I’d recently read Gear Diary’s arti­cle titled, DRM Rears It’s Ugly Head and It is Ugly which serves to remind us all that as con­sumers we are cut off at the knees when it comes to deal­ing with DRM. I’ve run into it myself and from my expe­ri­ence with it, DRM leaves read­ers feel­ing shafted. It sucks.

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The only way to work around deal­ing with DRM is to buy non-secured ebooks or break the law and strip it off your­self. Google is your friend. But remem­ber, most of your favorite authors rarely, if ever, release new ebooks in a non-secure format.

Secure ebooks are almost always wrapped up in the barb wire that is known as DRM which stands for “data rights man­age­ment” or some deriv­a­tive thereof. Most pub­lish­ers require DRM on their ebooks so until things change, it’s some­thing that ebook read­ers will have to deal with unfortunately.

While I have jumped hoops for a for­mat I pre­fer and have shaken my head at some of the most bone-headed deci­sions made by pub­lish­ers espe­cially when talk­ing about the pric­ing of ebooks, I must say, the ben­e­fits out­weigh the risks or annoy­ances of using ebooks. I’d like to think that as read­ers we are resilient.

DRM does noth­ing but annoy con­sumers and at the same time, indus­try insid­ers or oth­ers have said that DRM does noth­ing to inhibit piracy. DRM is akin to the pub­lisher giv­ing the con­sumer the mid­dle fin­ger and remind­ing us that we own noth­ing. It is the ugly side of dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing that I hope gets erad­i­cated some­day soon.

One of the types of DRM that I loathe is the one used by eReader (how ironic) because it requires that you unlock your ebooks with your credit card. God for­bid if you should lose that CC.

Just a Quick note: As an aside, I was truly shocked at the sud­den death of Michael Jack­son. Before you roll your eyes or make a com­ment about his char­ac­ter, please note that I didn’t care much for his per­sonal life. And really, you don’t have to love the man to love his music.