One of our core beliefs at O’Reilly is that digital rights management (DRM) is a bad idea. We have a very simple theory: Trust your customers to do the right thing and you’ll earn their business. That’s why when you buy ebooks from oreilly.com, or through one of our retail partners, you’ll never be handcuffed by the restrictions of DRM.
This isn’t anything new at O’Reilly. It’s how we’ve sold our ebooks from day one. Plenty of publishers were skeptical of our approach but we’re thrilled to see more and more of them adopting it. In just the past few weeks Macmillan subsidiary Tor as well as independent publisher Sourcebooks announced new DRM-free product plans.
We agree with Charlie Stross’ point that publishers who insist on using DRM have handed “Amazon a stick with which to beat them harder.” That’s why we’re excited to help celebrate International Day Against DRM with a special discount on all our ebooks and videos. For today only (5/4/12), use the code DRMFREE to save 50% on our entire catalog.
Matt Lee, campaign manager at Defective by Design and one of the organizers of Day Against DRM, explains why DRM is detrimental to ebooks:
“DRM is a growing problem in the area of ebooks, where people have had their books restricted so they can’t freely loan, re-sell or donate them, read them without being tracked, or move them to a new device without re-purchasing all of them. They’ve even had their ebooks deleted by companies without their permission.”
We appreciate your help in making Day Against DRM a success. If you agree with our DRM-free philosophy we hope you’ll take the time to tell other publishers and retailers to abandon DRM as well. A DRM-free world is one where retailers will find it much harder to create a monopolistic position that locks you into their device or format. We long for the day when the book publishing industry takes the same important step the music world did by abandoning DRM.
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