How to protect ebooks from sharing & piracy with DRM

1. Copying & distribution.  If someone purchases an ebook, they feel that it should be theirs to keep to do what they like with.  A physical copy is quite different to a digital copy due the fact that an identical copy can be easily produced and quickly distributed.  There is no need for the photocopier and the use of the postal system when you are dealing with digital e-books – a simple file copy and email distribution or uploading to a web site will do.  E-book publishers want to protect their IPR and prevent loss of revenue by stopping ebook sharing (unauthorized distribution) and copying, however attractive they are to the purchaser.
2. Licensing authorized devices.  You need to address on how many devices should an e-book be allowed to be installed on.  An e-book publisher might argue that one is enough – just the same as if a person had purchased a single copy of a physical book.  A user would argue they need to use it on several devices.  Good e-book protection systems use DRM to allow you to specify the number of devices the e-book can be used on.
3. Offline use.  When a person purchases an e-book they don’t want to have to be connected to the Internet to view it (just like a physical book).  It is important that the e-book protection system is capable of allowing permanent offline use.  More sophisticated DRM based e-book protection systems should let e-book publishers specify a one time connection after so many days use so that they have the ability to revoke access if a chargeback is made.  Also, they should have the option to connect to the Internet for licensing if it is available.
4. Printing.  Just because someone has purchased an e-book, that does not mean they have the right to produce a hard copy of it as well.  If printing is to be allowed then you might want to consider the use of dynamic watermarks (user information is added at the time of printing).  This is to provide another layer of e-book protection – most people don’t want to have their names associated with copies that have been unlawfully distributed.
5. Portability & Security.  The ebook format you decide upon is equally important – what file format do you have to convert to and do you get the same results on different devices?  While both Amazon (Kindle, .azw) and Adobe (epub) have their own popular proprietary e-book formats they have both been broken – type in Kindle .azw crack or epub crack into Google and you will find quite a few websites dedicated to this task.  So as an ebook publisher you might want to wonder what e-book protection you are actually getting.  Locklizard works with PDF files since they provide consistent rendering across a variety of platforms and devices, and we use our own Viewers so we don’t have to rely on the Adobe security handler (security through obscurity) for protection of e-books.
6. Fixed locations.  This is a more sophisticated DRM control that only allows the e-book to be used from a specific location (IP address or range) which might be a library, a school, or a country and so on.  This allows a publisher to manage access to e-books much more flexibly.
7. Dynamic watermarks.  There are many ebook DRM systems that claim to watermark ebooks dynamically with user information.  However, often these are just standard PDF watermarks that can be easily removed using any PDF editor.  If you want to add watermarks to a PDF ebook then you need to make sure they cannot be easily removed.
8. Managing expectations.  A digital ebook does not cost the same to produce or distribute (in both time and physical shipping costs) as a physical copy (paper or hardback).  So e-book publishers can charge less and manage customer expectations of use (what limitations there are on copying, printing, use on additional devices, etc.) to justify lower prices than physical copies.

DRM provides an essential series of licensing measures in ebook protection which extend the ability of the publisher to publish safely when distributing ebooks in the digital marketplace.