Sealing Up
Digital Rights
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (MAY 2002)
Now
that a flock of formerly high-flying technology vendors
has gone down in flames (Reciprocal and Digital
Goods: remember them?), it may seem odd that a 50-person
business based in London should be winging toward the
publishing sector. But that’s just what SealedMedia
is doing, having scored $16.5 million in a third round
of funding last fall to plunge into that black hole
called digital rights management. As Martin Lambert,
SealedMedia’s founder and CTO, made clear in a recent
conversation, part of the firm’s current success may
lie in an unsentimental view of where digital rights
are heading. If anyone needs any hints: it’s not just
toward ebooks anymore.
“I
don’t think it’s very good news for the electronic version
of trade books at the moment,” he says, “because it’s
a high-volume, low-value market, and the technologies
applied in this space are extraordinarily immature.”
So much, perhaps, is obvious. But Lambert thinks the
first generation of consumer ebooks took a giant step
backwards, because of rights technology that locked
a book to a particular computer. You could only access
your ebook at work or at home (or on a dedicated device
that you lugged with you), but not in both places. SealedMedia’s
solution, which they’ve been developing since 1996,
gets around this problem by storing user rights on a
central server, meaning you can open a locked file from
anywhere, as long as you have the password. (Password-swapping
is discouraged, because you can’t read a file in more
than one place at one time.) This technology can also
protect a whole range of file types, including Adobe
PDFs, HTML documents, and the whole suite of Microsoft
Office formats, including PowerPoint presentations,
plus audio and video files. All users need to do is
download a small “unsealer” program to their computer,
and they’re ready to roll. Support for mobile devices
is coming soon.
Among the company’s 40 customers is Cavendish Publishing,
a legal publisher in the UK which was losing sales when
students couldn’t reliably find its expensive law textbooks
stocked at stores. With electronic rights already covered
in all its author contracts, the publisher rolled out
400 backlist ebook titles (and the first electronic
customer turned out to be in Portugal). Ebooks are priced
at up to 50% off the hardcover edition, and individual
chapters are offered for sale. Purchasing a full license
allows unlimited viewing and one-time printing, as well
as access from any computer, and offline use for a specified
length of time.
Other customers include Time Warner’s ipicturebooks.com,
which is offering a Shrek “enhanced animated storybook”;
Harcourt, which is enabling downloads of electronic
reprints through aggregator sites; Pearson Education,
which is making York Notes study guides available online;
and Congressional Quarterly, which has launched
e-delivery of its daily digest (and upped revenues by
over $200,000). Now, Lambert says, he’s aiming to sign
up the McGraw-Hills and Reeds of the world,
which can offer DRM for trade applications. “At the
end of the day, if you put yourself in the shoes of
a consumer, you have zero interest in DRM,” he says.
“All you want is the content at a fair price. More accurately,
you can already get the content at a fair price: you
can buy a printed book. Ebooks will only work when someone
says, this is miles better than the printed book.”
©2002
Publishing Trends
