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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

I've always just used Calibre because it's a nice way for me to strip DRM and then archive my books. I've never really used it any kind of active way. Since I buy pretty much everything from Amazon, I already effectively have a content server.

Does anybody have a link to an online server (with public domain books)? I'm curious to see what the presentation is like. What's the typography like? Does the screen dim after 30s? What's the browser battery consumption like compared to an ereader app?

Long term, my big concern about ebooks is DRM. Amazon's most recent version (KFX) hasn't been cracked and workarounds involve getting Amazon to send you an older version of the file with older, crappier hyphenation and layout. I've started mostly buying DRM free books from Amazon, but they don't make it easy to find them.

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My response is to avoid buying ebooks from Amazon if possible.

Most of my purchases are from Weightless Books [1] which sells only DRM free books and magazines.

Granted, this is a limited and small market (SF related stuff) but if I have a choice of getting a book DRM free from a vendor or getting it from Amazon, I would avoid Amazon, even if its price was cheaper.

[1] https://weightlessbooks.com/

Baen [1] are also still DRM-free and sell a bunch of smaller publishers too, but again it's all fairly genre-limited.

[1] http://www.baen.com/baenebooks

I agree. I've purchased a lot of things from Angry Robot[1]. It's a similar story: smaller market and mostly SF, but I've enjoyed a large number of their offerings. You purchase in UKP via Paypal (no need for Paypal account), but the conversion has never seemed to have been a problem.

[1] https://www.angryrobotbooks.com/

> My response is to avoid buying ebooks from Amazon if possible.

This severely limits what ebooks one can read. I used to torrent DRM-free epubs and buy the paper copy so I could support the work without appearing to support DRM. Lately though I've been skipping the torrent part and just buying the paper books.

I wonder how many people do this and if it over inflates piracy figures or physical book readership

Does it even matter when the people using these numbers will distort the facts anyway?

(this may not apply that much to books but most types of content are usually filled with DRM garbage, region restrictions, usually have worse quality and distribution methods, and they pretend to not understand why people choose to pirate it)

If you think most people who pirate are aware of region restrictions or notice the quality difference, I think you're mistaken. That's a rationale that some idealists use, but most people would just rather not pay.

Streaming video piracy sites are becoming more popular than downloading, and that's usually poorer quality and worse interfaces than the official sources.

> but most people would just rather not pay

These people wouldn't pay no matter what you do so it's not really relevant. I'm talking about people who resort to piracy because they can't pay to get what they want. Or the value just isn't justifiable.

For example, I feel cheated when I have to wait months for content to be available in my country. Sometimes years (or not ever). So I go and download some torrent since I can't buy the content anyway. And now I'm one of the numbers on their spreadsheets.

If licensing is broken or too hard to manage, they should spent the money fixing that instead of going after "pirates".

> but most people would just rather not pay

I purchase out-of-print paper books, but I would really like to get out of the dead-tree-storage business.

A couple of years ago we donated most of our 3000 books to our school. I still have boxes, though. Mostly textbooks, because textbook sales terms have become even more exorbitant than when we were students.

I would gladly pay for eBook copies of the novels I own and enjoy. Many are simply not for sale.

And textbook market is getting weird: either $200 each, or open courseware for little or no $$.

I've never met anyone in person who thought it sounded worthwhile.

I did go back to paper books. I used to love Kindles, I bought them as gifts all the time (the device), but I want a DRM-free copy of books I buy.

I used to think DRM by Amazon was a kind of wink-wink nudge-nudge, we pretend to do DRM but we don't really. But then they went serious about it, and so I left the platform.

This is often the case for me as well. I buy the paper book and send it on for (destructive) scanning, netting me a DRM free ebook.

Kobo has a fairly excellent selection of ebooks, some of which have DRM, but there are straightforward tools for removing it, if that's your cup of tea.

Whatever else is wrong with it the Kindle store is incredibly convenient in a way that sideloading books isn't. I can tether to my phone and get a book instantly wherever I happen to be at the moment.

I will buy DRM-free when it's available, but stripping DRM from Kindle Store is the next best option, and usually cheaper too.

Amazon should have an DRM-free option or fingerprinting option for publishers. I am not sure if it does. I believe some publishers would be fine with fingerprinting, since that is what they do on their own sites when you buy a PDF (Springer is one). All the Gutenberg books on Amazon are DRM-free I believe, and it's just more convenient to get them there if you have a kindle and have a significant collection of eBooks from the last few years.

>My response is to avoid buying ebooks from Amazon if possible.

Why? Just because of DRM?

Yes.

It's philosophical for me. Yes, I could buy a DRM book and then strip the DRM but that is self-defeating in the long run, in my opinion.

By refusing to buy DRM books from Amazon and choosing to buy from non-DRM providers instead, I'm sending a message as a consumer about my DRM preferences. I'm also trying to support the non-DRM providers by keeping them in business.

Buying DRM books from Amazon, then stripping it away quietly only signals that you don't mind DRM and discourages other people from directly providing non-DRM options.

I've yet to run into an Amazon-purchased book that Calibre can't liberate, and I haven't even updated Calibre since installing it a few years back. Where are you seeing this turn up? If I need to be looking for alternate sellers or finding some workaround, better to know it ahead of time, I suppose.

KFX just started rolling out in recent months.

As the parent post said, the only way right now to "crack" is to dodge it. To have Amazon send you a copy of your book for a older device or older version of the PC software that doesn't support KFX, so they have to send you a crackable format instead.

I haven't done anything with Barnes & Noble in quite some time, but I've been curious to try a eBook purchase from there to see if their current DRM is any more friendly.

That explains why I haven't seen it! I haven't updated Kindle for PC in years, either.

Thanks for the info! I might have to give B&N a try myself, although at the moment the only books on my list are preordered.

Most of the DRM removal tools are based on Apprentice Alf's DeDRM library. Here's the Github issue related to KFX:

https://github.com/apprenticeharper/DeDRM_tools/issues/38

Does this mean if you used kindle unlimited you could effectively keep the books forever?

As mentioned just up thread, if you don't purchase in the most recent KFX DRM format, you can strip the DRM. However AFAIK this is illegal to do for Kindle Unlimited ebooks. You are not supposed to keep them, just borrow.

If you are going to pirate the book, you might as well just go straight to something like Pirates Bay. It's much easier.

Very many books are not available on torrent sites.

Very many are available on library genesis among others. The pirate bay is a bad place for books.

> Does anybody have a link to an online server (with public domain books)?

[Izzy's eBook Library of English Public Domain books](https://ebooks.qumran.org/opds/?lang=en)

[Izzy's eBook Library of German Public Domain books](https://ebooks.qumran.org/opds/?lang=de)

[Feedbooks' have a "Free" category in this following library](http://www.feedbooks.com/catalog.atom)

[Free books on Beam Shop](https://www.beam-shop.de/angebote-specials/gratis/?p=1) (from a quick check, titles were in English, but could be German, too, or mixed)

[Manybooks](http://manybooks.net/opds/)

There are also others but in Hungarian, Russian, Japanese languages. Besides, there is always Gutenberg.org for Classics.

I don't think those are running the Calibre Content Server. I was hoping to find a live instance so that I could see what the books look like in my browser.

What are some of the sites for Japanese books?

In Japanese or translated to English? If you are interested in a collection of Japanese bestsellers/classics, translated to English, then asking over at the /lit/ forum of 4chan (hear! hear!) will yield you some interesting answers. Other...I don't know.

Aw, I was looking for Japanese books in Japanese

> workarounds involve getting Amazon to send you an older version of the file

I have stopped buying ebooks from Amazon when I discovered I couldn't strip DRM from them anymore, but I wasn't aware of these workarounds.

Where can I find tutorials about those? (I have about 20 ebooks I bought between the time KFX came out and the time I found out about it).

How do you differentiate between DRM-free and DRM-protected books on Amazon?

Up until I have read this comment, I didn't even know that Amazon support DRM-free books.

Tor doesn't put DRM on any of it's titles. For an example, look up Cory Doctorow's book Walkaway. At the bottom of the book description it says:

> At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Unfortunately, they don't always tell you. If you look up Little Brother (another of Doctorow's books), it doesn't say anything about DRM even though the book doesn't have DRM.

Ah, well, at least the sentence is consistent and does not change. Something like:

    site:amazon.com "At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied."

Gives me ~37.4k results (out of ~5m Kindle books, assuming that Google indexed every single one of them).

All of Cory Doctorow's books are available DRM free and free-as-in-beer free from his website, craphound.com

He's always made a point of that

Walkaway is his first book that isn't available from his website for free.

oh, ok

It's completely up to the publisher (or author if self-published) to enable DRM or not via a checkbox in the UI when publishing on Amazon.

We've been releasing ours with the same CC license as Cory Doctorow, but honestly very few people really seem to care, unfortunately.

Re public domain books, try out Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/

Why are you guys so concerned about authors trying to control the profitless distribution of their product? I'm being serious -- what's the issue?

That's not really a relevant question.

We are concerned about content that we purchase being tied to a single method of distribution which may disappear at any given moment, so we make backups which will be compatible with future and past devices and storage.

Why should they control it? I want to buy one copy of a book and then lend it to my friends and family members and borrow books that they have bought. I want to give my old collection of YA sci-fi to my friend's kid. I want to browse my friends' bookshelves and borrow something that looks interesting.

Because their quest for control works only when it restricts the things I've always been able to do with paper books.

When I buy books I can give them away, I can resell them, I can loan them to you, I can leave them to my kids in my will, and I can read them in any country that I want.

I want to be able to do the same things with digital books. I remove the DRM from every book that I buy and I feel no guilt over doing so. Today I read on a Kindle, but maybe tomorrow I want to buy a Kobo device. When I do, I don't want to lose access to my library.

Is any of that unreasonable?

Perhaps that's just the price you pay for access to ebooks at all -- particularly via an incredibly convenient system like Kindle? (Also, loaning -- the most pressing concern here -- is supported.)

Authors need to get paid. I completely understand the irritation DRM presents, but if you want to be able to resell your books or pass them down through the generations, maybe paper copies are the way to go under our present conditions.

A second question. Most of us, I presume, work in software. How do you approach the distribution of your work? Is unlimited piracy of your code an acceptable price to pay for giving customers unfettered access to the product of your labor, in your eyes?

Loaning is supported as long as the other person is also using a Kindle. I think if there were a non-proprietary DRM system where I could give my books away or loan them to friends reading on non-Amazon devices, I would feel a lot better about it. Having access to your library when you travel is also a pretty big deal.

You suggest sticking with paper books, but the accessibility benefits (ie large typefaces or screenreaders) that you get with ebooks is hard to give up. For some people, it isn't a matter of choosing between paper or digital, it's digital or nothing.

I agree that authors should usually get paid (I say usually because I support public libraries). However, I don't think there's much evidence that DRM helps authors get paid. Is there a popular book that hasn't been pirated thanks to DRM? Do you think the Amazon lock-in that DRM provides is good for the industry? I certainly don't.

As for your second question, you are probably not going to get the answer you expect. Lots of people here support and work on free and open source software.

Open source software is fantastic -- but is that how we're making our livings? From what I can tell, OSS is either a) a labor of love, in addition to a separate full-time job, b) supported by a nonprofit that pays you a salary out of grants and donations, or c) supported by a corporation that pays you a salary out of EE sales or support revenue. (There may be exceptions, but they seem few.) Only (a) bears any resemblance to the business model for authors.

Some authors certainly receive nonprofit monies, but funding for the arts is notoriously thin. If you were able to create a corporation that sells support contracts for literature or an enterprise edition for scholarship -- and payed out to authors regardless of how well their product performed -- then there might be a comparison.

I wished people thought so high of my code that they actively tried to use it,even through illegal means.

Your question is based on two premises: that DRM reduces piracy by a non-negligible amount, and that anyone pirating a copyrighted work would have otherwise purchased it legally. The available evidence contradicts both.

The other day I walked past a few used book stores. I'm quite sure many of the publishers are out of business - yet the books can be read.

Books only available behind solid DRM will dissappear along with those who operate the drm system. Never mind the fact that they allow for virtual book burning by taking control over the DRM.

See Microsoft zune, yahoo music. Consider that we still read books that are 100s of years old, and ask yourself if you believe DRM will help or hinder the spread of books. Add to this the possibility of "banning" books in certain regions (as with Netflix, Amazon video) - the role of DRM in ensuring corporate profit (author rights and profits are hardly their raison d'être) - puts the world at unacceptable risk.

Copyright doesn't last forever, but DRM can. That's actually a pretty big problem. Maybe DRM vendors should have to share the key and an unlock method with the librarian of Congress?

Good idea - and if the Feds think that asking for backdoors in encryption is reasonable, I don't see how they could possibly disagree with that.

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