imageimageI figured that it would be a timesink to get Amazon to stop DRMing The Solomon Scandals. Sure enough, it has been, and the damned DRM edition is still up at Amazon despite my objections and my publisher’s. Amazon’s Kafkaesque e-forms don’t simplify the task.

So much for Jeff Bezo’s claim to Jon Stewart that Amazon is agnostic on DRM. Once again he comes across as two-faced on this issue. “Publishers get to decide whether they want to encrypt the books and put DRM on or not,” he told Stewart.

If you feel you must buy from Amazon rather than elsewhere, get the nonDRMed e-book or the paper edition. Please, boycott Amazon’s DRMed Scandals. Hey, Jeff, I love the way you respect my intellectual property.

A little more background: My publisher couldn’t get Scandals into the Mobipocket store unless we agreed to DRM. Then Amazon used the DRMed edition in the Kindle store. It remained there even after we removed the Mobi edition. Still there. Hello, FTC? Time to stop scaring mom-and-pop book reviewers (wittingly or not) and get the guts to  investigate Amazon for real? No, I’ll not link here to the proprietary-DRMed book but will gladly point federal investigators to it.

Amazon has also bungled the writeup on my book—with, for example, horrible formatting and blurbs from Jim Fallows and Bettina Gregory reproduced three friggin’ times, each—but that’s another story. I know it ain’t so, but it’s almost as if Amazon is trying to sabotage me.

Look, I see many good things about about Amazon and love my Kindle’s text to speech. May Bezos not just be agnostic on DRM, but also work to get publishers to drop it—perhaps substituting social DRM as a compromise! He was clueful enough to do a DRMless MP3 store. Time to work with consenting publishers to do the same for e-books, so they can be read on a variety of devices? Yes, I also hope Jeff will also let the Kindle natively render ePub-standard books.

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3 COMMENTS

  2. David, in your article above:

    If you feel you must buy from Amazon rather than elsewhere, get the nonDRMed e-book

    I clicked on the link (nonDRMed ebook) and got to a page on Amazon.

    If I had not read it here on TeleRead, how would I know that this Amazon page offers a nonDRMed ebook?

    Also, another question:
    This page offers the ebook for $ 5.95. But it links to another page on Amazon, that offers the ebook for $ 4.76.

    What’s going on with these two different prices?

  3. @Betsy: Thanks for illustrating the harm Amazon is doing. Excellent questions! Talk about understandable buyer confusion! Not to mention the people who’ll blame the botched listing on me or Twilight Times Books!

    Here are the facts about the DRMed edition and the authorized one:

    1. No, you can’t tell that one edition is DRMed and the other is not, unless you’ve read mentions in TeleRead or perhaps MobileRead. Amazon is not giving consumers the whole story. Of course, there should be only one digital edition at Amazon–the authorized, nonDRMed one that TTB uploaded. Meanwhile, as noted, I’ve linked in the above post only to the nonDRMed edition. That’s the one with the cover image showing on the Amazon page.

    2. The $4.76 is Amazon’s price for the DRMed edition. I suspect this is a standard discount. But the effect is to drive people to the DRMed book. The authorized edition, as noted, sells for $5.95

    3. Forced DRM was openly going on in the Mobi store, last I knew, and I’m disappointed but not surprised that the MSM hasn’t taken Jeff to task for being so two-faced about DRM. How can he say on The Daily Show that it’s the publisher’s choice when it isn’t?

    Thanks for your interest, and we’ll hope that this mention turns Amazon around, though I’m skeptical.

    David

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