Currently I’m still able to buy the book and break the DRM, though that option is rapidly closing. I try to buy it elsewhere if possible, but it’s often not.
Piracy is an option, but because the authors are so small, pirated copies can take months to become available, if they ever are. Also, I consider myself very knowledgeable in breaking the encryption for these files. I would be the person putting the upload out there if I was interested in that kind of thing. So if I’m having difficulty breaking the DRM, chances are high that nobody else has either. Or at least we’d be stuck with crappy OCR’d PDF copies instead of proper epubs.
At the end of the day though, as the consumer, exclusive content like this means I participate in the platform or I simply don’t get access to that content. If it were simply a couple of titles, that’s one thing, but it hurts when it’s an entire genre. It’d be like being a fan of metal music, but 90% of all metal music was only on Spotify and nowhere else. It’s horrible that a single company can control an entire genre like this.
Spiders are welcome to the basement. Currently I’ve got one posted in pretty much every corner down there. Those guys are chill.
I’m also okay with out of the way corner spiders up near ceilings, but only if they aren’t too big.