NA: E-books have been criticized by the media for their lackluster market performance. What's the problem?
JA: E-books have received a lot of criticism from the media because criticism sells newspapers. The best news stories about e-books are from journalists who either use e-books or have taken the time to try one. The fact is that the e-book market is young and growing. Go to BN.com and Amazon.com, and look at the Top 10 lists for e-books. The consumer e-book market is well on its way.
For Adobe, there are two opportunities. First, the market for our e-book technology outside of the United States is exploding. Second, the market for securing business documents with digital rights management (DRM) is starting to take hold. At Adobe, we view e-books as one vertical of a larger market for rights managed content.
We will continue to grow the traditional e-book market while applying our rights management server tools to a variety of other enterprise opportunities.
NA: Is rights management technology central to Adobe's strategy?
JA: Adobe's network publishing vision is to deliver visually rich, personalized content on any device, anywhere, at any time. Some of this content may be open with no restrictions on usage. More and more of this content, however, will have some restrictions on how it can be used, imposed by the author, publisher, distributor, or some other party. Users of this restricted content have to be able to consume it whenever and wherever they want.
NA: But if Adobe's e-book protection scheme can be compromised by ElcomSoft's Ebook Reader software, what does that say?
JA: No software is 100 percent secure from determined hackers. In the e-book category, all of the major platforms have been compromised. The real threat to publishers is not the cracking of e-books, but scanning of physical books. Most of the more than 7,000 pirated books on the Internet were scanned from a physical copy. Security is an ongoing effort. We're committed to strengthening the security of our products by using sophisticated industry-standard levels of software encryption, and working with the software community, including white hat security experts.
NA: Some experts hold that cracking encryption systems is critical to improving software security—like a kind of scientific peer review process. Would you agree?
JA: Absolutely. While I think most companies would prefer that their security weaknesses were disclosed privately, the reality is that exposing such flaws publicly is a source of notoriety for software engineers. As Adobe is more interested in shipping world-class software products than its pride, we'll take the information however we can get it. We fully support the right of software engineers to speak publicly on whatever topics they choose.
NA: Even Dmitry Sklyarov?
JA: We believe the prosecution of Mr. Sklyarov in this particular case is not conducive to the best interests of any of the parties involved, or the industry. However, we are in complete agreement with the government's decision to prosecute the company, ElcomSoft. The indictment returned in this case clearly reflects the grand jury's agreement with the U.S. government that a criminal prosecution is warranted in this case. We're pleased that Mr. Sklyarov and the United States government were able to negotiate a settlement that resulted in his being freed.
NA: Do you think the current legal climate benefits the market for DRM technologies, or does it have a chilling effect?
JA: In the publishing industry, it has had minimal impact. I don't know any publisher who is holding back from releasing e-books because of the challenges to the DMCA. The use of digital content is becoming more and more pervasive. Much of that content will have restrictions on usage, regardless of whether programs like Adobe Acrobat are protected by the DMCA from illegal circumvention of security measures.
NA: Is the lack of widespread acceptance of DRM architecture an impediment to more rapid expansion of the market for e-books?
JA: Who said the e-book market isn't expanding rapidly? The market for rights-managed content is tripling, even quadrupling every year. The best DRM in the world has little to do with technology. The best DRM has three components: widely available content that is reasonably priced and is easy to use. If there isn't anything good to read, well, guess what? No one is going to buy. Making that content easy to use is where Adobe and the Network Publishing vision come in. With every release of our DRM products, it gets easier and easier to use rights-managed content.
