[Infowarrior] - Ebook DRM provider goes dark, books disappear

[Richard Forno]

(Is why I still prefer hardcopy to PDF, and hardbacks to Kindle.  And  
why none of my books ever released electronically had any DRM  
whatsoever.....much to my publishers' annoyance. I told 'em whatever a  
customer could do with a real book is what I wanted them to do with  
the electronic version.  --rf)


Ebook DRM provider goes dark, the books you paid for disappear

Posted by Cory Doctorow, January 8, 2009 12:55 PM | permalink

Hudson sez, "Fictionwise used Overdrive to provide DRM encrypted  
ebooks to their customers and Overdrive has informed them that they  
will be shutdown on 30 January with no reason given. Since Fictionwise  
doesn't have the decryption keys, they are not able to provide new  
versions of the books to all customers."

     Fictionwise strives to maintain your purchases indefinitely, but  
our terms of service do not guarantee they will be available forever.  
Forever is a long time. We have control of our MultiFormat files and  
we have control of the Secure eReader format, so that gives us the  
ability to ensure we will continue to be able to deliver those formats  
to you. However, as noted above, other formats are delivered through  
third party aggregators. We do not have legal control of those third  
party servers. If those third party servers "go dark" for one reason  
or another, we have no way to continue delivering those files.

And publishers wonder why their customers rip books off on #bookwarez  
sites rather than paying for them...


http://www.boingboing.net/2009/01/08/ebook-drm-provider-g.html