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As I understand it, pretty much, yeah: anyone who wants to can lock their book in Amazon DRM and sell it through the Amazon store to an Amazon-controlled device. I sure wouldn't do it ... but there's worse. The author whose vanity book started this paid for a PDF of unknown DRM status (I couldn't find out in a quick look) sold only by a vanity press nobody has ever heard of, and as a POD paperback which is currently #943,776 on Amazon. Yeah, even worse -- despite paying hundreds of dollars for the "service".
And that's where the problem comes in. Sure, it would be DRM-locked and Kindle-only if the author sold it as an Amazon ebook. But at least people would be able to buy it from a reputable and available source. And it would have been FREE to the writer. Instead, that writer paid hundreds of dollars and got less ... because the vanity presses say that's how everyone does it. Hence my peevishness. What Amazon (or Smashwords, or pretty much anyone else who accepts open submissions) does isn't worth the hundreds of dollars a vanity press charges. It might or might not be worth the zilch that Amazon, etc., charges, but certainly no more. Yet charge they do ... a bare minimum of over $300 to this individual ... and poor deluded people think they're "authors" and their bestseller is right down the street. Just as soon as they get above #943,776.
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