The Digital Rights Management Trap

I am hardly an expert on the subject of Amazon's DRM (Digital Rights Management) for Kindle.  No doubt others who are will weigh in.  But my purpose on this blog is to pass on wisdom I had to learn the hard way, and here is today's lesson:

DRM is controversial and unpopular and there are people who will not read your books on Kindle if DRM is set.  How many?  That's for the experts.  What I can tell you is that you cannot casually go back and uncheck DRM.  You must go back and unpublish every title you want to fix, then resubmit them as brand new books from scratch.

I just got back from doing that.

So decide how you feel about DRM before you publish on Amazon!

Soft-core Processer

So what's a Susan in this dichotomous duo of ours? If Keri is persistent, driven, and tech-savvy, does that make me a lazy, distracted dinosaur? Oh sure, I'll cop to the first two (on occasion), but dinosaur? Let's dig a little deeper.

The dinosaurs did not die off because they were slow to change; the Cretaceous creatures were among the most bizarre in appearance, after all. This was no case of extinction by lack of evolution.

Meteorites happen and then what's a lizard to do? You cannot outrun destiny, especially when it blots out the sun for days on end and kills the food supply.

I've never had a problem finding sustenance and at nearly two miles high, the sun and I are intimately acquainted. The relationship I'm working on is the technological one and Keri is my psychologist: She has been navigating the electronic realm forever and tolerates my quaint tales of magazine subscriptions and catalogue orders. She kindly pets my pointed little head.

Yes, I want my kids to be able to click on any element of the toolbar and perform any task on the pull-down menus. I also want them to know their way around a toolbox and comfortably manage a dinner plan. I hope they examine their email threads when they aren't stitching together quilt squares, and I know they will effortlessly process their words electronically. I just prefer that they write to me in cursive.

Dinosaur? No, not yet. I do still carve in stone, but as I stand on the precipice of e-publishing, the valley seems verdant and the future looks bright. No meteorites in sight.

In excavating the wonders of my garage, I can still find the notebooks, diaries, and journals of my Triassic. During my Jurassic, I moved from a simple word processing machine through PCs, laptops, and now on to my IMAC and IPAD.

Let's see what weird horns, humps, and spots I sprout as I lumber over to this new watering hole. Terrabytes, anyone?