Money Down the Drain
For anyone who buys e-books.As some of you might have heard, Overdrive, which provided secure DRMed e-books to Fictionwise, is shutting down on 30 January. Via
a BoingBoing post, Fictionwise says:
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.Wow, sorry about all your purchases. Not our fault.
This is why I don't buy DRMed e-books, or anything that has to "phone home" in order to be used. Whether it's every time you activate the product, or weekly or monthly or yearly, or even just when you install it on a new system, that kind of DRM scheme makes the product a rental,
not a purchase.
Online activation means you're at the mercy of the company which really owns "your" product, whether it's an e-book, a computer game, a piece of digital music, or whatever. If they go out of business, if they're acquired by another company that doesn't want to maintain a hundred percent of their old (especially their
really old) products, then that's it, your product is dead. Even if it only activates when you install, if you ever get a new computer or reader or whatever, that takes a new install, which might well require a new activation. Better hope that server is still up and being maintained.
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