If you use DRM, I hate you.
Preface: I don't use DRM on my books. Do what you want with it. Pirate it for all I care. If people are reading it, I'm happy.
If you use DRM, I hate you.
DRM is terrible. It needs to die in a fire and never come back. I bought something. Doesn’t that mean I own it and I can do whatever I want (barring distribution/piracy) with it?
Dammit, I just want to read the books I bought on iBooks on my Kindle Fire. THAT IS ALL I WANT.
But no. NOOO. That is not possible. Because Apple makes iBooks an Apple thing. I can only read it on my Mac products. And THEY own the distribution rights of the iBook format of the book. So fellow authors, you don’t own all the rights to your product because of a specific format. Isn’t that wonderful?
Guess what. In this day and age you aren’t buying content. You are buying a format. Be it Apple’s iBooks or DRM infested epub or Amazon’s DRM’d .mobi/.AZW format. You are chaining yourself to someone’s walled garden or ‘special’ format.
So let’s say, for instance, you wanted to read a Amazon book on a different app or in a different format. Good luck. Not gonna happen.
Not unless you, you know, use a DRM cracker, which is ILLEGAL in the United States of America, land of the free and home to the brave. You can’t convert your mobi to epub so you can switch platforms or use a different ereader.
Since when did being a consumer become more like a voluntary prison sentence? By buying something I have become shackled to that format and ecosystem. I want to take a sledgehammer to these walled gardens and see the plants of all the other gardens. No borders. No walls.
I just want to use the content I paid for. In any way I choose.
Is that too much to ask?
If you hate DRM, complain about it, don’t use it, and don’t tolerate it.
Related/Recent Posts
Balon Character Development Spotlight
Since Amethyst Shards is (finally) out, I wanted to talk about Balon Zfnoctewoohi. Balon, Balon, Balon. Balon who is the only member of the Trinity and the One to debut mid-series (excluding Dien who is like an evolution of Hequera). Balon who has only been in five books (half of the series) thus far but has has dominated so throughly thematically and plot-wise since her debut.
Commissioned Art of Cyclone!
As King was drawn by Erika Hollice, the same had to be done with Cyclone. The art drove what I wanted out of this commission was this piece of Cyclone looking awesome that I did many years ago. I wanted Cyclone with his Scythe, cape, and dark in a powerful pose. The whole package! And the whole package includes his helmet. His helmet…well, it’s been an internally contentious point for me since I moved on from LEGO as a primary...