The publishing industry is critically transitioning from old-style methods to new approaches covering online solutions and digital publishing fields. In this transition, technology has helped the whole process to be implemented in a trusted and reliable way. However, there are many concerns regarding uploading valuable content to an online platform, and many questions have been raised. Questions such as the security of uploaded valuable content and how they are protected. How content owners and distributors can manage and protect their digital assets from piracy? Let’s see some examples.

Just imagine that you own (or maybe you own) a company that provides streaming video and audio services for its clients. How can you make sure your clients don’t share their subscribed content and videos with others? Conversely, how can you prevent unsubscribed people from accessing your content?

Another example is those publishers who publish and sell their books in online bookstores. Without digital rights management and policy, how can they be confident about their copyrights or privacy?

These concerns come from two parties: the content owners from one side and those about to distribute those contents.

But as we promised earlier, the technology was invented to answer the questions and came to facilitate the whole process. If you ask how? Here is more.

What are Digital Rights Management (DRM)?

Today we are faced with many teasers trying to make us accept that we need to care about our environment by shifting from printed books to ebooks. But when we are convinced that ebooks are more accessible than printed books, a big question appears!

How could online content be protected? In other words, how can a publisher trust an online platform to act as an online shop without letting the ebooks be downloaded illegally?

Here we can talk about a kind of management purposed to protect digital content from illegal access.

Called DRM, “Digital rights management is the management of legal access to digital content. DRM technologies govern the use, modification, and distribution of copyrighted works (such as software and multimedia content) and systems that enforce these policies within devices.”

So, DRM seems to be the best approach for digital assets to be protected systematically. They do this in several ways, which we will discuss in the next part.

How do Digital Rights Management systems protect publishers’ ebooks?

Digital rights management does its protective job in many ways. Here are some techniques that DRM uses:

• Prevent users from saving, manipulating, and sharing content.
• Prevent users from creating screenshots or screen grabs of the content.
• Set an expiry date on content, after which the user can no longer access it. This could also be done by limiting a user’s number of uses.
• Lock access only to specific IP addresses, locations, or devices. This means that if your media is only available to certain countries, it will not be accessible to people in other countries.

DRM takes care of the copyright for any digital content through these ways. By applying this technology, any content owner can be assured that their digital asset will be secured regarding the copying and illegal use of the content.

Can publishers trust Digital Rights Management systems?

In previous parts, we discussed that nowadays, DRM is widely used by all active companies that own digital assets. This includes professional bookstores and platforms containing interactive books that enable the reader to purchase and download their desired book and read them on their device. However, the sensitivity of content protection for such platforms is a matter of issue. Therefore, many professional bookstores like KNiTO are searching for a DRM that can help safeguard their valuable ebooks. Hence, trusting this technology can secure them from all concerns surrounding the e-publishing industry.

Which DRM does KNiTO use?

KNiTO, offered by the Canadian company, Notion wave, is a bookstore for interactive educational content. In parallel, At KNiTO, you can publish your book under different licenses. A world-class Rights Protection as a DRM system ensures the safety of owners’ copyrights, especially your epub content worldwide.

The DRM used in KNiTO, called Readium, is a technology developed especially for the publishing industry. It is an interoperable and distributed DRM solution that defines a simple passphrase-based authentication method. Readium completely fulfills the requirements of public libraries, booksellers, and publishers regarding content protection and is created and promoted by Readium members and managed by EDRLab.

Readium meets GDPR compliance requirements. This makes it easier for indie authors and publishers to reach a worldwide audience. In addition, the app is built using best-standard content encryption. Specifically, the encryption includes AES 256 bits encryption for content and content keys and SHA-256 for user passphrases.

Conclusion

Suppose you are a professional publisher and, even more, a digital content owner and are concerned about making your content visible without any piracy. In that case, we invite you to visit our online bookstore, KNiTO, a DRM-protected platform for epub3 books to be sold and read. Here is a place where your interactive books could safely reach your audience. Contact KNiTO today if you need more details on our DRM.