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Comment by jangid | Hacker News Reader

From where do you guys purchase or download (free) EPUBS? I wanted Christensen books and didn't find any. Either they are tied to Kindle or Noob.

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If you enjoy sci-fi, Tor Books gives a free novel in epub and mobi formats each month or so; just sign up for the e-newsletter.

This is literally the reason I'm excited to learn about nov.el and other epub readers; when I get an epub book, I sigh inwardly because there's 2-3 more steps to go before I can actually read it, e.g. email the file to my kindle address, wait for Amzn to ask me to verify it's not spam, then finally download it to my Kindle.

For public domain books there's https://standardebooks.org

Project Gutenberg also gives you EPUB downloads for any of their ebooks. (Though some older ebooks are transcribed/processed as text-only, so the HTML/EPUB is autogenerated and loses the original structure.)

StandardEbooks are book from Gutenberg that have been cleaned and make to look nicer. See https://standardebooks.org/about/

It's not just "cleaned and make to look nicer". StandardEbooks ebooks contain editorial changes from the original text. They're tagged in the changelog, but they're mixed with technical edits so there's no easy way to revert them. I'd rather read the Project Gutenberg versions.

From the same people that run sci hub. Please remember that authors need to eat too though. If you have money you should support them by buying their books or they may write fewer of them for you to enjoy.

This doesn't excuse DRM. Personally I don't read ebooks because (1) I won't accept DRM, (2) I won't pirate. Instead I buy a few books in dead tree format but mainly lots of authors are losing out.

You could buy the dead tree and pirate the ebook supporting the author but not drm.

Some publishers do not use DRM - I believe that's the case for Tor and Baen, in SF/Fantasy. Baen sells direct in their site, including monthly bundles.

If they work thru big publishers authors get actually very little from every book purchase. So in practice most of your payments go to feed large majors. I wish more authors would go the path of self publishing so they can maximize their compensation per book sale.

More authors are self publishing than ever before. The problem is that you never hear about them. Additionally, the editing on self-published books tends to be a lot rougher.

Plus, they tend to price very cheap, so they’re probably getting about the same per sale as a normal royalty on a print book. And, any editorial service (proofreading, copyediting, etc.) has to be paid out of the author’s share.

Removing DRM from (purchased) EPUBs or MOBIs and/or converting them works extremely well. Otherwise, there are numerous websites that offer downloads, IRC and BitTorrent.

ebookhunter dot ch.

The pop-ups can be pretty annoying, but just close them and persist; the download links are pretty legit.

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