I need to rant for a minute here, okay? And I’ll go straight into it.

Tell me if you know the feeling.

You’ve been dreaming for a while about buying yourself an e-reader. Your house is full of books – it’s unsustainable. How many more IKEA shelves do you need to buy just to store all the books you’ve already bought?

Okay, you get into the right mindset: I’ll sacrifice the feeling of holding a freshly printed book and read from a screen. Luckily, modern e-book screens are quite mature – it actually feels good to read on them. They even have backlights now, so you can read in the dark without your partner wanting to kill you because they’re trying to sleep. Great!

Let’s say – you’re me. You’ve done your research. You like a Kindle. You buy a Kindle.

You already have a few e-books accumulated over the years from here and there, but now it’s time to actually purchase something. In my case, I have no problem reading in English, but most of the time, I prefer to read in my own language, you know what I mean? So I want to read a book written in Bulgarian.

Well… the Kindle store doesn’t really have many translated books for me.

Alright, let’s hop over to some Bulgarian websites that offer e-books, and – boom – you see a message right next to the buy button:
“This book is protected by LCP DRM and cannot be used on Kindle.”

In fact, there’s really only one brand of e-reader that supports it. But hey, feel free to read it on your phone (with an app, of course), or on your computer. Oh, or maybe you’re buying from the Kobo store? Yeah, that’s protected by Adobe Digital Editions DRM.

Let me guess… I can’t use that on my Kindle either?

Hey Amazon…
Ugh, never mind – you’re clearly happy with your walled garden ecosystem where people are forced to buy only from your store.

Excuse my French, but what in the actual fuck.

If you’re really insistent, you can find some convoluted way to hack the system and send the book to your Kindle. But let me be clear – as the phrase goes – your average Joe is not going to pull that off.

Are these people trying this hard to alienate a whole portion of readers so they’ll either never buy books, or just find other ways to get them?

Hey guys, are you not seeing what’s happening in the gaming space? “Console wars” are basically dead. Why? Because – surprise, surprise – people like to consume content on their preferred platform. Shocking.

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Let me paint you a picture.

The people who came up with the idea to create DRM protection for digital media – what exactly was their mindset?
“How do we generate more money?”

“Oh, I know – we charge a hefty fee to e-reader manufacturers, in the form of a subscription, so they can gain access to open our encrypted files!”
“Yes, yes, and we’ll tell them that doing so will skyrocket their devices and e-book sales!”
“And fuck those poor bastards who can’t afford a book. Sharing with a friend? Who do you think you are? A filthy pirate?”
“Oh, you found a way to remove our DRM protection? Here’s a nice DMCA takedown for your troubles.”

These device manufacturers, we depend on them paying their subscriptions so we can continue to exist.
You bought a Kindle? Well, guess what – you better be ready to cough up more money for one of the approved devices.

And hey – just because your device supports our DRM now, doesn’t mean it will in the future.
No, no, no – we might change something in our policy, and the manufacturer might not like it.
So now your device doesn’t support it anymore.

“What? Why are you looking at us? It’s not our fault – they’re the ones who stopped liking us. We’re the good guys. Buy from this other brand – we’re friends with them now.”

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How the fuck does any of this make sense?

Let’s continue.

So you bought an e-book, right? And the file extension is… interesting: .lcpl

Do you even know what this is?
It’s a license file. It promises you that you can read the book anytime you want.

Until… well, maybe the servers hosting those licenses go offline.
Or maybe you say something online that someone doesn’t like, and suddenly your access is revoked, even though you paid for it with your hard-earned money.

Or, as I said earlier, maybe your device manufacturer pushes a firmware update, and you can’t open those files anymore.
Why?

Because fuck you, that’s why.

But Commodore, take it easy there, fella!
“Nothing like this would ever happen – we promise!”

Mhm… like 23andMe promised your DNA data was safe, and now they’re looking for the highest bidder to buy it because the company filed for bankruptcy.
Or like Google, who swears they’re not listening through your devices.
“Spying? Never heard of it!”
Okay… maybe just a little… or all the time.

Or remember when a dev pushed buggy code into production and the entire planet went into panic mode for a while?
Cough CrowdStrike cough.

Why wouldn’t something similar happen here?

There are way too many examples to ignore.
Call me cynical, but I like owning the stuff I pay for.

And my stubbornness on that matter is so high that I’m at the point where I’m seriously considering buying physical books, scanning them, turning them into .epub files, and reading them that way.

And – imagine that – even sharing the file with a friend or two.

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There’s this petition going on right now – if you haven’t heard – called Stop Killing Games, which is trying to stop publishers from just flipping a switch and making a game you bought completely inaccessible.

Gamers have been putting up with publishers bullshit for a long time now, and me stepping into this e-book space only to see the exact same patterns?
Yeah. Red flags everywhere.

And I don’t like it.

People don’t like being told what they can and can’t do with the stuff they paid money for.
Or at least, some people don’t.

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Thank you for your time listening to my rant. This shit pisses me off.

And remember…

Stay safe out there.

Commodore Bo, out.