I Too Am a Repressed Nerd,,,

hey everyone! I’m going to be closing my shop from april 11th to april 18th in solidarity with other etsy sellers to protest etsy’s latest seller fee price hike and certain new policies you can read about below! you know I’m always complaining about their fees and how I prefer to be paid outside of etsy whenever possible. I hope you’ll join me and not cross the picket line from april 11th to april 18th! you know where to find me if there’s anything I have listed that you want to buy or you have an idea for a commission! 🖖🏻

“On April 11, 2022, they plan to increase our transaction fees by 30%.

“Etsy’s last fee increase was in July 2018. If this new one goes through, our basic fees to use the platform will have more than doubled in less than four years. These basic fees do not include additional fees for Offsite ads - which started during the first wave of the pandemic.

“Etsy was founded with a vision of ‘keeping commerce human’ by ‘democratizing access to entrepreneurship.’ As a result, people who have been marginalized in traditional retail economies -- women, people of color, LGBTQ people, neurodivergent people, etc. -- make up a significant proportion of Etsy's sellers. For many of us, Etsy makes up our main source of income.”

Microsoft has a DRM-locked ebook store that isn’t making enough money, so they’re shutting it down and taking away every book that every one of its customers acquired effective July 1.

Customers will receive refunds.

This puts the difference between DRM-locked media and unencumbered media into sharp contrast. I have bought a lot of MP3s over the years, thousands of them, and many of the retailers I purchased from are long gone, but I still have the MP3s. Likewise, I have bought many books from long-defunct booksellers and even defunct publishers, but I still own those books.

When I was a bookseller, nothing I could do would result in your losing the book that I sold you. If I regretted selling you a book, I didn’t get to break into your house and steal it, even if I left you a cash refund for the price you paid.

People sometimes treat me like my decision not to sell my books through Amazon’s Audible is irrational (Audible will not let writers or publisher opt to sell their books without DRM), but if you think Amazon is immune to this kind of shenanigans, you are sadly mistaken. My books matter a lot to me. I just paid $8,000 to have a container full of books shipped from a storage locker in the UK to our home in LA so I can be closer to them. The idea that the books I buy can be relegated to some kind of fucking software license is the most grotesque and awful thing I can imagine: if the publishing industry deliberately set out to destroy any sense of intrinsic, civilization-supporting value in literary works, they could not have done a better job.

Cailbre d/l:

https://calibre-ebook.com/download

How to use cailbre to remove DRM:

Some more tutorials and tools:

removing DRM from your kindle purchases

Removing DRM from epubs

“i want my kermit the frog tshirt now.”

“yeah so what may we do for you?”