[Ed.: Read and comment on the unabridged version of this interview]
Jon Bruner: On all your titles you've dropped digital-rights management (DRM), which limits file sharing and copying. Aren't you worried about piracy?
Tim O'Reilly: No. And so what? Let's say my goal is to sell 10,000 copies of something. And let's say that if by putting DRM in it I sell 10,000 copies and I make my money, and if by having no DRM 100,000 copies go into circulation and I still sell 10,000 copies. Which of those is the better outcome? I think having 100,000 in circulation and selling 10,000 is way better than having just the 10,000 that are paid for and nobody else benefits.
People who don't pay you generally wouldn't have paid you anyway. We're delighted when people who can't afford our books don't pay us for them, if they go out and do something useful with that information.
I think having faith in that basic logic of the market is important. Besides, DRM interferes with the user experience. It makes it much harder to have people adopt your product.
JB: What about a much bigger publisher? Suppose Amazon dropped rights management?
TO: Amazon is effectively doing that now with the Kindle. It would be trivial for me to give my Kindle account credentials to my family and friends and have everything I buy on Kindle sent to every one of them.
JB: That's small scale. We're talking tens of thousands of pirated copies floating around if Amazon dropped rights management.
TO: I just think the whole logic of DRM is flawed. There's a bakery in Berkeley that every day dumps a lot of fresh bread into a dumpster behind the store. And there's a bunch of people who get their bread there. I guarantee you that there are a lot more people who, even if you told them they could, would not do that. A lot of sources of free content are like going rooting through the dumpster.
JB: E-book sales account for a quarter of your revenues, up 42% in the last year. Did you need a strong print brand to do that?
TO: We could absolutely have emerged online without a strong print brand. Heck, we emerged in print without a strong print brand.
JB: Borders just declared bankruptcy, and
TO: Not exactly. I think we're seeing a transformation of the marketplace. The biggest challenge is not the death of print; it's the question of how books will change. Take the map: The print map has largely gone away, and online mapping has become the norm. In the process, what we expect from maps has changed: They include directions, nearest gas stations, nearby merchants. The book's format will change, sure, but so will the very form.
JB: You're among the top 200 Twitterers, with 1.5 million followers, behind some teen heartthrobs.
TO: No credit to me. I was on Twitter's suggested-user list for a long time.
JB: But you've kept those followers.
TO: Yeah, I try to give good content. I basically just share things that I find interesting.
