DRM-free e-books are a big deal (2019)
libraryjournal.com
libraryjournal.com
I hope more authors and publishers start releasing their stuff DRM-free too. As it stands, I have a jailbroken Kindle that I run KOReader on; I use a Calibre plugin to bust the DRM off of any book I buy for my Kindle, then port the ebook over to my device.
Of course, I wouldn't have to do any of that if publishers would just sell the darn things without DRM.
Import the plugin into Calibre, provide your Kindle serial number, and then DRM removal is transparent.
I have over 2000 books in my library, all DRM-free, thanks to these excellent tools.
Still, I wish more authors would follow. DRM is a plague.
Surely the many "free trade" agreements Australia has entered mean you can use US stores as much as you please? ;)
Unfortunnately in the paper world there are separate North American and CommonWealth contracts. Many publishers do only one thus many books have different publishers in the two regions.
These two contracts could have one with DRM and one without.
Could I buy books from the Kobo store, strip the DRM, and load them onto my Kindle?
And it's good to have competition, that's why I buy most ebooks on kobo.
So far, yes. Kobo hasn't updated their encryption in many years, and it's easily broken by DeDRM.
> Could I buy books from the Kobo store, strip the DRM, and load them onto my Kindle?
Certainly, you could. It might even encourage you to switch devices down the line. :)
The only exception is a few new KFX files, which are still unsupported by deDRM.
The publisher wouldn't have to do anything if the tech was built to protect works by default.
Youtube protects big hollywood with copyright strikes, but apparenty books are beneath protection.
It's your tech industry, stop blaming the publishers.
And it's not the "tech industry" in the first place, it's fucking Adobe.
I have bought hundreds of ebooks and all were cheaper than the mass market paperback.
The silly thing about DRM for media is that, fundamentally, anyone can break it with manual effort, just by transcribing the words, or recording the video/music.
Besides, anyone who doesn't break DRM runs the risk that the vendor will take away access to the books they already paid for. It's happened before.
Who cares what people record for personal use. Copyright strike any books uploaded to windows machines from usb sticks and ethernet cables, with the same copyright strike system.
Then nobody will care when you time-shift or format-shift media you already 'own'.
There is a clear bias in protecting cloud software/some games and hollywood products. That bias has always protected the 'economic interests' and left the average joe flat on his bum.
If we live in a world where private conversations cannot exist, thanks to global survelliance, then your windows PC and copies of media, are subject to the same (bs) overseers. I didn't ask for this massive overwatch system, but now it's here....
[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dragonsteel/surprise-fo...
Has rankings, plus a reasonably good discovery engine. More sales on the platform will influence the former and could influence the latter, leading to even more sales.
Buying direct puts more money into the author's pocket per sale but has zero ability to influence other sales.
There is no easy answer.
And of course there's a ton of non epic fantasy (Skyward & Steelheart skew younger).
See also: https://www.brandonsanderson.com/where-do-i-start/
Especially for pdfs where you can swap to landscape, reduce margins etc. Has a cool feature to highlight and create a QR code you can scan if you want to share snippets.
Used it on my old kindle and currently on my kobo ereader.
- https://www.ebooks.com/en-uk/drm-free/
- https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/
DRM-free audiobooks:
Other lists and tips on where to buy DRM-free:
- https://libreture.com/bookshops/
- https://aperiodic.net/phil/archives/Geekery/where-to-get-ebo...
(Here in Norway we've so far been lucky, I've yet to see e-books with DRM. There's ebok.no which does watermarks, but that feels acceptable.)
I have some of their military history books in printed books and was happy to discover recently that they are selling DRM-free EPUBs. They also cover many other historical topics (like the section on technology history) and sell some books from other publishers too.
- https://ospreypublishing.com/
- https://weightlessbooks.com/
Public Domain Ebooks:
Audio Books:
Public Domain Audio Books:
Standard Ebooks is seriously impressive. One of my favorite sources of books in the public domain.
I’d also add in addition to this excellent list of DRM-free ebooks, it’s always worth looking into borrowing a book from the library via Libby/Overdrive.
Book summaries: https://littlerbooks.com
I hadn't heard of libro.fm. I'll have to give them a try, thanks for pointing them out.
Enough with the "bought, but actually renting with an undetermined end date".
And paying sends the message of "I'm OK with DRM shittified media, abuse me more!"
Stripping DRM is also illegal under DMCA. Might as well just pirate and call it a day. Either way you mention leaves you illegal
It is not illegal to mail cash within the US, unless you're trying to avoid paying taxes/launder money.
Not sure about other countries, a cursory web search didn't turn up anything useful.
Yes, which is why nobody is saying "buy second-hand books to support your favorite author".
Also, it's probably a small effect, but I'd guess that the existence of a secondary market contributes to at least some primary sales (since the buyers know they will probably be able to resell a book if they need to, making them more likely to buy a primary copy if they want to read it right now).
Somebody paid for a second-hand copy, nobody paid for a pirated copy.
Incidentally, many favorite books that I pirated when I was broke and had very little room, I later bought paper copies of.
I also pirate most music, but if I really like a band I discovered via piracy, I will buy their vinyl or see them in concert.
The ability to freely share content scondhand, be it a paper book or in digital form, creates new fans. Some of those fans have money to give back, or will share with people that do.
Because they provide a platform (making content more visible), payment processing (which can be 3% or more for some payment methods), customer support etc.
If content producers don't need any of that, they can always have a self-hosted website with their own donation button (or physical mailing address for checks and banknotes, cryptocurrency address etc).
> I think all authors and other content producers should have sort of a tip jar
That tip jar would cut out everybody else involved in the production of a book and in getting you to even find out about it existing.
Every author has the option to self-publish and set their own price (including a "pay-as-you-wish" option), but on the other hand, if they prefer the (relatively) lower risk of going with a traditional publisher, you should also respect that decision and not sidestep that by unilaterally deciding that "oh, I'd prefer you would have made this DRM-free and pay-as-you-wish, here's a check for $20!".
If somebody puts together a different tip jar which supports and even wider variety of people, or does so in a more equitable way, I want to be free to choose that one instead.
Let content compete for legitimacy based on how integrated into the wider community it's associated tip jar is.
Not everybody wants a tip jar. Why should you get to impose your views over that of the author who’s book you want to read?
I don't care if they think I should read it in a couch or a hammock or a bathtub, why should I care whether they think I should print it on a page or project it on my ceiling or peer at it through a cloud of malware?
There are people who want to turn the world into a skinner box. I'm not going to fund their project just because I appreciate an author who has made a deal with them at some point. The author did not make that deal on my behalf.
If I can't pay an author without also paying my enemies, then I'm not going to pay the author. But I'd really rather pay the author.
As long as you just leech, you're not sharing copyrighted content, and therefore arguably not in breach of copyright.
Any resources/tools/tutorials you'd recommend?
Even then I’ve found around 5% don’t decrypt
Here's one option you might try (no connection to it but it seems to be one of the most recently usable, trustworthy versions) https://github.com/noDRM/DeDRM_tools
Even on IT related ebooks, some authors only publish their ebooks on Amazon.
They’ve pretty much closed this loophole. IIRC now you need an older physical Kindle that doesn’t support KFX files and you can download files for that device.
It’s still a crappy workaround because the older file format doesn’t have any of the latest typography features.
Piracy is more ethical than buying DRM media.
I know at least one author that refuses “out-of-band payments” for that reason.
And this is to say nothing about advance payments where the publisher is taking the risk of a book not selling, and the author gets paid regardless, which can be a big thing for small authors too.
Using piracy from the beginning ensures nobody gets paid.
A library can only lend as many copies as it purchases. Someone selling their copy can only sell the copy they purchased. These secondaries are constrained by the primary.
Your talking about one person buying a single copy and then distributing it for free in perpetuity. This secondary is not constrained by the primary.
Only if you sent $$ to the author/s.
And don't forget to send a larger chunk money to other new prospective authors that you don't know and that haven't even sold a single copy of their book (or maybe not even finished it yet)!
Indeed. And also do not underestimate the cost of adding DRM to media. Don't know about ebooks, but for streaming media I would estimate about half the engineering time spent designing, building and maintaining video work flows is somehow related to CENC, CBCS, Widevine, Playready, Fairplay and the whole ecosystem of third party consultancy around this.
For larger platforms these investments are worthwhile, but I don't think it's a coincidence that smaller audio shops and podcasts generally avoid DRM for streaming audio (where margins are smaller than Live/On demand video streaming).
We have been living millenia without DRM protection of books so I would wager the justification of their necessity is dubious at best.
I 100% always pay for books available without DRM such as from No Starch Press. I encourage any authors reading to consider similarly ethical publishers.
Not buying it nor downloading it illegally would be the ethical stance.
That's the crucial difference between choosing what you think is right and using an external source, you have access to your thoughts while they don't.
Some bands have been scolded and threatened by their publishers for said public voice, and instead choose silence as they could be sued by their producers/publishers.
Creators I have contacted about DRM almost never reply. Likely for similar contractual reasons. They can only legally respond with scolding or silence.
I did have one artist I contacted reply once. They were Christian and all but said I would go to hell for sharing copies of someone elses work.
I asked how they felt about Jesus replicating and freely sharing someone else's bread and fish. They never replied again.
In my country, you have a legal right to share copies to close friends. I think that’s ethical, but I don’t think it’s ethical when people mass download someone’s work without paying them when they were charging for it.
And woah! I completely underestimated how much user hostile anti-piracy tech has grown in the past 20 years .
Couldn't even play my DVD, that I bought, with my money, on my computer. Had to install a bunch of libraries to deal with all the file chunking and mangling they do now, just to play a video, not even burning it, just play.
Really raised my blood pressure that one.
Mainstream DVDs have pretty much always been a collection of .TS files on the disc, best ripped with specialized software. Things like VLC pull in those libraries upon install anyway. Also, I think you mean "rip" rather than "burn", if you mean to copy data from the disc to your machine.
You can buy it or use it free with the beta keys, and it should solve your problem.
For audio books, I find Libro.fm to be awesome: DRM free, great prices, and nice app and infrastructure.
1. DRM-free
2. No more expensive than the cheapest suggested retail price
3. Available in a generic format (EPUB, preferably)
So far, I've had excellent luck with Baen books, and decent luck with Tor books and miserable luck with just about every other publisher. Still, jokes on them, I will just pirate if I can't find a version that fits my criteria.
With old books, they're competing with used books which are most often very inexpensive, so may as well get you an ebook for free or low cost and if you like it, hopefully you're buy the author's future books when they're new.
Which is a nice segue into a related topic, that by instituting DRM, publishers have removed the possibility for consumers to buy a book, read it once, and, knowing they will not want to read it again, decide to resell it for some of the value so they can buy more books.
None of this makes piracy ethical. But the whole system is rife with unethical practices, participating in almost any way is a quandary. The choice of simply not consuming literature and technical knowledge with the benefits of modern technology is not a perfect solution, for the individual nor society, either.
In some US cities it is literally illegal to feed the homeless. In every US city it is illegal to go on mile over the speed limit. In some countries it is illegal to not turn in your neighbors for being gay.
Be careful with confusing legality with ethics.
Maybe: "In some US cities it is literally legal to apply eminent domain to kick people out of their houses to enlarge a freeway" would be a better slippery slope, but that's still a totally different power dynamic.
So yeah I dunno. Try to come up with a better analogy, but definitely keep to your slippery slope. It'll convince somebody.
https://www.kobo.com/ww/en/p/drm-free
Your current best bet IMO is just to search for books that have this line on their description page:
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/shadow-claw
> At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
You could turn that into your search engine filter, i.e.:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22without+Digital+Rights+Manageme...
But admittedly that's not a great way to search.
Your better option is just to make note of some publishers that do not use DRM (like Tor Publishing), and search against them instead.
When I see something like Kindle or Audible, the first thing I do is check to see if I can strip off the DRM. If I'm buying it, I have the right to use it anyway I see fit (short of copying and redistributing...obviously).
I still check the DRM-free places first, because they deserve the sale, even if the price is higher. If I can't, I'll buy it and strip the DRM off (super simple, with the right software). If that won't work, I'll check the darknet. If there's a decent copy there, then I'll buy the useless DRM work (so the author gets paid), and use the darknet copy for my library.
Technically, this probably breaks several US laws. But I don't think any lawyer wants to try a case where I paid for the books/audiobooks, then removed their DRM. Kinda hard to show damages, or bad intent.
But at this point it gets faster downloading a pirated ebook than buying one. Why publishers don’t actively fight the book piracy and offer a better way to read eBook? The eBook market is large. And kindle is not an alternative solution since uses a proprietary format. I’m a proud user of Kobo for that reason
If it works for the music industry (basically all purchases are DRM-free since the iTunes store dropped theirs), why shouldn't it work for publishing?
If a title is only legally available with DRM, I'll just do without, not pirate.
When the book is available non-DRM, such as from ebooks.com, I've paid a hefty premium over the Kindle DRM price.
Thanks to O'Reilly for being clueful enough to sell non-DRM versions.
If the DRM situation gets even worse, I don't know what I'll do. I'd like the DRM situation to get better, not worse.
Did O’Reilly start selling ebooks again? Directly? Several years ago it stopped doing that and pushed the Safari or O’Reilly subscription as the only way to read its catalog of books. I provided feedback at that time, but the policies didn’t change. But I have seen some O’Reilly books in Humble Bundle sales once in a while.
There was also a time when O’Reilly and Apress would have a “deal of the day” every single day, selling ebooks at a much lower price than retail..all DRM free. I haven’t seen those in years.
https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/book/210313783/programming-rust...
Bad news is that the O'Reilly site's page for the book is now (as of around start of 2023) sending people to a subscription, though:
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/programming-rust-2nd/97...
They used to send people to Amazon or Ebooks.com first:
https://web.archive.org/web/20221128145404/https://www.oreil...
Longer term, I don't know whether they intend to keep Ebooks.com and Amazon as options at all, for those who can find the options.
Imagine how quickly we could get rid of all DRM if everybody simply stopped buying DRM! The world would be so much better! To me it feels like a moral obligation to not support any kind of DRM. Luckily there are plenty of authors and distributors who support DRMfree books, games, audio. Let's make the world a better place, for ourselves and for the next generations, by simply refusing DRM!
Surprisingly, some time ago all large publishers (or rather, their trade union) have agreed to drop DRM in favor of "invisible watermarking" for all of the German-language books they sell – except for one. Take a wild guess which one...
In any case, this is really great when buying books: Since it's all just DRM-free ePubs, I can read them on whatever hardware I want, including a Kindle.
The formatting and UI is a bit off compared to "native" Kindle books (which are also just ePub at this point!) because Amazon refuses to activate their nicer/newer renderer for "personal documents", but not being locked into a given ecosystem for books I already bought vastly outweighs that.
Best Buy will no longer be selling physical DVDs soon. What happens if publishers stop selling paper books and only sell licenses for ebooks?
Edit: https://time.com/6266147/internet-archive-copyright-infringe...
Have you actually tried writing a book that you'd want to read? I think there are very few authors who just knock one out like you imply.
[0]: Editors are very useful, but you could feasibly avoid utilizing them, and they're also not so expensive as to be out of the range of what an individual person could afford to hire, so my point stands even if you take them into consideration.
So is piracy.
So instead of paying the privilege of being illegal, just pirate and save your money.
XKCD called this hypocrisy out ages ago. https://xkcd.com/488/
Authors are not powerless victims here.
Perhaps not entirely powerless, but nearly so if they want anybody to actually read their book, or to make any money on it.
Doctorow has written extensively on this:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/31/seize-the-means-of-comput...
> I won't let my books be sold with DRM, which means that Audible won't carry my audiobooks. My agent tells me that this decision has cost me enough money to pay off my mortgage and put my kid through college.
Big authors like Sanderson and Doctorow can pull it off, small and new authors, if they want to build an audience, really can't.
I recently read Adrian Tchaikovsky. If I wanted to send him money, I google his name, end up at his website, and at the bottom is a contact page: https://adriantchaikovsky.com/contact.html there's his agent's address at the bottom, where I can easily mail cash. This works for most authors.
In the past I've emailed small creators, such as authors or music producers, and simply asked them for their cashapp, paypal, or venmo, and sent them money that way. Many small producers already have this info on their website or instagram for this exact reason.
It is illustrated as a comic (but not considered a comic) and due to the shitty experience with the Kindle desktop app and Kindle web app I am unable to actually zoom and read it properly as I would with any PDF or CBZ.
Basically removing the DRM and converting it is the only way I'd be able to enjoy it and to do that I'd need the whole calibre+dedrm machinery which I'm not even sure works on my box.
Damn Amazon and DRM using publishers.
DRM for books will of course always be easily bypassible - it's just text and images, not exactly hard to copy. But I don't see how a "library" can work without some limit on how long you can be using a piece of content.
Artificially imposing a limitation doesn’t seem like a great thing to do.
The library could charge per download.
There could be be ads, though that seems distasteful.
None of these require making an ebook available for a limited amount of time.
> While pricing for unlimited-user, DRM-free e-books is higher than the cost of traditional 1-user versions protected by DRM technology, DRM-free materials are also seeing more usage—and so the cost per use is ultimately lower.
I read that as: for some works, the libraries are buying "unlimited-user" licences that basically allows them to give away copies of the book to borrowers (not "borrowers" any more, I guess?).
Kindle formats for example are locked into .ksx format, which you can strip out into a DRM free epub, but most people can't or don't know how to. This means:
- They have to buy amazon ereaders if they want to read their books
- No other company can reliably build ereaders for an exclusively proprietary format like ksx
Aside: I think if publishers want to protect their books from being shared for free, watermarking [0] is a better solution than DRM. It brings back the same dynamics we have with sharing physical books (common with friends, less so with strangers), and also is a lot more obvious to non-technical people.
It must be bigger phenomenon than authors understand.
Palahniuk knows this and made a video how to steal more of his books.
Lars Wilderäng seems to understand it too, because he just jokes about it in X. He probably made those torrents himself as they are from trilogies and people are compelled to buy rest of the books, like I did.
The laws in many countries make it specifically illegal to break/circumvent DRM (even if making a copy, e.g. for personal use or viewing it on an unsupported device, would otherwise would be legal!), which is pretty messed up.
If you buy DRMed content because you know it's easily breakable, you are sending the signal that you are fine with DRM for purchased (not rented) goods, which is probably not what you want since it reinforces this unfortunate status quo.
If you want to actually support "asserting ownership" of digital goods, support DRM-free content.
Audiobooks from Audible can be downloaded via the UI. They will have DRM, but it's possible to remove.
If you have audiobook files without DRM you can listen to them via any app that plays audio, but there's also at least one OSS project that aims to fill audiobook UI niche [1].
That said, it's very easy to remove Audible DRM. Each of your purchases is encrypted with the same short series of bytes. You can fetch them by uploading any purchase to this site [0] (also open source). Then, FFmpeg supports the `-activation_bytes` arg for this exact purpose:
ffmpeg -activation_bytes <ActivationBytes> -i <Input>.aax -c copy <Output>.m4b
I know this is correct because I found out the hard way. Couldn't keep up with listening so cancelled the sub. Came back when I had time but the credits were gone (think about 7). Was pretty mad but found out they do mention this somewhere. Threw 5 euros at Libation, downloaded my library and never looked back.
Cancel your subscription, download all your books from audible, put them on a NAS, run Plex, and use Plexamp for access.
I still buy things via Audible, I just immediately download them and load them into my Plex server.
DRM should be allowed, but it must expire when the copyright does, it must accommodate transferring titles from one person to another, it must provide a way for accessibility devices to access the book, it must not lock readers into a single ecosystem, etc…
Unless the author sells an epub version I usually pirate them now.
It got so frustrating finding out a book wasn’t available in my part of the world once I tried to purchase it.
Piracy isn't stealing if purchasing isn't ownership
Failing that, I mostly get things from my local library (via Libby). Conveniently, those all have weak DRM, so one could still build a personal library that way.
Doesn't this motivate publishers to only let books be shared from public libraries using strong DRM?
I would guess that the DRM mostly does its job though, but it's hard to say for sure!
Libraries to Publishers: Please stop abusing our readers so much.
Readers: The library helps me pirate, muahahaha.
Publishers: I rest my case.
1) All of the heavy lifting is done sneakily by the word "purchasing." Of course "purchasing" something feels like you ought to own it, but did you "purchase" X or did you just pay for limited access to it? That's the entire debate, but this quote baits you into thinking of everything in terms of purchasing / panders to people that already do.
2) This quote amounts to "if paying cannot get you full ownership of X then getting a full copy of X for free is not stealing (so go ahead)." How about you always pay the creator and then pirate only for the additional ownership rights? I'm sure the quote reads that way to some people, but clearly it was crafted to also appeal to the "I just want stuff for free" crowd.
In each of these cases, the creators are getting paid. I'm just getting an actual durable file out of the deal, not DRM garbage that I'll hopefully still be able to use later.
Besides, I'm pretty sure it's this one:
https://www.amazon.com/Ring-Xeelee-Sequence-Stephen-Baxter/d...
http://www.davisr.me/projects/books/
On that note, do the same for your CDs and Blu-Rays.
“Unfortunately, software that strips an e-book of its DRM protections is readily available online.”
What??? UNfortunately?
And this is coming from Library Journal?