Children's eBooks: DRM and Piracy
Should you enable DRM or not?
Children’s books are mainly sold through paperbacks, but we still offer ebooks for special markets. The ebooks are read on reading apps such as EPIC! or Booka, but they are also available from all the educational distributors such as Mackin or Follett, or distributors such as Apple iBooks, GoogleBooks, or distributors such as Draft2Digital. KDP/Amazon is another market for children’s books and today, I want to talk about upcoming changes for those ebooks on Amazon.
Digital Rights Management (DRM) will change on January 20, 2026. DRM is a technology that protects your books from being copied or pirated. Yes, children’s books are pirated, as we learned this year with the Anthropic Copyrights Class-Action Lawsuit.
So, before we go any farther, the first thing you must do against piracy is establish your legal rights under copyright. As soon as you write a book, it is copyrighted. But if you want the right to sue and obtain financial settlements, you must file your copyright with Copyright.gov. It’s a simple process that you can do yourself, no help required. Simply create an account at Copyright.gov and follow instructions.
Then, you need to consider your choices, especially in light of changes in the library market late this year.
