Three months ago, Amazon yanked over 5,000 IPG titles from the Kindle store after IPG refused to capitulate to Amazon’s demand for better terms. The titles were restored just before Memorial Day. IPG wouldn’t comment on those negotiations, but president Mark Suchomel wrote in a letter to clients at the time, “We will continue to work hard for every last sale so that all of our publishers stay healthy moving forward.”

Now, Suchomel says in a statement, “Whether or not to sell books with DRM is a decision publishers need to make. Since there was interest among our clients, we felt IPG could service them better by giving them an option.” Though Suchomel does not mention Amazon explicitly, anti-DRM advocates have argued that DRM keeps users locked to the Kindle store.

Cynthia Sherry, publisher of IPG client Chicago Review Press, says, “I do not believe that DRM prevents piracy, but simply frustrates paying customers and hinders sales. By removing DRM we are offering our customers the flexibility to read their e-books on whatever device they please.”

IPG’s announcement coincides with BookExpo America, the United States’ largest book industry event. Yesterday at the Publishers Launch BEA conference, Macmillan’s Fritz Foy announced that, in addition to removing DRM from all Tor/Forge titles, Macmillan is launching a DRM-free science-fiction digital bookstore.

See also:

“Why I break DRM on e-books”: A publishing exec speaks out 

DRM is crushing indie booksellers online

A kinder, gentler DRM?

Note to publishers: Your addiction to DRM is killing you

Will Hachette be the first big-six publisher to drop DRM on e-books?

The store will sell all of Tor’s DRM-free titles and may also sell DRM-free titles from other publishers, Foy said. Tor tried launching an online bookstore for print titles in 2009, but that initiative didn’t last.

Science fiction authors Cory Doctorow, Charlie Stross and John Scalzi also spoke on the panel. By adding DRM to their e-books, Doctorow said, publishers send the message to readers that “by being foolish enough to buy this book instead of stealing it, you agree that it will only live on a device from which we can remove it at will without notice. Who wrote the design brief, Joseph Stalin?” Most sci-fi fans “ignore the fine print” (and presumably break DRM), Doctorow said: “They understand that publishing empires rise and fall, and all of the big-six will someday be as dead as Byzantium and Sumer. But the book will live on.”

Getting rid of DRM “delivers a longterm boost to the midlist,” Stross said, by reassuring “voracious genre readers” that “it’s safe to buy e-books and that they won’t lose access to them five years down the line.” These readers may read thousands of books over a decade, but “they are no more immune to the elaborate turnover of electronic devices than the rest of us…they’re not going to happily walk away from the thousands of books they bought during that period.”

Scalzi said that when readers have problems with DRM, they turn to the author first. “When something goes wrong with their ebook, when they can’t transfer it from one place to the next, the person who hears about this first is us,” he said. “Authors want to tell stories. We don’t want to be the guy at the other end of the line dealing with technological and purely interface issues. That is not what we were hired to do. We were hired to tell a story.”

Photo courtesy of Flickr / jonny2love

See also:

“Why I break DRM on e-books”: A publishing exec speaks out 

DRM is crushing indie booksellers online

A kinder, gentler DRM?

Note to publishers: Your addiction to DRM is killing you

Will Hachette be the first big-six publisher to drop DRM on e-books?

“The problem is that DRM restricts users from legitimate copying — such as between different e-reading devices,” said Momentum publisher Joel Naoum in a statement. “We feel strongly that Momentum’s goal is to make books as accessible as possible. Dropping these restrictions is in line with that goal.”

Announcements from Momentum and Tor/Forge do not mean that Macmillan plans to drop DRM across the company worldwide. “Momentum is not so much ‘inside’ Pan as it is exiled to a small wood shed somewhere down the very bottom of the backyard,” writes Momentum author John Birmingham in an op-ed in the Brisbane Times. But he notes his titles — like other Momentum titles — are sold worldwide.

“Our authors and readers have been asking for this for a long time,” said Tor/Forge president and publisher Tom Doherty. “They’re a technically sophisticated bunch, and DRM is a constant annoyance to them. It prevents them from using legitimately-purchased e-books in perfectly legal ways, like moving them from one kind of e-reader to another.” (As a publishing executive wrote on paidContent this morning, that is why he breaks DRM as a regular part of his e-reading experience.)

Doherty notes that Tor’s DRM-free titles will be available from all the retailers that already sell Tor/Forge books and “the company expects to begin selling titles through retailers that sell only DRM-free books.” That could include, for example, independent e-booksellers like Emily Books, whose Ruth Curry has argued that DRM’s prohibitive costs are “crushing indie booksellers online.”

Tor/Forge is an imprint of Tom Doherty Associates, which is a subsidiary of Macmillan. (Thanks Tim!) One should not necessarily infer, from the changes at Tor, that Macmillan is close to dropping DRM across all of its imprints. This decision could be related to competition within the genre (sci-fi/fantasy publishers Baen and Angry Robot are also DRM-free) or to Doherty’s specific role at Macmillan.

Presumably, though, the change did not happen without some support from the top. (Yes, there was support from CEO John Sargent, Charlie Stross reports.) It also offers a possible model for how other publishers might drop DRM — in bits and pieces or by imprint, rather than all at once — though that could be problematic in some ways. (How do you decide which books go first? Is it fair to readers?)

Note that Mike Shatzkin wrote today, “I heard a rumor from a very reliable source that two of the Big Six are considering going to DRM-free very soon. The rumor is from the UK side, but it is hard to see a global company doing this in a market silo. Another industry listener I know was hearing similar rumors from different sources.”

Maja Thomas, VP of digital for Hachette, recently described DRM as “a speedbump” that “doesn’t stop anyone from pirating.”

Photo courtesy of Flickr user jonny2love

Hunt polled readers on his website, Facebook and Twitter pages. 71 percent of the respondents were reading e-books–mostly on their Kindles and laptops. Not surprisingly, the most common place for buying e-books was the Kindle store (54 percent)–but 39 percent of respondents buy e-books directly from the publisher, and 25 percent buy them directly from the author. (Respondents could select more than one response.)

Nineteen percent of respondents were reading e-books illegally by downloading them from BitTorrent or other file-sharing services.

Keep in mind that most of the 833 respondents to this survey were Stephen Hunt fans–sci-fi/fantasy readers, a tech-savvy bunch. Science fiction is one of the most popular e-book genres. But the fact that many of these readers are buying e-books directly from publishers and authors is good news. We asked Hunt which sites respondents were buying from directly, and he mentioned Baen, a small independent sci-fi/fantasy publisher located in Riverdale, New York. “Baen really led the way on this back when e-books meant web browsers and the Rocket Reader,” he said, “so hats off to them.” One of Baen’s creative selling tactics has been to serialize e-books, releasing them to subscribers in segments prior to their official publication.

Some larger sci-fi publishers are taking cues from publishers like Baen. Tor/Forge, an imprint of Macmillan, recently launched the Tor Store on iBooks, and it publishes short fiction for free on its website.