Thread: Amazon is not evil after all. Maybe?
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Old 02-24-2009, 09:48 PM   #2
wallcraft
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Quote:
Originally Posted by pilotbob View Post
"It is up to the publishers to specify if they want DRM or not."

So... that is NOT an Amazon mandate. You heard it from the horses mouth.
That is what Jeff Bezos says, but it isn't what Amazon does. All ebooks that come originally from MobiPocket (an Amazon company) must have DRM, because MobiPocket is in the DRM business and has no procedure to accept DRM-free ebooks. All ebooks that come from the Kindle's Digital Text Platform (DTP) must use DRM. Publishers who never use DRM (e.g. O'Reilly) have DRM on their Kindle ebooks, presumably because they were given no choice in the matter. The only DRM-free ebooks I am aware of are the “extra large print” ebooks from the Virginia M. Woolf Foundation. Since there is no indication on Amazon’s web site about DRM status, the only way to tell is to try to open them. So there could be others here and there in the 200,000 ebooks, but it is a vanishingly small percentage of the total.
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