Kobo takes a number of steps to protect your content from piracy. When Kobo customers read books they’ve purchased on one of Kobo’s ereaders or apps, we encrypt them so they can’t copy or save the book outside of their app or ereader.
In addition to those protections, we offer our authors the option to enable Digital Rights Management (DRM) on all of their titles.
Whether or not you enable DRM, your content will always be protected when customers read on Kobo ereaders or apps. Enabling DRM adds another level of protection for customers who prefer to read outside of the Kobo reading environment.
Books that don’t have DRM enabled can be downloaded from Kobo.com as epubs which customers can then read on their preferred ereading platform. If you’re not comfortable with that, we suggest you enable DRM on all of your books.
If you enable DRM, Kobo will apply Adobe DRM to your books. This means that when customers download their purchased books through Kobo.com, instead of downloading an epub, they’ll download an .acsm file that must be opened in Adobe Digital Editions. It will then download the DRM-protected epub. These DRM-protected epubs can only be used once.