Digital Rights Management (DRM) is an area of technological advancement that authors within the eBook business should pay close attention to over the coming years as these innovations are striving to safeguard their written work.

What DRM boils down to is working out a way to stop your eBook being sold-on, copied or distributed without your knowledge (and without you benefiting). Technological innovation in the music industry was slow to catch up on providing DRM, resulting in songs being widely distributed on the Internet. Music publishers were slow to act (and react) in that instance.

The eBook business is different from the music industry though as eBooks are a result of the software sector rather than the book publishing sector. Consequently, written eBooks have incorporated innovation in DRM from the early days to protect the eBook’s contents.

Previously, software vendors such as Adobe pioneered the PDF format for writing eBooks. Their software can inhibit the functionality of PDF readers. Most notably, a protected PDF can be configured to disallow copying of the eBook text or even disallow printing the file. This is DRM in action.

Most PDF file creators/readers/add-ons now provide this functionality. Some prime examples are the Adobe Reader and Microsoft Reader. The Microsoft reader goes one step further by ID stamping PDFs with the purchaser’s details in order to discourage sharing the PDF with others.

In new and recent developments in DRM, players like the Kindle Reader can send notifications back to their home servers if eBooks are being illegally read or shared. At that point the vendor can then choose how to deal with the file sharer (possibly through litigation). Could they remove the PDF? Yes, apparently this is already possible, as detailed in a recent case when Amazon remotely removed PDFs from customers’ Kindle Readers (http://mashable.com/2009/07/17/amazon-kindle-1984/). This does open up a potential can of worms regarding the privacy rights of device owners so expect to start seeing Terms Of Conditions for digital readers containing statements about remote access permissions of vendor.

In parallel with the hardware producers firming up the DRM security, software publishers are also including functionality into their PDF publishing tools to include the ability to disable an eBook remotely if a customer uses fraudulent credit card details or is seeking a refund (two traditional means of obtaining PDFs at no cost). For most authors writing eBooks, protecting their PDFs through simple configuration of PDF creation software is an ideal solution.

These technological advancements in the eBook business may be too late in coming for the existing published PDFs. These still have copyright protection on their intellectual property once it is written. The new advancements in PDF security and copy protection should however make it even more secure and viable for the average person to start writing eBooks and start profiting from selling eBooks online.

Writing ebooks and want to publish & sell them online? Read Robert’s DLGuard review and get your ebook ecommerce business online today.

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