Technology
What is actually running
An indigenous implementation of digital rights management, built by DMI around the current edition of Adobe Content Server — and, for video, around the two DRM systems the browsers and phones already trust.
The document stack
Adobe Content Server was the software Adobe developed to add digital rights management to eBooks, distributed through Adobe Digital Editions and applications built on Adobe's Reader Mobile SDK. DMR is a flexible implementation of that stack at version 6.5, now maintained as ByteBooks Content Server under Wipro.
What that gives a publisher, practically: encryption bound to a reader identity rather than a device; automatic appearance of purchased titles across every authorised reader; support for PDF, EPUB and EPUB 3 with a choice of rendering engine; and timed lending that expires without anyone having to remember it.
The video stack
Video protection does not use ACS and cannot. Browsers and mobile platforms decrypt protected video inside a content decryption module the operating system owns, and there are only two that matter: Google Widevine and Apple FairPlay Streaming. DMR issues licences into both.
Around that sit the controls that encryption alone does not provide — dynamic watermarking, device and geography policy, session tokens, capture blocking and per-viewer analytics — plus an adaptive delivery pipeline so the protection does not cost you playback quality.
Where we are heading
A publishing chain you can audit
We are designing a distributed ledger and blockchain-based publishing chain intended to make rights and supply-chain movement verifiable rather than reconstructed — which is the part of royalty accounting that currently costs everyone the most time.
This work is in development. It is described here as direction, not as a shipped feature.
- Rights as records
- A right, its territory, its term and its holder, recorded once and referenced everywhere.
- Transactions that reconcile
- Fulfilment events that a publisher, a retailer and an author can each verify against the same entry.
- Accessible by design
- Accessibility metadata carried with the title rather than reconstructed downstream.
The group
What sits around the reserve
DMR is one of several units inside Digital Media Initiatives. Most publishers who come for DRM end up using at least one of the others.
DMI
Publisher workflow solutions and EPUB production — DMIEPUB.
ePubNow!
An online publishing system for getting a manuscript to a distributable file.
Antrik
An eBooks retail system, already wired to the reserve.
OnixMaster
The group's ONIX for Books application, with an e-commerce web-store built in.
How it joins the reserveNIMAS Master
Accessible education formats — NIMAS, DAISY, DTB and Braille — from Aligarh.