Readium LCP is a digital rights management solution (a DRM) that supports different publication formats (ebooks, audiobooks, and PDF) and business models (library lending, bookstore sales, and subscriptions). It provides efficient protection to publishers while remaining minimally intrusive for end users. It does not require a third-party account, allows sharing an ebook with close friends and maintains the accessibility of protected publications, as imposed by the EU Accessibility Directive.
LCP is an ISO international standard under the reference ISO IEC DIS 23078-2. EDRLab, its worldwide technology operator, maintains its secrets and organizes the certification of LCP-compliant reading applications and distribution platforms.
Because of the technology’s distributed nature, one cannot automatically obtain data about the number of titles accessible through LCP, in which countries these titles are available, which languages are covered, or the total number of LCP licenses generated during the last 12 months. This is a concern, as establishing a quantitative and geographic view of the adoption of LCP is key information for ebook distributors and providers of reading solutions when they have to decide on the opportunity to adopt LCP.
We launched a survey and talked with many LCP implementers to gather such data. Since it was the first time we did this exercise, the data was still incomplete, and we had to make some extrapolations. We will consolidate this information in the coming years. If you are generating LCP licenses, please complete our LCP adoption survey. If you are developing an LCP-compliant reading application or device, contact us using our contact form.
October 2024 adoption checkpoint
54 LCP license servers have been deployed so far, 11 of which responded to our request for data. The 11 respondents distribute over 6 million LCP-protected ebooks in 84 countries and 51 languages, and they generated 2 million licenses during the last twelve months. Doing some extrapolation based on our knowledge of LCP providers, we estimate that at least 12 million titles are available and more than 10 million licenses are generated per year.
If we list LCP-compliant applications and devices, we obtain today:
- 92 mobile applications (iOS and Android apps being considered separately)
- 13 desktop applications (Thorium Reader and its forks, FBReader, Vivlio)
- 21 e-ink devices from 5 brands (tolino, Pocketbook, Vivlio, inkBook, Bookeen).
- 1 Braille device (Braillesense from Selvas).
New applications are made LCP-compliant every month.
Publishers have given their green light to LCP
Publishers do not directly choose the DRM to protect their books and audiobooks: ebook distributors and sometimes booksellers choose and install one or two DRMs in their distribution workflows. However, publishers have protection requirements that can be rather precise. The biggest publishers audit distributors’ technical platforms and validate (or not) their choices.
Distributors like De Marque (Canada), Gardners Books (UK) and eKitabu (Africa), booksellers like tolino (Germany) and Bokus (Sweden), review services like NetGalley (USA, UK, France, Germany, Japan), textbooks distribution services like the PNLD project in Brazil, and public libraries like the National Library of Finland, the Shanghai Library and the Honk Kong Library provide LCP-protected ebooks and audiobooks from multiple publishers.
Consequently, all ebooks from the “Big Five” publishers are protected by LCP in different markets. In some countries like France, all publishers have explicitly adopted LCP as the DRM of choice for protecting their ebooks. Some publishers, like Madrigall in France, the University of Chicago Press in the USA and Beletrina in Slovenia, operate selling websites and have chosen to protect their ebooks with LCP only.
Countries where LCP is available, and associated languages
From our survey, LCP-protected publications are currently available in 84 countries. A map is more straightforward than a list …
It is fascinating to list the languages in which LCP-protected publications are available: Italian, English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Turkish, Russian, Chinese, Romanian, Arabic, Indonesian, Croatian, Dutch, Bulgarian, Polish, Greek, Albanian, Japanese, Catalan, Serbian, Hindi, Vietnamese, Slovak, Swedish, Latin, Korean, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Afrikaans, Finnish, Thai, Hebrew, Welsh, Telugu, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Bosnian, Tamil, Latvian, Esperanto, Norwegian, Persian, Estonian, Danish, Slovenian, Malayalam, Marathi, German, Montenegrin, Kaikavian.
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