Lets hope you haven’t bought any e-books from Microsoft. If you have, by now you found out you didn’t own any of them. They all had “digital rights management” attached and won’t work without Microsoft servers – the same servers they have just shut down. If you have bought any books from them by now you know they have stopped working. This is the same garbage we talked about on our show and wrote about here in an article entitled “You can buy the pants but you have to wear them here.” Amazon does this same thing with their videos. If you have ever purchased a video from them you go to your online video library and it says proudly “you own this video”…

…but you don’t. Everyone who bought an e-book from Microsoft thought they owned them as well. They said they will give out refunds but it hardly seems like the point now does it? What happens if Amazon decides to do the same thing? All you videos and all your books you thought you owned that came from Amazon will go away as well. This is why we have stopped buying digital copies of videos and books from Amazon.

So let me tell you a little about something that will stick in the beak of every seller of every electronic book everywhere…free eBooks. That’s right, absolutely free. Its from a place called Project Gutenberg. You can get free books to read and all free of digital rights management.

Project Gutenberg has over 59,000 free ebooks.

As for us, we will rent videos from Amazon but we have long since stopped buying them. If you own a hard copy of a video or book no one can shut down a server and take it away. Sometimes progress isn’t always a good thing.