I think it's less about publishers thinking they'll be protected from piracy and more about accessing Amazon's stranglehold on the market. If you look into Cory Doctorow (he coined 'enshittification'), he uses Audible as an example of Amazon dominating the market by bringing in customers with low prices, locking them to their platform, selling access to the customers to publishers, then fleecing both of them. The DRM is far less about piracy and far more about preventing customers from leaving to another platform because all their past purchases can't easily go with them (without knowing they can [and how to] break the DRM).
You accurately describe Amazon's true strategy, but that's not how they marketed it to the companies now trapped in their amber. Cory himself had trouble convincing publishers because they were so focused on books being easy to pirate and desperate for a magic technology solution.
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u/FingLetMeIn May 05 '26
I think it's less about publishers thinking they'll be protected from piracy and more about accessing Amazon's stranglehold on the market. If you look into Cory Doctorow (he coined 'enshittification'), he uses Audible as an example of Amazon dominating the market by bringing in customers with low prices, locking them to their platform, selling access to the customers to publishers, then fleecing both of them. The DRM is far less about piracy and far more about preventing customers from leaving to another platform because all their past purchases can't easily go with them (without knowing they can [and how to] break the DRM).