When you buy a digital book, what exactly are you buying? The answer might blow your mind: nothing. You’re not buying a book at all. You’re licensing it, and with that license comes stipulations.

In this episode, I talk about digital rights management (DRM), and what Amazon, and other digital media services, giveth and taketh away. We’ll talk about the ups and downs for readers as well as the pros of cons for authors puzzling over whether to apply DRM to their own books.

I won't bore you by telling you a story you've heard before. This isn't hand-wringing about an individual author's ethical issues—this is an examination of what brought us here.

In this episode, I talk about:

• The breakdown in the rules about AI between trad and self publishing.
• How acquisition practices, especially those of the past several years, have led us to the current situation.
• How to protect yourself (to the degree it's possible).
• What we lose in our current approach to creation and what we could have if we bothered letting ourselves envision a different world.

I’m just going to be honest with y’all—I’m overwhelmed. This podcast is about exploring the world of publishing and providing a resource for authors, but everything is moving so quickly that it’s easy to feel left behind even when my goal is to stay on top of things.

So I feel that, in this episode, it’d be good to get back to basics.

Let’s talk about reading. Yeah, remember that? If I’m not mistaken, that’s what we’re all doing here, or at least why we started.

In Episode 87, I talk about:

1. Why it’s so hard to stay focused on books (down to the nuts and bolts of what our eyes have been trained to do)
2. What deep reading does to enrich your life
3. Some ways you can rebuild your reading habit
4. A reminder that the sheer number of books and subjects for you to read about is more than you could ever begin to approach

To sum-up: between now and my fortieth birthday next February, I’m going to aim to be a more thoughtful reader and retrain my brain to become fully immersed in books rather than just skim the surface.

If that sounds like something you’d like for yourself, let me know at emily@hybridpubscout.com, on LinkedIn, or on Bluesky @emilyeino.