One Year Later, the Results of Tor Books UK Going DRM-Free
On April 25, 2012, Tor Books UK announced that it was making all of its ebook list DRM-free. There’s still a lot of debate and interest in the topic. I recently wrote a piece about the subject for Publishers Weekly which I’ve replicated here.
We made this decision in conjunction with our sister company in the US, for our shared brand imprint. It was something that we’d been exploring for quite a while and a move that we felt committed to for our particular area.
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For our particular readership, we felt it was an essential and fair move. The genre community is close-knit, with a huge on-line presence, and with publishers, authors and fans having closer communication than perhaps some other areas of publishing do. Having been in direct contact with our readers, we were aware of how frustrated many of them were by DRM. Our authors had also expressed concerns at the restrictions imposed by the copyright coding applied to their ebooks. When both authors and readers are talking from the same page, it makes sense for the publishers to sit up, listen and take note—and we did!
Michael Sauers is currently the Director of Technology for Do Space in Omaha, NE. Michael has been training librarians in technology for the past twenty years and has also been a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, serials cataloger, technology consultant, and bookseller since earning his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany’s School of Information Science and Policy. Michael has also written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines and his fourteenth book, Emerging Technologies: A Primer for Librarians (w/ Jennifer Koerber) was published in May 2015 and more books are on the way. In his spare time he blogs at travelinlibrarian.info, runs The Collector’s Guide to Dean Koontz Web site, takes many, many photos, and typically reads more than 100 books a year.
View all posts by Michael Sauers
On April 25, 2012, Tor Books UK announced that it was making all of its ebook list DRM-free. There’s still a lot of debate and interest in the topic. I recently wrote a piece about the subject for Publishers Weekly which I’ve replicated here.
