Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Interesting article today in USA Today which talks about how more and more big-time record labels are selling content as restriction-free MP3s that come without any kind of Digital Rights Management. If this policy starts to catch on, it would be a real about-face for the music industry, which has long insisted on wrapping content in as much DRM as possible (in fact, Sony got so paranoid about it that they produced CDs earlier this year that were so restrictive on the part of the user that they actually contained spyware, tracking the user’s every move and reporting it back to Sony). So if this takes off in the music business, maybe trade publishers would follow suit, and issue novels and non-fiction text in a DRM-less format which anyone could read anywhere on any device. If that happened, the Attention Economy would have finally arrived. As it is now, we’re still very much in the DRM economy.

Major labels to offer unrestricted MP3s