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Amazon Is Testing a $10-Per-Month Ebook Service
Nate the greatest (2261802) writes "Details are still scarce but it looks like Amazon is going to be launching a competitor to Scribd and Oyster. Earlier today new pages leaked on the Amazon website which mentioned Kindle Unlimited, a new subscription ebook service. The pages were quickly removed, but not before we got some screenshots. If the screenshots are to be believed Kindle Unlimited is going to offer a catalog of over 600,000 titles for $9.99 a month. The news hasn't been confirmed by Amazon but those pages were seen by a number of authors and bloggers, including indie authors who confirmed that the new service is mentioned in their sales reports."
DRM is a publisher choice. It is a checkbox in the Amazon "publish my book" interface. All of my books sold through amazon are DRM free. If you want to know how to tell (since it is non-obvious)... under "product details" there is an item called "Simultaneous Device Usage" if that says "unlimited" it is DRM free.
That's pretty much how it already is with ebook libraries that use Amazon or Adobe's DRM solution. From discussions on pirate ebook communities, I've seen that it's already common for pirates to buy a temporary subscription to a service, download everything through some clever scripting, break the DRM, upload to a pirate site, and let their temporary subscription lapse. Considering how trivial it is to break the DRM on these books, it really is only the honour system keeping people paying.