Since Amazon recently removed our right as Kindle eBook owners (or licencees?) to download our books (and subsequently strip the DRM – Digital Rights Management) from them to enable use on other devices; I’ve seen YouTubers talking about switching to the Kobo store for example. As though Kobo is perfect. People talk about how they trust Kobo to not be the evil corporation that Amazon are most associated with being. And while Kobo certainly does seem vastly more focused on customers having a good experience; they still have DRM on their books. People talk happily about being able to easily strip the DRM. And that Kobo even tells you how to do it themselves. That’s a lot better than Amazon as well, of course. But we shouldn’t continue to accept this as normal.
There’s absolutely no reason why all paid eBooks can’t be sold entirely DRM free tomorrow (or maybe in a month. It might take a while to make the switch. But you get the idea). We fought for and won DRM free iTunes music 16 years ago! Even in the book world, we have Libro.fm, the fantastic audiobook service (that I use and recommend). It provides DRM free audiobooks that you can download, back up, and play on any media player on any device. They also have an excellent app which has streaming, and cloud sync of your place. I tend to back up books, but then listen via the app. It’s awesome. As a communist in a miserable capitalist world where pretty much all corporations exist to fleece you; it’s shocking to me that I found even a single company that I’d recommend this highly. Stop giving Amazon (and then Google) money for audiobooks; as I was before I found out about Libro.fm. Before I get accused of being sponsored, I’m a communist. I hate sponsorships. So no.
It’s pretty bewildering that audiobooks are DRM free, but eBooks mostly aren’t. I would have thought the book industry would be more protective of audiobooks than eBooks because of their increasing popularity and their investments in the production of the audiobooks, the narrators and so on. There are two reasons I can think of why the publishing industry would do it this way round. Either they would be fine with DRM-free eBooks, but no one really complains vocally (because they’re quiet and polite bookworms), and therefore they haven’t realised there’s demand for it. Or they’re worried about how easily eBooks (which are small files) could be shared around. Compared to audiobooks, which are relatively large files and so people will be less willing to make the effort to steal them? I think the first option I’ve arbitrarily given myself to pick from is clearly more plausible. I mean I don’t know if that second argument holds water at all given the speed and reliability of our 2025 internet, and the affordability of storage as well.
DRM is definitely a big problem in our lives in various fields. Gaming is a big one. I’m not exactly sure how that gets solved under capitalism, because I do think that if gaming publishers did offer DRM-free, I’m not confident that the majority of gamers would keep paying. I honestly don’t think the gesture of respect would be reciprocated by enough. Although I hope I’m proven wrong on that. I’m sure there are many gaming industry experts (on the left) out there who can speak to this better than me. But certainly we can continue to eliminate it from more places very easily, and books are one of the easiest. I do think that the publishing industry could be easily pushed to do it with a relatively small co-ordinated campaign. Libro.fm shows that it can definitely be done.
Hopefully pretty soon, the only place where DRM for books exists will be with digital borrowing from libraries; where it actually makes total sense.
