Quote:
Originally Posted by BearMountainBooks
HOWEVER, we heard from various trad authors that they had no choice--now the rumor was varied, sometimes saying Amazon required it of publishers and sometimes it was said the publishers required it. My guess is that for quite some time (and possibly still today) one or both required it of traditionally published books.
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Amazon required it only for publishers who were going through the Mobipocket service to get their books on Kindle originally. That stopped being required as they migrated to handling everything in house. Or at least that's what some publishers/editors have told a few authors that tried to get their books to be DRM free three or four years ago. I have heard that some third party services don't offer options and just DRM everything. Kind of like how various ebook distributors used to do.
Still it would be nice to see the requirements of these various places in writing somewhere.
I don't doubt that it's been required, or at least no option for NOT having it was available, over the years but it's not required today at least not anywhere I can come up with (maybe some 3rd party distros do?).
But my real question was with Ken's statement that "they" were doing something to "convince or incentivize" authors and publishers that they should use DRM. That's what I asked for some kind of info on as I've never heard or seen anything about this. What are they doing to convince folks? What incentives are they offering them?