In the midst of all the preparations for the big Erekos release on Tuesday (your calendar has a big red circle on it, doesn’t it? Well, why not?), we’ve been giving a bit of thought to digital books and digital formats.

It’s only natural, given that we’ve been spending a lot of time prepping the book for ePub and Mobi formats (more on that another time, when we can manage to discuss ePubs without devolving into frothing rage). A lot of tools for eBook generation and a lot of platforms for eBook sales insist on adding DRM – it’s actually sort of complicated to take it off sometimes. And that boggles our little minds.

So it was with great enthusiasm that we came across this blog post from Kobo today, creating an eReader’s Bill of Rights.

Woohoo! The right to read your book wherever you like, and to load books that you didn’t purchase from a certain vendor, and to get copies of your books back! That’s awesome, and we’re all about it.

That’s why, at Candlemark & Gleam, you’ll never find DRM on any book you buy directly from the website. Other vendors might add DRM; if we want to sell through Amazon in the Kindle store, for instance, we don’t have any choice. But if you want to read Erekos on a Kindle, you also have the option of coming here and buying a Mobi download. You’ll get your book, and you can copy it over to as many devices as you like, and make as many backups as you like. Load that sucker on Kobo, or Calibre, or Ibis Reader, or any other reading platform. Enjoy it wherever and whenever you want.

The book is yours; you bought it, after all. Telling you you can’t take it along with you on a trip, or read it onscreen at work (keep that finger over the Esc key in case the boss comes by!) would be like telling you that you can’t read a paperback you bought anywhere but in your living room, and then only between the hours of twelve and four, with an armed midget standing by to make sure that no one reads a paragraph over your shoulder. Kinda silly.

All we ask is that, if you really like the book and want to share it with a friend, you buy them a copy instead of giving it away willy-nilly  – we are a tiny indie publisher, after all, and we need all the sales we can get.

So hey, it’s your book. Read it where you want, when you want. Rock on with your bad book-reading self.