Vitrium Systems

After staying static for many decades and consisting mainly of annoying magazine blow-in cards and junk mail, direct marketing’s taken a whirlwind ride through the last 15 years as the Internet changes the way we all view media.

While some markets still rely heavily on paper means of reaching sales leads, the costs associated with printing, mailing, and data entry—especially in a down economy—are too much for many companies to bear. That, and restrictions set by the Federal Trade Commission’s CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 have businesses rebuilding their marketing efforts by using PDF documents.

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A decade ago, Adobe and future merger partner Glassbook published Stephen King’s Riding the Bullet, a 16,000-word short story, as the first major eBook. Its digital rights management (DRM) failed as hackers hacked, King got mad, Amazon ended up giving it away. The eBook—and DRM—suffered a brutally black eye.

About the same time, iTunes rose and record labels struggled to rein in MP3 music pirates, DRM as a technology got beat up badly, caught in a riptide between freethinking music consumers and bottom-line-oriented copyright owners.

Adobe, somewhat quietly, released a product called Policy Server (currently part of the LiveCycle Enterprise Suite), and later, Digital Editions, to rights-manage documents and eBooks. Even it wasn’t without hitches, as arguments over text-to-speech features erupted between publishers—who reap revenue from audio books—and advocates for visually impaired readers.

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