That's a shitty kind of a deal. There are other options, e.g. Greg Egan sells his books on SmashWords - you get full text of the book (epub) via email, no DRM, most money goes directly to the author. Getting unencumbered full text is much better - you can use it with TTS read of your choice, search, summarize, whatever you want.

So other options exist, it's just that most people (and authors) don't give a flying fuck and give their money to bloodsuckers