TOR and Forge books have now completely shed their ebook encryption on everything they sell. This provides customers with the ability to freely transfer the books to any of their devices without having to use Adobe Digital Editions or other methods. This is the first major publishing company to completely absolve any kind of anti-piracy measures and time will tell if it was a savvy move.
Author John Scalzi has had a positive experience with the digital rights management not being prevalent in his books. In a recent blog post he said that “For those authors apprehensive about what having a DRM-free eBook out there means for sales and/or unauthorized copying, I’ll note that my anecdotal experience having Redshirts go out DRM-free has been been very positive. First, the ebook sales of Redshirts, on a week to week basis, have been substantially higher than they were for any of my previous books (for example, first week it sold roughly two and a half times as many as Fuzzy Nation did in ebook, and that book did fine ebook business its first week). Second, we’re not seeing any particular increase of instances of the book being shared in violation of copyright , i.e., dropping DRM hasn’t suddenly made it more available in the dark and stinky portions of the Internet than other (previously DRM’d) books of mine.”
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
