Macmillan’s Tor/Forge Leads the Way in Offering DRM-Free eBooks Across Major Retailers
Digital rights management, or DRM for short, often faces criticism in the eBook industry. This protection aims to prevent eBooks from being copied without the consent of the rights holders. The downside of this approach: purchasing and using eBooks becomes unnecessarily complicated for customers, and consumers’ rights to their eBooks are restricted. While you can lend physical books to friends and acquaintances at will, doing so with eBooks is not easily possible.
The sci-fi and fantasy publisher Tor/Forge, which is part of the Macmillan publishing house (Georg von Holzbrinck Publishing Group), announced a few days ago that it will sell all eBooks without DRM in the future. eBooks will be DRM-free when sold through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, Google, and almost all other major eBook retailers. Additionally, the company plans to offer eBooks at retailers that generally sell DRM-free.
“It’s clear to us that this is what our customers want,” comments Senior Editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden on the move. “We see it in the successes of SF publishers like Baen and Angry Robot, who have led the way in selling DRM-free. To our knowledge, we are the first part of a Big Six publishing house to take this path, but we highly doubt we’ll be the last.”
The removal of DRM is frequently demanded and predicted by various parties. It’s likely only a matter of time before this becomes a widespread reality. For example, the music and film industries have almost universally switched to digital watermarks. A file is invisibly marked with the buyer’s name, purchase date, etc., allowing it to be traced back to the source in case of illegal online distribution. The Harry Potter eBooks, for instance, are already being sold in this way without DRM.
We can hope that other publishers will jump on the DRM-free bandwagon and simplify the digital reading experience.
