TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Mathew Ingram:

As we’ve described before, Apple and Amazon come at the e-book market from different perspectives: Apple sees books as just another form of content that it can use to sell iPads and other devices, whereas Amazon sees devices like the Kindle and the Kindle Fire as ways it can lock people into its content ecosystem and sell them more books, movies and so on. But both are dependent on having users locked into their products, and so they make it as difficult as possible to move from one to the other.

While that is accurate for Amazon, I’m not sure it is for Apple. Apple my benefit from lock-in, but from their perspective, DRM-ed content may hurt them more than it helps by locking customers to their platform. If DRM-free content in compatible file formats becomes an expectation, then selling only protected content makes the platform less attractive, and thus could lead to lower device sales—which is their primary business.

Remember, Apple pushed music labels aggressively to sell DRM-free music on the iTunes Store. Apple didn’t need to do so, but they did. Music was traditionally sold in an unprotected format and Amazon’s MP3 Store, which sold DRM-free MP3 files, was doing well, so the expectation for DRM-free music was growing. So Apple began selling DRM-free files, too, something I suspect they would have preferred to do even earlier.

Ingram’s argument is that Apple depends on protected content to lock customers to their platform, but I don’t think that’s how Apple sees it. I think Apple wants to make their platform as attractive to customers as possible, so they want to stay on the platform. If that means DRM-free content, great; but if labels, studios and publishers won’t sell music, movies or books without wrapping it in DRM, well, alright, as long as the user experience is good enough. User experience is the primary consideration, because that’s what drives sales of new devices, which is what they want to do. Their content stores exist to sell more devices.

Note that this may mean it will be a long time until Apple sells DRM-free books. Unless customers begin demanding it, or it becomes an expectation because others in the market are selling unprotected books, it’s difficult for Apple to pressure publishers to do so. The norm for the nascent ebook industry is DRM-wrapped books.1 So while what Ingram laments is perfectly accurate, I think it’s a slightly less dire situation than he describes. Amazon certainly has a direct interest in locking down content, but Apple doesn’t.

1. It’s possible, though, that self-published authors will become more popular and a larger part of the market, and if they tend toward DRM-free books, the market could force large publishers to abandon DRM protection. [↩]