Today, Tor announced that it would go DRM-Free. Thats quite a GREAT announcement, maybe showing that at last, the big publishers have gone over the tipping point, toward a DRM-less ebook world.
However, it gives me also one reason to raise my 5 months old gripe against them : no DRM-Status display in the French, Italian, and Spanish Kindle stores.
On October the 11th, last year, I found out a small but disturbing fact about the just opened French Kindle Store : I had no way to find out whether an ebook had DRMs or not.
At first, the lack of "Unlimited"-like text -- combined with an "upgrade" from Watermarks to DRM of Bragelonne's (one of our publishers) ebooks -- lead me to believe that Amazon was putting DRMs on ALL the ebooks from the Store.
Well, no, following discussions between Bragelonne and Amazon , I understood that NO, Amazon was not DRMizing widely. It was just hiding which books had DRMs with which had none.
Oh, I had contacted them about that, asking for at least the obscure "Unlimited" message, but no answer, except for redirect to their TOS.
And since then, five months later, no news, except for those two additional stores, the Italian, and the Spanish ones, both missing the mentions too. I take it (maybe wrongly), as a clear sign that it IS a strategic decision, perhaps to use DRMs as an asset against other e-booksellers in Europe.
This is one of the reasons that lead me to distrust Amazon, despite their other tremendous qualities.
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