Amazon and DRM

Over at Attendly.com John Birmingham has a provocative article entitled When It Comes To DRM, Amazon Is A Bottom Feeding Hell Beast. That is, to put it mildly, a bit hyperbolic but Birmingham has a serious point. A point that we’ve made here before: DRM is allowing Amazon to establish a virtual monopoly in ebooks.

Unlike many commenting on the situation, Birmingham has some skin in the game. He’s a fiction author who, one would think, has a lot to lose from people copying his books without paying. Indeed, he starts his article with a story of a women who had so enjoyed one of his early books that she photocopied parts of it and gave the copies to her friends. At the time he was not pleased but decided in the end that she probably earned him a couple of new readers. As Tim O’Reilly says, the typical author’s problem is not piracy but obscurity.

Regardless, he’s come to realize that the main effect of DRM is to make Amazon into a monopolist by trapping people in the Kindle ecosystem. Much the same can be said, of course, for Apple iBooks and the Barnes and Noble Nook ecosystems. Still, it is Amazon that everyone worries about. Notice who’s benefiting here. It’s not the authors and it’s not the publishers; it’s Amazon.

It is, then, an absurd irony that the authors and publishers are the ones insisting on DRM. Birmingham, for his part, is having no more of it and is now selling his books without DRM. We can only hope that the publishers will get on board before it’s too late.

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