, and providing access to culturally and historically significant works is severely limited by DRM distribution systems that remove content at the end of a license term, or prevent copying content in new formats. Libraries provide access to cultural heritage for multiple generations, but business models enforced by technology jeopardize long-term access to the knowledge products of our society.”
Ari Sigal, reference and instruction librarian at Catawba Valley Community College (Hickory, NC), believes that “current DRM practices when applied to ebooks are excessive in that they limit readers’ access and create a burdensome system for cash-strapped libraries.” This is bad enough for pleasure reading, but when applied to academic literature, it constricts the ability to do research. “As the system stands now,” says Sigal, “it is an outgrowth of unreasonable fear on the part of the publishing community. My hope is that as the Open Access movement continues to gain momentum more academic publishers will follow in its footsteps and create more DRM-free content available through various channels, not only their own.”
Traditional academic publishers have been slow to allow aggregators to deliver their books DRM-free, but great strides have been made in recent years, and the Open Access movement, along with pressures put on publishers by librarians, can certainly be credited as having positive influence. What once began as an initiative of non-profit organizations like Knowledge Unlatched and Unglue.It has spread across academic publishing and led to major players (e.g., DeGruyter, Springer, SAGE, Elsevier) embracing the concept of Open Access and DRM-free ebooks (first with journals, then ebooks). A white paper published by Springer Nature in November 2017 (The OA effect: How does open access affect the usage of scholarly books?), revealed, among other findings, that Open Access books enjoy, on average, seven times more downloads, 50 percent more citations, and ten times more online mentions than paywalled titles.
Another notable influence on publishers’ willingness to reconsider their DRM practices has been, ironically enough, the spread of piracy and the omni-presence of sites like Sci-Hub. The self-proclaimed “first pirate website in the world,” Sci-Hub provides mass and public access to tens of millions of research papers. In 2015 Elsevier filed a legal complaint against Sci-Hub and its founder, alleging copyright infringement. Sci-Hub has since then cycled through a number of domains, some of which have been blocked, but it remains the ‘go-to’ place for research all over the world, even in the most affluent countries with comprehensive library collections. Some mind-boggling stats that get us to rethink DRM’s power in combating piracy: the heaviest use of Sci-Hub apparently takes place on U.S. and European campuses; the United States is the fifth largest downloader; more and more academics donate papers to Sci-Hub voluntarily; hundreds of thousands of download requests are placed every day from millions of unique IP addresses.
According to biodata scientist Daniel Himmelstein (University of Pennsylvania) and his colleagues, who recently investigated the impact of Sci-Hub, the pirate site currently provides access to more than two-thirds of all scholarly articles in the world. When asked what publishers could do to stop new papers from being added to Sci-Hub, Himmelstein said: “There are things they could do but they can really backfire terribly. The issue is, the more protective the publishers are, the more difficult they make legitimate access, and that could drive people to use Sci-Hub.”
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If Open Access continues to exert influence on scholarly publishing while the majority of ebooks remains ‘locked’ with DRM encryption, if pirate sites remain difficult or impossible to combat, if students continue to show dissatisfaction when not able to print from ebooks, and if libraries continue to be stuck between a rock and a hard place, having to please both patrons and publishers, the question arises: how does the book industry move forward in a way that it can meet its business goals while giving users the research experience they want and allowing libraries to build sustainable collections?
Although slow to adapt, some academic publishers have made significant progress in opening up to the idea of ‘DRM-free’ beyond their own platforms, which automatically makes more content widely available to more libraries and, consequently, more users. EBSCO Information Services announced this month it has made more than 70,000 ebooks DRM-free through its EBSCO eBooks platform—including new releases and over 1000 titles highly recommended by librarians as well as ebooks from many publishers whose content is DRM-free for the first time (e.g., I.B. Tauris, Lynne Reiner Publishing, and Cambridge Scholar’s Publishing). This means that titles from a range of publishers are available on an unlimited concurrent user basis, and there are no limitations on printing, saving, or downloading. Further, no sign-in or Adobe ID is required, and no special software is needed for access. Librarians have the choice between the DRM-free unlimited user version of a title or a limited user model with standard DRM-protection, which may include single user, three user or concurrent access.
Kara Kroes Li, EBSCO’s Director of Product Management, explains the logic behind the dual approach: “We believe removing the DRM will lead to increased adoption and usage of the unlimited user version of the title. Publishers have the authority to determine which titles to include, and research shows that DRM-free titles achieve higher use and greater sell-through. Many publishers saw this opportunity immediately and signed on, and others are taking a wait-and-see approach, or are participating on a more limited, experimental basis. We believe once we have a chance to collect more data, thanks to the early adopters, more publishers will choose to participate with more content.”
According to Kroes Li, publishers who sell directly to libraries and have their own platforms figured all this out as early as 2010, because they have full control over their content and technology. The reason it’s taken large aggregators a while to catch up is that to date, aggregator platforms had supported a single type of delivery—either DRM-protected or DRM-free. EBSCO has been working with advisory boards, library and publisher focus groups and end users for over two years to determine how to develop a sustainable approach to DRM-free ebooks via its multi-publisher platform. “Asking publishers to remove DRM on all content, all models, was not successful, because it was not appreciative of the nuances of their concerns,” adds Kroes Li. “When we compromised and proposed our solution, we got a great deal of cooperation.”
If we consider, for example, that a major publisher like Elsevier has determined that it does not fear the idea of offering DRM-free titles, but instead use it as a way to drive purchases on its own platform, the majority of publishers that don’t have their own platforms (and don’t offer DRM-free yet) are automatically at a disadvantage in selling their ebooks. Libraries want DRM-free books, and favor ebooks with DRM-free access when selecting titles to purchase. Even if a library purchases a package from a large publisher, they may still favor that same publisher when they are selecting individual titles—just because they have DRM-free options. When a major aggregator (like EBSCO) incorporates DRM-free titles from a wide range of publishers, big and small, into its platform, publishers now have an avenue to compete. Publishers also have the flexibility to pick and choose which books to make DRM-free when there are circumstances that require this. Because libraries typically prefer to have a cross-section of books from various publishers, with greater publisher participation, libraries will have DRM-free options and spread their collection development efforts appropriately—making unbiased selection decisions. It’s those publishers that haven’t come on board with DRM-free options that may find themselves struggling to keep up.
There is also the issue of how DRM-free works with complex ebooks business models, such as, Short Term Loans (STL), an electronic version of traditional interlibrary loans (ILL). Since the Digital Millennium Copyright Act renders it illegal for libraries to share considerable portions of their digital collections—and ILL has historically represented the commitment of libraries to enlarge the pool of resources available to their audiences—DRM restrictions, as Marlene Manoff notes in “Human and Machine Entanglement in the Digital Archive,” have the potential to inflict considerable damage on future scholarship.
In EBSCO’s case, as Kroes Li explains, “DRM-free is a version of the unlimited-user model that a publisher may choose to participate in. A customer may choose to purchase the unlimited DRM-free version, or a customer may choose to purchase a DRM-protected version which may be single user, three user or concurrent access. Short-Term Loan is an access model that (when available) is applied to single user, DRM protected e-books. The reason so many publishers have signed on for DRM-free with EBSCO is because it is applied to the unlimited user version of the book.”
Another important reason DRM-free (still) doesn’t work across all books is the content type. Oxford University Press (OUP), for example, withholds about a third of its scholarly books from its University Press Scholarship Online platform because they are reference books, course adoption titles, textbooks, or books with rights issues OUP does not control. A large share of these are available, ironically, on aggregator platforms precisely because there is DRM. Likewise, SAGE withholds more than half its titles from its own platform and aggregators because so much of its content includes reference books and textbooks. These are niches that present special challenges.
Looking ahead, the ebook ecosystem is rife with threats to publisher sustainability. It is also rife with threats to library sustainability. Movement towards DRM-free will certainly continue, but it will be—like much of the evolution of ebooks and digital content—a long and winding road. The journey will likely take time and more adjustments are ahead for all in the game. If the lessons learned thusfar are any indication, ‘two steps forward’ will be followed with ‘one step back.’
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References
ALA DCWG Tip Sheet: Digital Rights Management. American Library Association, July 2012. http://www.districtdispatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/drm_tip_sheet.pdf.
Berrio. Matamoros, Alex & Fred Dingledy. “What Is Digital Rights Management?” (2016). CUNY Academic Works. https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cl_pubs/334/.
“Digital Rights Management.” American Library Association, January 13, 2018. http://www.ala.org/advocacy/copyright/digitalrights.
“How Enormous Is Sci-Hub and Does Its Formidable Size Signal the End of Paywalled Research.” No Shelf Required, July 28, 2017. http://www.noshelfrequired.com/how-enormous-is-sci-hub-and-does-its-formidable-size-signal-the-beginning-of-the-end-for-paywalled-research/.
Manoff, Marlene. “Human and Machine Entanglement in the Digital Archive: Academic Libraries and Socio-Technical Change.” Libraries and the Academy, Vol. 15, No. 3. Johns Hopkins Univ. Pr., 2015.
“New (But Not Surprising” AAP Findings This Week: Paperback, Hardcover, and Audio Sales Grow; Ebook Sales Decline.” No Shelf Required, February 24, 2017. http://www.noshelfrequired.com/new-but-not-surprising-aap-findings-this-week-paperback-hardcover-and-audio-sales-grow-ebook-sales-decline/.
Perrin, Andrew. “Nearly One-in-Five Americans Now Listen to Audiobooks.” Pew Research Center, March 8, 2018. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/08/nearly-one-in-five-americans-now-listen-to-audiobooks/.

A few times a year I’ll find myself in a conversation with Laura Brady or some other expert in the world of and I’ll attempt to explain how different the world of EPUB/ebook support looks when you review content and identify support gaps at a place like Kobo. Laura asked me to give this a go in blog form so here goes.
EPUB 2 still makes up roughly 70% of all incoming content
I thought the best way to go about this was by providing some insight into the content we ingest and I’ll start with the split of EPUB 2/EPUB 3 and reflowable/fixed layout. It may come as a surprise to some that EPUB 2 still makes up roughly 70% of all incoming content. Here’s the breakdown of what we’ve received so far in 2017:
EPUB: 69%
EPUB 3: 16%
EPUB 3: Fixed Layout 15% (half of which are image only and contain no HTML, mainly comics)
EPUB 3: Open Manga Format 1%
EPUB 2: Fixed Layout

Most of you probably know Readium, a fully functional engine which can be used to develop EPUB 3 Reading Systems. And you may have already interacted with it, either through the Readium Chrome extension or an app leveraging its Software Development Kit (Cloudshelf Reader, NYPL SimplyE, Bookari, Bookvia, etc.).
The original goal of Readium has been largely achieved. It is a tried and tested solution which has already been used to create a significant amount of Reading Systems. It has been used to read hundreds of thousands of books. It is here to stay.
In the meantime, the web has continued to mature with the browser and JavaScript engines becoming much more full featured, and the major standards bodies, including the W3C and IDPF, have been producing additional specifications for digital publishing in many forms.
The overarching goal of Readium 2 is to re-think, from the ground up, a SDK that can be used to develop Reading Systems. Instead of developing an engine (or engines) for interpreting EPUB markup, the ambition is to develop a framework for interpreting and rendering current and future digital publishing markup.
The project is well under way, and it is now time to deal with its CSS (layout, pagination, default styles, reading modes, settings, etc.).

We do want to get it right

Historically, the relationship between Reading Systems implementers and ebook producers has been lukewarm—at best.
There’s been limited dialogue between those two, sparse documentation, quite a few overrides and a significant amount of bug reports–and fixes.
More importantly, it has been painful for anybody involved and probably hurt digital books in some ways.
This is the reason why we are making this call for participation today: we will need your help to do our best.
Design and development will be entirely public so that you can provide feedback. But there’s a lot of other goals to it:

• document the design and implementation, and make it public;
• publish a case study explaining our design choices;
• require feedback from the community on a regular basis;
• set best practices for Reading Systems;
• in the spirit of the modular approach taken, design the CSS so that it is as independent as possible and can be used by other SDKs;
• insofar as possible, keep it simple and accessible;
• get CJK (Chinese Japanese Korean), RTL (Right to Left) and accessibility covered out of the box;
• last but not least, avoid overriding authors’ CSS.

That is quite a list but we think that, eventually, all items have to be checked. Openness, transparency and communication are values we want to defend throughout the process; and we have hope it can be done with your help and involvement.
How you can make an impact
One of our main goals is to provide a sound basis for ebook producers. In order to achieve this, we will need samples and/or books. Of course, all samples will be kept private, they won’t be collected in a public repository.

What we need, in order of priority:

1. one or several reflowable samples or ebooks which are representative of your CSS authoring;
2. reflowable samples or books for which you’ve experienced issues in Readium or other Reading Systems;
3. fixed-layout books for which you’ve experienced issues in Readium.
Samples can be send or shared at readium-css(at)edrlab(dot)org.

Please note we will parse the EPUB files’ stylesheets to get useful data (number of declarations, selectors’ specificity, font sizes and families, properties and values usage, etc.). We will take those statistics into accounts in order to make more informed decisions. Don’t worry, all the data will obviously be anonymized, withouth any human being invoved during the automated parsing of the stylesheets.
Your feedback will be extremely important too. We will try to organize twitter’s hours on a regular basis, to keep you updated on our progress and design choices, and collect your feedback. You can follow if this is not already the case.
Feedback can also be given on the Readium 2 Github repository, and we and we have opened the readium-2-css Slack channel on readium.slack.com for more casual discussions.
It goes without saying that we also want to know what your pain points are currently, so that we can try to find solutions or prevent recreating them in Readium 2.

his article was written by Laurent Le Meur, CTO of European Digital Reading Lab, and Jiminy Panoz. Starting July 3, Jiminy will work on the Readium 2 CSS and be one of your privileged interlocutors throughout the process.