Thursday, September 10, 2020

Fuck DRM

Cory Doctorow emailed me yesterday, following up on a note I'd sent him in 2014 about his novel Little Brother.

It's about his new book, Attack Surface (aka Little Brother 3). I like that it's a standalone, and it's written for adults. I'll read it.

The story itself sounds great. Attack Surface covers racial injustice, police brutality, high-tech turnkey totalitarianism, mass protests and mass surveillance. As Doctorow puts it, "there is something powerful about technologically rigorous thrillers about struggles for justice — stories that marry excitement, praxis and ethics." 

But Audible (an Amazon-owned monopoly) won't carry the audiobook because Doctorow took the ethical decision not to wrap it in DRM. (See here for more on digital rights management.)

Doctorow is making the unabridged audiobook (narrated by Amber Benson) available on Kickstarter. So you can get a great price and take a moral stand by sticking it to Jeff Bezos.

"This is a first-of-its-kind experiment in letting authors, agents, readers and a major publisher deal directly with one another in a transaction that completely sidesteps the monopolists."

I'm not generally an audiobook listener, but I'll make an exception.

Kickstarter
Audiobook preview
Print excerpt

No comments: