Cory Doctorow on Hachette, DRM, and locking down the books

by Gavin Grant June 20th, 2014

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Cory has a great piece in The Guardian on how Hachette scored an own goal by asking/agreeing to Amazon’s DRMing their ebooks which leaves all those who bought Hachette ebooks tied into their Kindle.

I am no fan of Amazon’s scorched earth policies: they want to relentlessly drive everyone else out of business and convince people (we are individuals! not just customers!) to funnel all their choices through them. I can’t imagine how horrible it would be to have an Amazon phone giving me a buy button on everything. Ack. They are akin to WalMart in their negotiations: every year they go back and ask for higher discounts from suppliers, which, believe me, if pretty painful from a publisher perspective.

We welcome all readers here: those who’ve been reading online for decades and those to whom reading on a screen is a whole new frontier. Many of our readers know how to move ebooks around, convert their books into different formats if needed, and redownload them if they have a new reading device. One of the main reasons Weightless exists is that we wanted to make sure indie publishers have a DRM-free, worldwide reader-friendly option to sell their books. As Amazon gets tougher and tougher on their suppliers, it becomes more obvious how important it is to have options.

Posted on Friday, June 20th, 2014 at 12:30 pm.

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