Great news for the ereading world… The promised end of DRM with Sci-Fi publishers Tor and Forge has happened, it is official. From now on all their ebooks will be sold totally DRM free, which means that you can move them from ereader to ereader, lend them to friends and family, and actually own the ebooks you buy from these good folk in exactly the same way as you own your paper books.

Completely DRM free:

As far as I can gather their ebooks from now on will have no sort of copy protection at all, they seem to have decided that it is senseless and only annoys their customers (anyone with a bit of computer knowledge can easily remove any form of DRM that exists currently).

In this they are following in the footsteps of several other publishers of ebooks who have never bothered with DRM, and not suffered noticeably from doing so.

Tor is the first major publishing house to go this route, and will very probably be followed by the others after a while as the others see that it doesn’t actually harm their sales figures to any noticeable degree.

“It’s clear to us that this is what our customers want,” said senior editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden. “We see it in the success of SF publishers like Baen and Angry Robot that have preceded us in going DRM-free. To the best of our knowledge we’re the first division of a Big Six publishing conglomerate to go down this road, but we doubt very much that we’ll be the last.”

To make this point I shall remark that long before all the Harry Potter books became legally available as ebooks via the Pottermore site, they had been illegally available from minutes after their publication as paper books on illegal torrent sites.

All these new DRM free ebooks will be available from all major ebook sellers as before.

For owners of their older DRM protected ebooks:

I wonder if they would be prepared also to allow us to swap any ebooks we bought from them before they removed the protection for non DRM protected copies? Interesting thought I feel.

So, lets see what the other major publishers make of this move by Tor.. Should be interesting, and if it finally frees us from the tyranny of the much loathed DRM systems it has to be a really great thing for all of us readers – finally no longer to be treated as criminals by these companies.

Link to Tor: http://www.tor.com/

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So, what are your feelings about this revolutionary move by Tor? Will it result in a flood of pirated Tor ebooks? Or will it simply allow us to own our ebooks as we should be able to?