When you buy a digital book, what exactly are you buying? The answer might blow your mind: nothing. You’re not buying a book at all. You’re licensing it, and with that license comes stipulations.

In this episode, I talk about digital rights management (DRM), and what Amazon, and other digital media services, giveth and taketh away. We’ll talk about the ups and downs for readers as well as the pros of cons for authors puzzling over whether to apply DRM to their own books.

Welcome to the Hybrid Pub Scout podcast,

helping you navigate the publishing landscape. I'm Em

Einolander, and I explore resources and services, so

authors can be successful and safe as they pursue publishing.

Years and years ago, in the early days of this podcast, my

former co-host, Corinne, and I had a pretty good time roasting

some tech bro who talked about creating a Netflix for books. We

said what a lot of our salty publishing colleagues said,

"Congratulations, you just reinvented the library. But I've

been thinking about that little incident lately in connection

with the way we interact with digital media, and the way that

digital media and the companies that purvey it tends to treat us

in return, because, yeah, in a lot of ways, my guy was talking

about a library, but there's something else that sounds very

familiar in that description. Maybe now it's just a little

more blatant than it was back in 2018 Netflix for books already

exists, and it existed back when he first said it too. And it's

not your local library, it's your personal digital library.

In its most typical form, one that is affiliated with Amazon

or Kobo, or any of the other ebook services that commonly

come to mind. A one to one comparison of ebook ownership to

print book ownership is a false equivalency. When I say this,

I'm talking about an individual reader, i.e. you and me, owning

an ebook versus a print book. You know that beloved object

capable of taking up too much space in your carry-on bag

versus the thing you access on your phone or e-reader. The most

immediate difference is that there is no quick and easy way

to duplicate the print book as a reader. Say your friend Bernice

wants to borrow your print copy of Enshitification by Cory

Doctorow because she wants to know why all her favorite social

media platforms suck so bad now when you lend your print copy to

Bernice, you aren't duplicating a copy for her to take home

while the original stays on your shelf. To paraphrase a

decapitated French woman, you can't have your book and lend it

to. When you lend it to Bernice, you no longer have it.

Eventually, if you're lucky, Bernice may give the book back

to you, but now she doesn't have it, and you do, and yes,

pedants, you can technically duplicate a book by scanning and

printing every single page of it, and I don't know, stapling

it together, binding it like those old paper readers Grampy M

had back in college, that's a pretty big time and resource

commitment, though. With all the money you spend on paper and

hours you'll spend in front of a scanner, you might as well just

buy a book. When you have an ebook you want to share, it's a

completely different situation. If you own an ebook and are free

to do whatever you want with it, you likely have it in the form

of an epub file that file type is the generic version of an

ebook. You can save it to multiple devices or upload it to

basically any distribution platform if you're an author,

but if you want to lend out the epub file you own, it's not a

situation where a single file moves away from you, and to your

friend, it would feel silly to just give Bernice your only EPUB

file. You drag it and drop it into an email or Google Drive,

or whatever, or put it on a thumb drive if you're feeling

really sassy. And then there's automatically a duplicate that

gets left behind, and you keep it. You have your ebook and lend

it too, so that leads to a natural concern for the people

selling the books, that using that same process you can just

post the book on a pirate site, where everyone can download

endless copies for themselves. If that happens, the publishing

company gets no money, and the author gets no money. Anthropic,

though, they get lots of money, certainly more money than

they're paying out in settlements. But do you see the

difference? Your public library has to buy a fixed number of

ebooks and audiobooks from the publisher, then only loan out

one copy to one person at a time, they're not duplicating

the book and giving out a brand new copy every time someone

borrows it, the way you might. It works the same way as it

would if you were lending your print book to Bernice, except

for your public library. The ebook costs about $50 and

sometimes they're only allowed. To lend it out a fixed number of

times before they have to pay additional fees. That's because

when the library buys the book, they do not own it, they're just

licensing it. And through digital rights management, aka

DRM, the publisher can put way more restrictions on it than

they would on a print book. And DRM doesn't just apply to

libraries in many cases. It also applies to you. DRM, or digital

rights management, is a type of lock. Companies put them on

anything that contains some sort of intellectual property, so it

can't be endlessly copied, shared, or modified. In the case

of ebooks and audiobooks, the lock looks like a special file

type that can only be used on particular platforms, and this

is where we get to questions of ownership. Because when you buy

a book in print or an audio book on a CD, that's yours now, you

can keep it forever, short of some Amazon repo man coming in

and ripping it off of your bookshelf, there's no takesy

backsies. Although I wouldn't be surprised if that idea has been

floated. Be kind, let your amazon.com repo driver use your

bathroom when they steal your books back, so they don't have

to go in their empty water bottle anyway. Cloud-based

ebooks and audiobooks are a different story if an author

applies DRM to the book, Amazon applies a special file type that

used to be AZWs, now they're shifting to something called

KFXs, which they are trying to make unbreakable, and that's

because with the right software and some ingenuity, you often

can break the DRM and convert your ebook to that generic EPUB

form that you can do whatever you want with. Now, to be clear,

and to probably be unreasonably fair to Amazon, they're not the

only ones who do this. It's not just a book thing, it's not just

an Amazon thing - Kobo, Nook, Google - they all use Adobe

Digital Editions DRM, but it does conform to that general

trend where we basically own nothing anymore. Everything is

licenses and subscriptions, and of course, Amazon still has the

most market share for anything book-related, and the audacity

to match. If there's one thing we know about them, it's that

their goal posts are always shifting. You used to be able to

lend people your ebooks in the same way people lend a print

book. You could send it to your friend for two weeks, only they

could access it, and then it went back into your library, but

they unfortunately discontinued that in 2022 Until about a year

ago, Amazon allowed you to download your ebooks onto a

separate disk with its download and transfer via USB function.

When I found out that they were discontinuing that function, I

rushed to download as many books as I could, but I got my first

Kindle in 2010 and I kind of had to pick and choose out of the

hundreds of books I had, and when I downloaded them, they

were all in the AZW file type, meaning if I ever did transfer

them onto a device, it would have to be one of theirs. All

the same, the option did exist to back up your books in case

somehow they got removed by Amazon or revised by the

publisher, and that's why I'm emphasizing that your ebook

library, which is made up of books you have paid for or think

you have paid for, is the actual Netflix for books. Think about

it. Streaming services can take down the shows you like, even if

they still own the rights. They can make it so nobody can watch

certain shows they like, unless the malevolent media overlords

decide to take pity, which they often don't. With Kindle, there

was a big to-do back in 2009 1000 years ago, where the book

1984 was removed from people's Kindles, which felt pretty on

the nose, if you can believe it. It ended up being a copyright

violation issue, which is a lot less exciting than a conspiracy,

but the effect is the same regardless. And just because

removals are often due to rights issues doesn't mean censorship

does not or will not affect the books people have on their

Kindles or other devices. The people in companies you bought

that book from can take it down for any reason. Authors get

their accounts suspended constantly without knowing why,

and as censorship laws are expanding all over the world,

tech companies love to comply in advance because that just makes

an opportunity to sell you something to replace the thing

they took away from you. And as of may 20, 2026 Amazon

discontinued support for Kindles released before 2012 Users can

still read books they've already downloaded, and they can get

access to their books through the mobile app or the cloud

reader, but after the deadline, no more downloads to their

devices are possible, which means. Now, according to Amazon,

the people who still use their pre 2012 Kindles make up 3% of

their current users, and that doesn't sound like a lot, but

let's say there are 1 million Kindle users, and all the

spitballing I've seen claims there's a lot more than that,

but even it's, it's just 1 million, that's still 30,000

people's e-readers getting bricked, even though they were

working just fine. You've probably heard of planned

obsolescence, where your devices are designed to fall apart after

a certain number of years, so you have to replace it with

whatever the latest update is, and it's not quite the same

thing that's happening here, a lot of these Kindles work just

fine. The vague answer Amazon gave for doing this is that

technology has come a long way after 14 years, but an e-reader

isn't an iPhone. It's not that complicated, doesn't need to run

more and more complicated software, it just needs to be

able to download ebook files from a website and display them

to the reader. As one of my sources pointed out, this isn't

planned obsolescence. This is forced obsolescence. Is this a

normal thing for a tech company to do? Sure, older versions of

different devices lose support all the time, but just because

it's normal doesn't mean it isn't wasteful or it doesn't put

financial pressure on people who enjoy their devices and don't

have hundreds of dollars to spend on a replacement, because

people are famously dripping in disposable income right now. But

don't worry, Amazon is offering 20% off new devices and some

ebook credits, but only if you buy a new one sometime this

June, but you know these new Kindles are even better than the

old ones, because they have lock screen ads, which everybody

desperately wants, and that work really well for authors, except

not really. This all goes further than just things Amazon

can take away from you. It's about what they can force onto

you too. Some of you might raise an eyebrow when I talk about

removing DRM from books, and I get it, because why else would

someone want to do that if not to pirate the book? Is there a

non-insidious reason to avoid or remove DRM as a reader, I'd

argue that removing DRM isn't just for pirates, especially if

you're trying to extract yourself from the Amazon or

other companies' ecosystem. Owning your own book means you

can put them onto any device you want, so if you decide to move

on somewhere else because of ethical issues, which I'm sure

we all understand, you can without losing everything in

your library as a reader. Removing DRM means you can take

that EPUB file on any device you want and save it to your hard

drive to make sure you can access it offline. Then it can't

be randomly taken from you or made super difficult to access

when your e-reader is bricked, or act as another anchor to a

company we all kind of hate. The point is, if you do remove DRM,

there are ways not to be a dick about it. And I get it from the

writer-publisher side. For a long time, as an author myself,

and someone who works with a lot of authors. I thought, why on

earth wouldn't you use DRM when you load your book up to KDP?

All it takes is checking a box to enable it. To me, if a book

wasn't protected, people could just steal it and throw it

around the internet like confetti. At the time, my

thought was that DRM let authors control distribution. Now I'm

more likely to say yes, but it lets authors control it, but it

especially allows sales platforms to control it. When I

first posted my own books, I enabled DRM, but I've also

distributed DRM-free ePubs to my mailing lists and ARC team. The

DRM-free files of my books are out there, and who knows how

often they've been shared. So, as an experiment, I have now

removed DRM protection from my first book. It came out a couple

years ago, and I haven't been putting in my marketing due

diligence - do as I say, not as I do. So, I doubt I'll get the

data I need to see whether it's been effective, but at least I'm

hopefully making things easier for some readers, especially if

there is some big censorship sweep that catches it in its

net. DRM free books give readers freedom, but in many ways it can

leave you vulnerable to having your book pirated. It just can.

Removing DRM is an act of trust, and it might be one you're not

willing to take, which is fine if you're on the fence. I'd ask

you to look at what you want your book to do. What purpose do

you want it to serve out in the world? Do you want it to be a

marketing tool to get people to read your other books? Maybe

take DRM off one and. See what happens, like I am. Do you just

care about getting your message out? Unlock that sucker. But do

you depend on your book sales for financial security? That's

when you've either got to stick to what you know or take a

chance. Maybe it's a utopian thought, but I'd like to live in

a world where readers act in good faith, and writers don't

have to claw for every cent they can possibly get. I'd like it to

be a world where authors can sell their books directly to

readers as the norm. I'd love it if there wasn't a glut of

scammers churning out slop to take advantage of people

desperate for any escape hatch from engaging with the world as

it is right now, and I'd love it if more people would engage with

the world as it is right now, but that's a different topic.

But I'd love it if artists weren't constantly terrified all

their work would be stolen and devalued. But for us to get any

closer to that vision, authors would have to do some trust

falls in the midst of one of the all-time griftiest periods in

our history. I can't blame people for hesitating to do

that, but we do have one big consolation: we've still got

print books that we can do whatever we want with. The books

on our shelves are, for now, still ours, and for now we also

have public libraries for the sake of having something that

can't be taken away or disappear in the flick of a switch or the

stroke of a legislator's pen, let's hold on to those things as

best we can. Check out the show notes and my website,

hybridpubscout.com for research links, related materials and

book recommendations through mybookshop.org shop. If you have

thoughts on this topic or other ones you'd like me to talk

about, you can email me at [email protected] Find me

on LinkedIn as M Einolander or follow me on blue sky at Emily I

know, and that's where I mostly complain, so be warned. Thanks

for listening, and go read a book for all our sakes.