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Policy on Perpetual Access |
What’s a perpetual access policy, and why have one?
In the old days, when all books existed as paper things you could hold in your hand, the process of buying one was straightforward. You paid money in exchange for ownership of a physical object. The book became your private property, to do with as you pleased. This included things like lending it to a friend, reselling it, or even digging a chunk out of the middle if it was thick enough and you wanted to hide something in there.
But in the digital age, things are different. Ebooks are wonderful for many reasons, but you can’t own them the way you own a physical book. In fact, if you buy from a retailer that uses DRM technology, like Amazon, you haven’t really purchased the book as such. You’re actually licensing it, and if the retailer ever decided to revoke your access, they can. Your ebooks could one day be rendered unreadable.
Think it can’t happen? Actually, it has. Your digital bookshelf just isn’t under your control the same way your physical bookshelf is.
Freethinker Fantasy supports the principle of private property—if you buy a copy of a work, you should own it outright, even if it happens to exist in digital format. If you ever lose access to a purchased copy of an Inferno book, just send an email to akat@freethinkerfantasy.com with the name of the retailer that sold it to you and you will receive a DRM-free EPUB to replace it.