News that Amazon is changing the way they offer their e-books books in Digital Rights Management (DRM) free formats. DRM is that evil force of enshittification that locks your media to a device or ecosystem as a means of protecting authors and destroying interoperability.

Naturally, authors are keen on protecting their works from rampant copying, so they opt in to Amazon’s protections. But, as you probably guessed, Amazon’s DRM does not stop that rampant copying. The people demand the ability to read any way they want and they’ll get it even if you try to stop them. So, let go of those fears and provide the people the interoperability they want.

To enable the new feature, the author needs to log into their KDP Bookshelf and check the box that reads “I understand that by not applying DRM, customers who buy and have already bought this book will be able to download it as a PDF or EPUB file.”

This is welcome for a bunch of reasons, but most of which is that books should always be free of DRM. I encourage all the authors out there to publish this way. My book From Rent to Ruin is also offered DRM-free and will always be that way.