Eoin Purcell

As far as DRM goes
I knew it would be fun to have G&M’s Digital Development Manager blogging. For instance, here is part two of his series on DRM:

Here’s how it works:

1. I visit a website to order a book
2. The website requires me to register (not perfect in terms of web usability but a fair compromise and fairly universal these days)
3. I order an e-book from the site in my choice of format.
4. The site back-end takes the XML source of the book and starts the process to create my copy of the book in the format I chose.
5. While creating the copy of my book it pulls information from the membership database to add to selected areas in the book and to create a custom header (This copy of RUINAIR has been personalised for XXXXXX).
6. The customised e-book is placed in a digital library linked to my member ship account for me to download at any time.
7. An email is automatically sent to me letting me know that my book is ready for download.

The data we pull from the membership system can be your name, billing address, email address, phone number, order number or any combination of these. Its not a device locked DRM but how many people will be willing to share files that have their email address or phone number in them.

I like this idea but mainly for the reasons I expressed in my comment on the blog:

Now that is smart!

I especially like the concept because where you can add DRM in such a fashion you can add value that is specific to the consumer.

Think of it, if you can pull their membership preferences you can slip in ads for their pre-selected genres and topics, extra info on authors they like and other stuff they would see as enhancing the e-book/digital product!

If you can make DRM a value added, then I think you have a winner. That is of course if e-books is the way forward and not just webpages and access rather than a physical/digital product.

Very nice,
Eoin