Following similar moves from Holtzbrinck, Bonnier Germany, dtv, Hoffman & Campe, Luebbe and others, Random House Germany has joined the trend and announced it will drop hard DRM in favor of digital watermarking (or “soft DRM”) as of October 1. In the announcement, ceo Frank Sambeth explained: “Abandoning harsh DRM facilitates readers and distributors dealing with e-book files, increases customer satisfaction and reduces complexity. At the same time traders and platforms can be supplied, which offer no hard DRM. With the conversion to soft DRM we join also an ever-widening industry consensus.” Germany is the first major ebook market to drop DRM on […]
