Ask Slashdot: How To Deliver a Print Magazine Online, While Avoiding Piracy? 298
An anonymous reader writes "I work for a technical magazine that has been available in print for over 40 years. Moving to providing an alternative subscription available online has been hard; the electronic version is quickly pirated and easily available around the world each month. We are a small company, and our survival depends not only on advertising but on the subscription fees. Do any slashdotters have experience of delivering electronic magazines via a subscription service in a way that is cost effective and secure?"
Fingerprint it! (Score:5, Insightful)
The best approach for dealing with piracy is making it easy to go after those that do it, without making it harder for everyone else. There are a number of good fingerprinting / watermarking schemes around. Try that as first approach with a readable "This copy has been bought by XXX" marker on the first or second page to make it obvious that it is a personalized copy.
You can't avoid piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
So just make it cheap and easy for real subscribers. If it's not worth someone's time to pirate something, they won't. Also, add something that can't be pirated, like an expert's forum, with article authors participating.
If the content can be accessed... (Score:4, Insightful)
then it can be pirated.
Re:Flexpaper, CloudCrowd, or other third party too (Score:5, Insightful)
Won't work. You can't prevent people from making screenshots. Yes, that's more work, but it only takes one person to subscribe and go to the trouble of taking screenshots of every page and compiling a PDF from them, and then uploading it on BitTorrent.
Not only that, who the fuck wants to read PDFs online using some shitty in-browser viewer? Not me; I'd never subscribe to something that made me jump through hoops like that. If I can't download the PDFs and be able to read them offline (like when I'm on a plane), then I don't want it.
troll here. (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, the /. crowd (or at least the younger ones) believe that information wants to be free.
Among others:
- How dare you put ads and cookies? It's an invasion of privacy!
- Paywall? Everything is a rehash from AP/ Reuters!
- We don't need journalists...we have bloggers!
- We're just trying out things on piratebay before we buy it....if it wasn't free in the first place, we would've never paid for it in the first place, hence it's not theft.
- it's not theft because you can make infinite copies.
- I want to buy it, not license it. If I paid for something, I *own* it.
blah blah, side-arguments to copyright and such, and how the system is broken.
Don't worry (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't worry about it. A regular paper magazine can be "pirated" by loaning the issue to friends. You actually want that, because the more people are familiar with your magazine and the more they read it, the likelier they are to subscribe.
Re:Flexpaper, CloudCrowd, or other third party too (Score:5, Insightful)
Watermark, and get over it (Score:4, Insightful)
Modern companies are getting worse at "customer service" and going the DRM route will make you just another one of the companies people love to hate.
Re:You can't avoid piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Your problem is ill conceived, you are grudgingly moving to the web because that's what everybody's doing, but you aren't really willing to change the business model and ask for a way to keep things working like before. I have some bad news for you: the web is a completely new medium and you need to adapt or disappear - technical journals will survive for some time but they will eventually die just like the rest of the print media.
To elaborate the parent's post: give it away for free, with a limit of free articles per device, a.k.a porous paywall [slate.com]. The heavy users will buy a subscription while the casual users willing to pirate but not subscribe will get the articles free contributing to your advertising revenue, which generally pays little for repeat visitors.
Re:DRM Free (Score:5, Insightful)
The simplicity is appealing, but you're just wrong. Some people will buy if they can't pirate. Some people will buy if pirating is difficult. Some people will buy if buying is easy. There are all kinds of people out there.
Re:You can't avoid piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:DRM Free (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, Type 1 (pirates) can easily turn into Type 2 (paying customers) when their circumstances change. Often pirates are people who literally cannot become customers. Many college students have abundant time but little money, inclining them to pirate readily while making purchasing an unattractive option. After graduating and (hopefully) acquiring a somewhat lucerative job and a busier schedule they'll happily pay a reasonable price to save themselves some now-precious time.
But if you make it too hard to access your content, you're going to end up shooting yoursefl in the foot. Bury your content behind a secure and obnoxious paywall and sure, Type 1's won't ever see a pirated copy, but neither will they potentially become future customers, because they never developed a taste for your content. And many Type 2's will decline to spend their precious time (even 5 or 10 minutes may end up being too much if there are other options available to them) dealing with your DRM. And that's assuming you don't manage to kill your own word of mouth (or even search engine presence) by locking up your content.
Obviously the precise impact of your DRM will vary depending on the nature of your content, but in many cases (I personally think it's the vast majority of cases) pirates don't represent any loss in current sales, but do represent potential future sales.
Re:Fingerprint it! (Score:5, Insightful)
Nah.
The best approach for dealing with piracy is making your content easily accessible, hassle-free (i.e., no DRM), and offered at a fair price.
Re:Flexpaper, CloudCrowd, or other third party too (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds good. You should do the same with your work. There are lots of people competing for jobs, so you should just show up and work for free, and if someone wants to make a donation to you, great.
Re:Don't worry (Score:5, Insightful)
My point is that there are more limitations and disincentives to borrowing a physical magazine than there is to digital piracy. This produces stronger incentives for a physical borrower to buy his own subscription than digital piracy does. As a result, creators see digital piracy as much more threatening than physical piracy. (This is the same reason creators see libraries as less problematic than digital piracy.)
wrong approach (Score:5, Insightful)
the wrong approach for dealing with piracy is going after those who do it.
the right approach is offering something which doesn't give them a reason to "pirate" it. Not to mention that the term isn't even correct, you can't pirate an ebook/magazine.
example: having your magazine available worldwide without restrictions.
example: offering something in the digital version that print doesn't.
TLDR version: put in effort to make a good magazine instead of doing the lazy step of "we need more control to deal with piracy"
Re:Fingerprint it! (Score:3, Insightful)
For a technical magazine with a thousand subscribers that might work, but in general this technique is dumb. So what if a DVD leaked online which was watermarked as belonging to Anonymous C. Oward ? There's zero liability due to viruses and trojans. The risk of public shaming will not secure the computers of the world (if only it would be that easy... "THIS is the picture of the idiot who wants to increase his manhood by software").
Ah, that stupid fallacy again. A measure won't completely and totally solve a problem 100%, and therefore it has no value at all whatsoever.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, where binary thinking is stupid and reality is analog, a solution that reduces the problem has value, even if it doesn't stop all cases. The kind of piracy this measure is aimed at reducing is effectively reduced by this measure. The only relevant question is, does the amount of reduction justify the cost. Whether John Obvious-Alias Doe distributes it freely on the torrents is utterly irrelevant to the question. The torrent users are mostly a lost cause, the goal is to discourage Alice from giving a copy to Bob.
You're creating your own problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
I have been a reader of WIRED magazine since their first year. (calm down now; its just an example. let's argue the merits of Wired's newsworthiness elsewhere).
I got an iPad, and when Wired came to the Newsstand app, I thought it would be an excellent thing for me- now I could read the magazine anywhere, anywhen. I didn't even have to pay, being a print subscriber was enough. But the thing is, I had to laboriously download each issue, they took up a lot of room on my iPad, and I just never remembered that there was an issue sitting, waiting for me.
What did I do all those times i was stuck at an airport, or babysitting a sleeping baby, and had time on my hands? You'd THINK I would open up Newsstand and read an issue of Wired, but what I really did was opened up my RSS reader and skimmed headlines from dozens of blogs, all at once. Gizmodo, Engadget, Techcrunch, boingboing, Ars, Slashdot, and yes, Wired.
I don't even read Wired any more. is it because of DRM, or watermarking? of course not. it's because: why would I sit down for an hour and read month-old news when i can get the headlines up-to-date every minute of every day, in bite-sized chunks?
If you want to modernize and get online, that's great. But why are you only thinking of modernizing ONE part of your hundred-year-old delivery service? If you're just going online because that's what everyone is doing, I would say: forget it. Save your money. Keep printing your magazine, and the people who really need it for their jobs and their wellbeing will continue subscribing. But if you want to get with the Now, do it right. Stop thinking in monthly/bimonthly/quarterly/whatever publishing cycles. Publish a steady stream of articles and news, when they're ready, when they're relevant. Give subscribers a way to log in and go thorugh old content whenever they need it. Create a community, get information flowing in both directions. Add value. No one will bother pirating your content because there will be NEW content tomorrow. You can't pirate breaking news, and you cant pirate community feedback.
Re:You can't avoid piracy (Score:4, Insightful)
This!
The concept of a magazine was born with print, and should die when print dies.
Why fight deadlines when you can simply post them as you finish them, and have people returning to your site every day?
Stick to what you know (Score:4, Insightful)
which is content. You're not experts in DRM, so trying to roll your own is only going to be a PITA for you, and your customers, while hardly impeding anyone who wants to pirate.
This means if you want a solution with DRM, you're going to publish through somebody who is doing DRM'd electronic distribution. That means Amazon's Kindle Publisher, the equivalent Barnes and Noble program, iTunes, or Kobo. The trickiest thing will be figuring out whose terms of use give you the most opportunity to recapture revenue.
If you're publishing a paper magazine, chances are you are heavily into Adobe already. It would make sense to see what they're offering in terms of electronic distribution and DRM infrastructure to their magazine publishing customers. I'd be willing to bet they've got a solution targeted right at your kind of outfit, because you are hardly unique in your predicament.
If DRM isn't that critical a concern for you, you might think outside the magazine publisher's box and go right to social media. I know that a number of publications are offering Facebook apps, and again because you are hardly unique in your situation I'd bet there's a way to capture advertising revenue through a Facebook app. Going this route you probably won't be able to keep folks from copying chunks of text from your magazine for their own purposes; that could be an issue for some of your contributors. That said, it's so convenient for users that wholesale piracy of the latest stuff probably won't be a practical concern for you.
So ask nicely and don't be a dick. (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, just ask your client base not to copy the mag, and maybe even do "pay what you want". It worked really well for The Humble Bundle.
If the product is good and you treat your customer base well, they will pay. IF you don't they wont.
The people who are going to copy it are not the people you want to care about as customers. Count them for ad revenue (like any other advertisement model, the reader is the product as far as the advertisers are concerned so copying is good from that angle.
You just need to find the sweet spot between universally free distribution (for high advert return) and enough direct sales for it's own sake.
And don't be a dick.