How my DRM-free principles left me owning the rights to a German audiobook
Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic.
Long story short: thanks to a series of misunderstandings, I had to shell out more than ten thousand euros to prevent a German audiobook of my work from being released with DRM and now I need your help (assuming you speak German) to get the book into readers' ears!
For more than a quarter-century, I've had an iron-clad policy of not releasing my work with "digital rights management," this being a kind of encryption that keeps my readers from reading the books they've bought in the apps of their choice.
There's two reasons for this: the first is, it's just grossly unfair. If you buy one of my print books, you can shelve it on any bookcase and read it sitting in any chair, under any company's lightbulb. It's stupid and offensive for a company like Amazon/Audible to declare that you can only read the ebooks and audiobooks you buy using the apps they approve.
But the second reason is more insidious and subtle. By retaining control over the apps that you must use to read or listen to your books, companies like Amazon are able to lock you into their platform. That means they can change the deal even after you've made your purchase (for example, Amazon has been caught deleting ebooks from people's Kindle apps and readers and Audible has experimented with inserting ads into your audiobooks after you buy them).
This lock-in isn't limited to readers, either. Once Amazon has all my readers locked in, the company acquires control over me, the writer. After all, if my readers can't switch from Amazon to another bookseller, then I can't switch from Amazon to another bookseller, because that would mean asking my readers to start over buying all their books again.
Amazon has a long history of squeezing its sellers – including writers and publishers – once it has them locked in. Today, 45-51% of every Amazon Marketplace purchase from an independent seller is skimmed off by Amazon in junk fees. The company makes $58 billion/year charging vendors for search placement (rather than putting the best match for shoppers' searches at the top of the result). And they stole at least $100m from Audible audiobook authors:
In 1998, the US passed a law (Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act) that makes tampering with DRM a felony with a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine (for a first offense). In the years since, the US Trade Representative bullied every US trading partner into adopting this law. The EU did so in 2001, with Article 6 of the Copyright Directive.
This means that it's literally a crime for me, the author of a book, who holds the copyright to the work, to authorize you, a reader who bought the ebook or audiobook on Amazon, to convert the digital file so that it works with apps that compete with Amazon's.
So that's why I don't allow my work to be sold with DRM.
Everyone I do business with knows this – my publishers, my agents, etc – and over the past quarter century and more than 30 books, all of these people have bent over backwards to accommodate this policy of mine, even when it meant changing the workflow they used for thousands of books just to make an exception for me. I'm incredibly grateful for this.
But eventually, someone was bound to slip up, and that's how I ended up owning the German audiobook for my novel Red Team Blues.
After Red Team Blues was published in English in 2022 and became a national bestseller, many foreign publishers snapped up the translation rights. Among them was Heyne, my German publisher, who commissioned a fantastic translation by Jürgen Langowski that has sold briskly in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Heyne also commissioned an audiobook, beautifully read by a beloved German audiobook narrator, Uve Teschner.
But somewhere in there, everyone forgot that this audiobook could only be sold without DRM. And since Audible, Apple Books and Audiobooks.com refuse to carry DRM-free books, that meant that they would not be able to sell the books in the places where 90+% of readers look for them.
No one is to blame here. It's just an oversight. But it left us all in the awkward position of my publisher having spent more than EUR10,000 on an audiobook that they would never be able to recoup on. Both my publisher and my agent offered to eat these costs, but I felt bad about this, given the great lengths both had gone to over the years to help me live my principles through my books.
Besides: I have this platform of mine, the newsletters and lists of people who've bought audiobooks from me before and the people who've backed the Kickstarters for my previous English works, and I decided I would buy the audiobook rights from my German publisher and try to make the money back by selling directly to my German fans.
Today, I've launched a Kickstarter campaign to sell the DRM-free German audiobook. I'm also selling the DRM-free ebook, and the German paperback, which will be fulfilled by my pals at Berlin's excellent sf/f bookstore Otherland (due to the Trump tariff nonsense, these can only be shipped in the EU, UK, and Switzerland):
There's something for English-speaking readers, too: discounted editions of the English-language ebook and audiobook (read by Wil Wheaton), available in bundles with the German titles, or on their own. Europeans can also order the print edition of the book (again, fulfilled by Otherland in Berlin).
Now, I don't actually speak German. I grew up speaking Yiddish, much of which I've forgotten, which means that I can kind of grunt out ungrammatical German-adjacent phrases (the Otherland folks generously translated my Kickstarter page into German). That means that I have extremely limited ability to promote this Kickstarter to German-speaking audiences. I'm really relying on my readers here: if you are a German-speaker and/or have German-speaking friends, please let them know about this!
When you do, your pals are going to ask you what the book is about. Red Team Blues tells the story of the last case of Martin Hench, a 67 year old high-tech forensic accountant who's spent 40 years in Silicon Valley, busting the weirdest financial scams that three generations of tech bros cooked up. For this final job, Marty's been called out of retirement to resolve that scammiest of all tech-bro schemes, a cryptocurrency heist.
Marty's dear old pal Danny Lazer has built a new – and wildly successful – kind of blockchain, built on the security chips in mobile devices, called Trustlesscoin. Lazer is a cypherpunk legend, but that's not why Trustlesscoin went from zero to more than a billion in capitalization in a few short months: all that money poured in because some of the world's most ruthless criminals came to appreciate how Danny's cryptocurrency could facilitate money-laundering.
That would be bad enough, but Danny is exactly the kind of very smart guy who is more than capable of outsmarting himself. That's how he came to build a cryptographic back-door into Trustlesscoin, a secret key that allows the bearer to rewrite the supposedly immutable transactions in the network, which is to say, to steal all the money.
That's where Marty Hench comes in: Danny summons Marty to his home in Palo Alto because someone has stolen the physical token that this billion-dollar key lives on, and if someone doesn't get it back soon, it's only a matter of time until a billion dollars goes missing, and then the kind of people who resolve their monetary disputes with bone-saws and red-hot pokers will come looking for Danny.
That's where the story starts – but it turns out that recovering Danny's missing keys are the easy part. The hard part comes next, when Marty finds himself in the crosshairs of the violent international crime syndicates that boosted the keys in the first place.
People really like this book. It's the kind of book you stay up all night reading (or, as Molly White from Web3 is Going Just Great put it, "don't start reading it at bedtime if you have to be awake for something the next morning"). If you find yourself craving morning Marty Hench in the morning, I've published two more bestsellers recounting his earlier adventures: The Bezzle and Picks and Shovels.
Check it out for yourself. Here's the first chapter of the German audiobook, read by Uve Teschner:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8e2or8ze_4
And here's the first chapter of the English audiobook, read by Wil Wheaton:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb8yJeASgho
The campaign only runs for a brisk three weeks (I've got to get it all put away before I head out on tour with Enshittification in October), so act fast:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
I was thinking about a quote from A Civil Campaign, and I remembered this disc that came with my hardcover edition of Cryoburn. I thought the files were all on my laptop (which would make it easy to copy/paste the quote), but I didn't see the folder right way, so I grabbed the disc and stuck it in my laptop, and there is so much more that I'd forgotten about!
The fourteenth book in the series came with the all 14 books & four shorter stories, plus a bunch of essays, interviews, photos, speeches, and more! They're all DRM-free. The only caveat? "This disk and its contents may be copied and shared, but NOT sold. All commercial rights are reserved. That’s it."
Why? Well, they figure if you share her books, more people will buy them.
They're not wrong. I think "The Flowers of Vashnoi" (2018) and Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (2016) are the only two I don't own as a physical copy (the former is a short story; the latter a novella), and I do own them both as an ebook and as an audiobook. The others I own as ebooks, audiobooks, and physical books. Did I pre-order the hardcover of Captain Vorpatril's Alliance in 2012? OF COURSE I DID.
I recommend this series all the time. I've gifted it to my dad. My two oldest kids picked The Warrior's Apprentice as one of their book club selections when they were teens.
2010 wasn't that long ago, but this disc (sorry, "CD-ROM") feels like an artifact from another century. It warns you that "for the disk to work properly you need to have your computer logged on to the Internet". Worried about file formats? "Any sound samples on Baen disks are all MP3, and the pictures are all JPG extensions, which will open automatically in any web browser you're using on your computer, whether PC or MAC." Can't figure out how to use a CD-ROM? "[T]here is nothing mysterious about the disk; if you are having trouble, your neighborhood guru can probably help you out, but she'll be dreadfully condescending about it."
When you select a book, you are given 7 format options, one of which is "Mobipocket for Kindle/Palm/Blackberry!" I selected epub and dragged the download into Calibre, where it opened without issue.
I don't see it in the fancy CD-ROM menu, but hidden in the novels folder on the disc is The Vorkosigan Companion. That's a 15th book.
By the way, the link to Baen's free collection still works, with 81 titles included!
And, if you haven't read The Vorkosigan Saga yet, may I recommend it to you?
BTW, this ebook sale has been extended another ten hours...
...Until 23:59 Hawai’ian time. Everything’s DRM-free and 50% off. Go knock yourselves out so we can afford enough junk food and booze for our Christmas night Good Omens rewatch. :)
I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then San Francisco (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!
It's been 21 years and 29 days since Tor Books published my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. In the years since, Tor has published every one of my novels, sending me around the USA and Canada to talk about them. Now, they've teamed up with Humble Bundle to sell 18 of my ebooks on a name-your-price basis, with part of the proceeds going to benefit EFF:
I've been associated with EFF even longer than I've been published by Tor! My first novel came out while I was working EFF's first-ever booth at CES. I split my time between the booth and my motel room, where I paid $0.25/call to dial up to Earthlink's local number and manage the launch-day publicity. Over the years, I've benefited immensely from Tor's editorial and publicity departments, working with brilliant publishing people like Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Patty Garcia, Dot Lin, Laura Etzkorn, Elena Stokes, Sarah Reidy, Lucille Rettino, and of course, Tor founder Tom Doherty.
But I like to think that it was a two-way street. Tor and I have come a long way together on ebooks: most visibly, they allowed me to publish several novels under Creative Commons licenses (my first book was the first ever CC book, coming out just weeks after the licenses themselves launched). As my editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden said at the time, "Ebooks have the worst hours-in-meeting-to-dollars-in-revenue ratio of anything in my publishing career. Why not?"
https://craphound.com/down/download/
Just as important – but less visible – was Tor's willingness to let me insist that all my books be published without DRM, meaning that anything you buy on say, Amazon, can be moved to any reader program if you decide to start getting your ebooks elsewhere. This worked so well that in 2012, Tor became the first major publisher in the world to ban DRM on all its ebooks, flying me, John Scalzi and Charlie Stross to New York City to announce it this at a big, splashy event at Book Expo America:
Tor's unique status as the sole major DRM-free publisher in the world was well timed! That same year, I curated the very first Humble Ebook Bundle, which was very top-heavy with Tor titles, and raised more than $1,000,000 for the writers, publishers and charities associated with it:
That opened the floodgates to a series of Humble Bundles, tempting other major publishers to dabble with DRM-free, including Simon and Schuster:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-I5QyAfglU
And Harpercollins:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHMLfeCrCrE
Now, 12 years after that inaugural Humble Ebook Bundle, I find myself honored by being the subject of a bundle of my own (it helps that I've written a hell of a lot of books in the intervening years). Included in the bundle are (nearly) all of my Tor novels and novellas: The Lost Cause; "The Canadian Miracle" (a Lost Cause story); Red Team Blues; Radicalized; Walkaway; "Party Discipline" (a Walkaway story); Pirate Cinema; Rapture of the Nerds (with Charlie Stross); For The Win; Makers; Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town; Eastern Standard Tribe, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Little Brother, Homeland, Attack Surface, and "Lawful Interception" (a Little Brother story).
(The sole exclusion is The Bezzle, which came out two weeks ago and is already a USA Today national bestseller!)
All these books are delivered as DRM-free epub files. The Bundle runs for the next three weeks, and the minimum buy-in is $18 – that's just $1/book (full retail value is $187). Of course, you can name a higher price, and, as with all Humble Bundles, you can adjust the final split to share out the money between me, EFF, and the Humble folks.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
