DRM it is. Readium LCP support is now live in LemonInk

DRM is no good. This is something we've been saying for years, and it's why LemonInk with its watermarking solution exists. Condemning your readers to a single, usually very poorly designed reading app is just not right. Treating customers like criminals is exactly what makes them turn to piracy. And it's terrible for sellers too: expensive, hard to maintain and a huge burden for their support teams.

But today we're adding DRM support to LemonInk.

Truth is, there have always been cases where DRM was a better fit than watermarking. When you give a watermarked ebook to a customer, you have no way to take it back. This takes business models like lending and subscriptions off the table. And there are titles (textbooks mostly) that are so expensive and have such small runs that stricter control is simply necessary to make them viable as electronic publications.

Still, that was never enough for us. We always knew we couldn't offer anything actually good to those businesses. Adobe DRM was always a terrible experience for everyone involved. Developing something custom would require an ecosystem of reading apps for all platforms and, as we've seen from other products, they would be mediocre at best. And to achieve some level of support on e-readers we'd need to involve their manufacturers, which is a whole other can of worms.

So how did we end up adding DRM to LemonInk after all?

The answer is Readium LCP. It's an open DRM standard developed by EDRLab, and it's actually good. It already works on a wide range of reading apps and e-readers, and more are being added all the time. You get the protection you need and your readers get the freedom to read in an app or on a device they like. And the apps are really good too!

We've prepared a dedicated page on our website explaining how LCP works and which apps and devices we recommend. Have a look at it if you're interested in the details of this solution.

This new feature suddenly opens up completely new business models on LemonInk. For starters, you can now lend your ebooks for a limited time. You could even do this in parallel with regular watermarked sales: offer a forever copy for the full price or a limited-time copy at a significant discount. See what this does to your sales!

One model we're particularly excited about is subscription (or streaming). With the underpinnings now in place, we'll soon be able to offer a dedicated feature that handles all the technical aspects of delivering content in a subscription model. Plug it into your billing system and you're good to go. We're aiming to launch this in early 2027, but we're already looking for beta testers that we may be able to onboard sooner. If you're interested, drop us a line at hello@lemonink.co.

For the time being, Readium LCP is in an invite-only beta. We're rolling it out gradually and aiming for general availability this autumn. If you'd like to start sooner, please reach out to us at hello@lemonink.co as well.