Cory Doctorow gives the O'Reilly Tools of Change keynote

Publishers using DRM (digital rights management) to prevent the sharing of ebooks and tie readers to a single reading device are “bent on the destruction of publishing” and constitute the “real pirates” of the publishing world, said BoingBoing editor Cory Doctorow yesterday in his keynote speech at the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

But according to this Bookseller report by Catherine Neilan, Doctorow targeted not a publisher but a retailer for a prime example of the kind of rights mis-management he was talking about: he cited Amazon and its Kindle as an example of a managed system that is “farcical” and can “destroy the bond between the readers and the book.” Referring to the recent incident whereby Amazon surreptitiously removed what it said were illegal copies of books from people’s Kindles (remember?), Doctorow added that “there is no mechanism whereby a retailer of a [print] book can take it away from you.”

Nonetheless Doctorow expressed optimism about the future: “The library of tomorrow will better than the library of today,” he said. “Just stop believing that the pirates in your digital department are right.”