A rant on how a reader behavior survey taken over the space of one month was conflated into an indictment on readers and—bafflingly—libraries. Emily discusses why fingers are being pointed in these particular directions and where they maybe should be pointed instead.

Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

When you buy a digital book, what exactly are you buying? The answer might blow your mind: nothing. You’re not buying a book at all. You’re licensing it, and with that license comes stipulations.

In this episode, I talk about digital rights management (DRM), and what Amazon, and other digital media services, giveth and taketh away. We’ll talk about the ups and downs for readers as well as the pros of cons for authors puzzling over whether to apply DRM to their own books.

I won't bore you by telling you a story you've heard before. This isn't hand-wringing about an individual author's ethical issues—this is an examination of what brought us here.

In this episode, I talk about:

• The breakdown in the rules about AI between trad and self publishing.
• How acquisition practices, especially those of the past several years, have led us to the current situation.
• How to protect yourself (to the degree it's possible).
• What we lose in our current approach to creation and what we could have if we bothered letting ourselves envision a different world.