Years and years ago, in the early days of this podcast, my former co-host, Corinne, and I had a pretty good time roasting some tech bro who talked about creating a Netflix for books. We said what a lot of our salty publishing colleagues said, “Congratulations, you just reinvented the library. 

But I’ve been thinking about that little incident lately in connection with the way we interact with digital media, and the way that digital media and the companies that purvey it tend to treat us in return. Because, yeah, in a lot of ways, my guy was talking about a library, but there’s something else that sounds very familiar in that description. Maybe now it’s just a little more blatant than it was back in 2018.

Netflix for books already exists, and it existed back when he first said it, too. And it’s not your local library; it’s your personal digital library. 

You can’t have your book and lend it, too.

In its most typical form, one that is affiliated with Amazon or Kobo, or any of the other ebook services that commonly come to mind, a one-to-one comparison of ebook ownership to print book ownership is a false equivalency. When I say this, I’m talking about an individual reader, i.e. you and me, owning an ebook versus a print book. You know…that beloved object capable of taking up too much space in your carry-on bag versus the thing you access on your phone or e-reader.

The most immediate difference is that there is no quick and easy way to duplicate the print book as a reader. Say your friend Bernice wants to borrow your print copy of Enshitification by Cory Doctorow because she wants to know why all her favorite social media platforms suck so bad now. When you lend your print copy to Bernice, you aren’t duplicating a copy for her to take home while the original stays on your shelf. To paraphrase a decapitated French woman, you can’t have your book and lend it, too. When you lend it to Bernice, you no longer have it.

Eventually, if you’re lucky, Bernice may give the book back to you, but now she doesn’t have it, and you do, and yes, pedants, you can technically duplicate a book by scanning and printing every single page of it, and I don’t know, stapling it together, binding it like those old paper readers Grampy Em had back in college. That’s a pretty big time and resource commitment, though. With all the money you spend on paper and hours you’ll spend in front of a scanner, you might as well just buy a book.

When you have an ebook you want to share, it’s a completely different situation. If you own an ebook and are free to do whatever you want with it, you likely have it in the form of an EPUB file. That file type is the generic version of an ebook. You can save it to multiple devices or upload it to basically any distribution platform if you’re an author, but if you want to lend out the EPUB file you own, it’s not a situation where a single file moves away from you, and to your friend. 

It would feel silly to just give Bernice your only EPUB file. You drag it and drop it into an email or Google Drive, or whatever, or put it on a thumb drive if you’re feeling really sassy. And then there’s automatically a duplicate that gets left behind, and you keep it. You have your ebook and lend it too, so that leads to a natural concern for the people selling the books, that using that same process you can just post the book on a pirate site, where everyone can download endless copies for themselves. If that happens, the publishing company gets no money, and the author gets no money. (Anthropic, though, they get lots of money, certainly more money than they’re paying out in settlements.)

But do you see the difference?

Your public library has to buy a fixed number of ebooks and audiobooks from the publisher, then only loan out one copy to one person at a time, they’re not duplicating the book and giving out a brand new copy every time someone borrows it, the way you might. It works the same way as it would if you were lending your print book to Bernice, except for your public library, the ebook costs about $50 and sometimes they’re only allowed to lend it out a fixed number of times before they have to pay additional fees. That’s because when the library buys the book, they do not own it, they’re just licensing it. And through digital rights management, aka DRM, the publisher can put way more restrictions on it than they would on a print book. And DRM doesn’t just apply to libraries in many cases. It also applies to you.

What is DRM?

DRM, or digital rights management, is a type of lock. Companies put them on anything that contains some sort of intellectual property, so it can’t be endlessly copied, shared, or modified. In the case of ebooks and audiobooks, the lock looks like a special file type that can only be used on particular platforms, and this is where we get to questions of ownership. Because when you buy a book in print or an audiobook on a CD, that’s yours now. You can keep it forever; short of some Amazon repo man coming in and ripping it off ‌your bookshelf, there’s no takesy- backsies. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if that idea has been floated. Be kind, let your amazon.com repo driver use your bathroom when they steal your books back, so they don’t have to go in their empty water bottle.

Anyway.

Cloud-based ebooks and audiobooks are a different story. If an author applies DRM to the book, Amazon applies a special file type that used to be AZWs, now they’re shifting to something called KFXs, which they are trying to make unbreakable, and that’s because with the right software and some ingenuity, you often can break the DRM and convert your ebook to that generic EPUB form that you can do whatever you want with. 

Now, to be clear, and to probably be unreasonably fair to Amazon, they’re not the only ones who do this. It’s not just a book thing; it’s not just an Amazon thing—Kobo, Nook, Google, they all use Adobe Digital Editions DRM—but it does conform to that general trend where we basically own nothing anymore. Everything is licenses and subscriptions, and of course, Amazon still has the most market share for anything book-related, and the audacity to match. If there’s one thing we know about them, it’s that their goalposts are always shifting.

What Amazon can take from you

You used to be able to lend people your ebooks in the same way people lend a print book. You could send it to your friend for two weeks, only they could access it, and then it went back into your library, but they unfortunately discontinued that in 2022. Until about a year ago, Amazon allowed you to download your ebooks onto a separate disk with its “download and transfer via USB” function. When I found out that they were discontinuing that function, I rushed to download as many books as I could, but I got my first Kindle in 2010, and I kind of had to pick and choose out of the hundreds of books I had. When I downloaded them, they were all in the AZW file type, meaning if I ever did transfer them onto a device, it would have to be one of theirs. All the same, the option did exist to back up your books in case somehow they got removed by Amazon or revised by the publisher, and that’s why I’m emphasizing that your ebook library, which is made up of books you have paid for or think you have paid for, is the actual Netflix for books.

Think about it. Streaming services can take down the shows you like, even if they still own the rights. They can make it so nobody can watch certain shows they like, unless the malevolent media overlords decide to take pity, which they often don’t. 

With Kindle, there was a big to-do back in 2009 (1000 years ago), where the book 1984 was removed from people’s Kindles, which felt pretty on the nose, if you can believe it. It ended up being a copyright violation issue, which is a lot less exciting than a conspiracy, but the effect is the same, regardless. And just because removals are often due to rights issues doesn’t mean censorship does not or will not affect the books people have on their Kindles or other devices. The people in companies you bought that book from can take it down for any reason. Authors get their accounts suspended constantly without knowing why, and as censorship laws are expanding all over the world, tech companies love to comply in advance because that just makes an opportunity to sell you something to replace the thing they took away from you.

And as of May 20, 2026, Amazon discontinued support for Kindles released before 2012. Users can still read books they’ve already downloaded, and they can get access to their books through the mobile app or the cloud reader, but after the deadline, no more downloads to their devices are possible, which means. Now, according to Amazon, the people who still use their pre-2012 Kindles make up 3% of their current users. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but let’s say there are 1 million Kindle users (and all the spit balling I’ve seen claims there’s a lot more than that), even if it’s just 1 million, that’s still 30,000 people’s e-readers getting bricked, even though they were working just fine.

You’ve probably heard of planned obsolescence, where your devices are designed to fall apart after a certain number of years, so you have to replace it with whatever the latest update is, and it’s not quite the same thing that’s happening here, a lot of these Kindles work just fine. The vague answer Amazon gave for doing this is that technology has come a long way after 14 years, but an e-reader isn’t an iPhone. It’s not that complicated, doesn’t need to run more and more complicated software, it just needs to be able to download ebook files from a website and display them to the reader. As one of my sources pointed out, this isn’t planned obsolescence. This is forced obsolescence.

Is this a normal thing for a tech company to do? Sure, older versions of different devices lose support all the time, but just because it’s normal doesn’t mean it isn’t wasteful or it doesn’t put financial pressure on people who enjoy their devices and don’t have hundreds of dollars to spend on a replacement. Because people are famously dripping in disposable income right now. 

But don’t worry, Amazon is offering 20% off new devices and some ebook credits, but only if you buy a new one sometime this June, but you know these new Kindles are even better than the old ones, because they have lock screen ads, which everybody desperately wants, and that work really well for authors, except not really.

This all goes further than just things Amazon can take away from you. It’s about what they can force onto you too. 

DRM-free Reading

Some of you might raise an eyebrow when I talk about removing DRM from books, and I get it, because why else would someone want to do that if not to pirate the book? Is there a non-insidious reason to avoid or remove DRM as a reader? 

I’d argue that removing DRM isn’t just for pirates, especially if you’re trying to extract yourself from the Amazon or other companies’ ecosystem. Owning your own book means you can put them onto any device you want, so if you decide to move on somewhere else because of ethical issues, which I’m sure we all understand, you can without losing everything in your library as a reader. Removing DRM means you can take that EPUB file on any device you want and save it to your hard drive to make sure you can access it offline. Then it can’t be randomly taken from you or made super difficult to access when your e-reader is bricked, or act as another anchor to a company we all kind of hate. 

The point is, if you do remove DRM, there are ways not to be a dick about it.

What this means for writers

And I get it from the writer-publisher side. For a long time, as an author myself and someone who works with a lot of authors, I thought, Why on earth wouldn’t you use DRM when you load your book up to KDP? All it takes is checking a box to enable it. To me, if a book wasn’t protected, people could just steal it and throw it around the internet like confetti. At the time, my thought was that DRM let authors control distribution. Now I’m more likely to say yes, but it lets authors control it, but it especially allows sales platforms to control it.

When I first posted my own books, I enabled DRM, but I’ve also distributed DRM-free EPUBs to my mailing lists and ARC team. The DRM-free files of my books are out there, and who knows how often they’ve been shared. So, as an experiment, I have now removed DRM protection from my first book. It came out a couple of years ago, and I haven’t been putting in my marketing due diligence (do as I say, not as I do). So, I doubt I’ll get the data I need to see whether it’s been effective, but at least I’m hopefully making things easier for some readers, especially if there is some big censorship sweep that catches it in its net.

DRM free books give readers freedom, but in many ways it can leave you vulnerable to having your book pirated. It just can. Removing DRM is an act of trust, and it might be one you’re not willing to take, which is fine if you’re on the fence. I’d ask you to look at what you want your book to do. What purpose do you want it to serve out in the world? Do you want it to be a marketing tool to get people to read your other books? Maybe take DRM off one and. See what happens, like I am. Do you just care about getting your message out? Unlock that sucker. But do you depend on your book sales for financial security? That’s when you’ve either got to stick to what you know or take a chance.

Maybe it’s a utopian thought, but I’d like to live in a world where readers act in good faith, and writers don’t have to claw for every cent they can possibly get. I’d like it to be a world where authors can sell their books directly to readers as the norm. I’d love it if there wasn’t a glut of scammers churning out slop to take advantage of people desperate for any escape hatch from engaging with the world as it is right now. And I’d love it if more people would engage with the world as it is right now, but that’s a different topic. I’d love it if artists weren’t constantly terrified all their work would be stolen and devalued. 

But for us to get any closer to that vision, authors would have to do some trust falls in the midst of one of the all-time griftiest periods in our history. I can’t blame people for hesitating to do that, but we do have one big consolation: we’ve still got print books that we can do whatever we want with.

The books on our shelves are, for now, still ours, and for now we also have public libraries for the sake of having something that can’t be taken away or disappear in the flick of a switch or the stroke of a legislator’s pen, let’s hold on to those things as best we can.