List of DRM-Free Bookshops
libreture.com
libreture.com
When ok buys a book for kindle, it seems that one supposedly doesn’t own the book? One “owns” it at the “goodwill” of Amazon?
I put my kindle on eBay today and I think going forward I’ll consider buying physical books and when necessary “finding” the digital versions of it?
Do this before next Wednesday and you might save your Kindle books!
Old kindles are best for this; save books in the older .azw3 format. I’m not sure about newer Kindles that use .kfx
Yup. Same for movies, games, music, etc. It's pretty wild how many hard-won rights we abdicated in the move to digital pseudo-property. Not wild in the sense that it's surprising consumers would place a priority on convenience when it came to making purchasing decisions. Wild that legally there's such a huge difference between physical and digital goods. Like, all the consumer rights and protections built up over centuries were deemed invalid on a technicality. "Move fast and break things" indeed.
I think a relatively small proportion of people buying media online fully comprehend that—based on a contract negotiation gone wrong or just the whim of a senior exec—the things they've "bought" can simply be taken away from them. Sellers should be required to make it fully clear (e.g. not just in their 73 page ToS) that they're selling something impermanent and entirely unlike owning physical media.
Unlike a lot of people on here I think I don’t have fundamental problems with DRM, but I think consumers absolutely should be guaranteed more rights over the things they buy. Maybe something like.
* access is non revokable and if any part of the drm scheme stops working the provider must provide a drm stripping tool
* access is transferable
This is unenforcable even in the presence of good will. (If a company goes bankrupt, they might simply not have the resources, or, if relevant programmers leave, then they might not have the ability, to distribute a stripping tool.) A practical measure in this direction might be to mandate that DRM schemes "phone home," which they surely do already, and that they are required to disable themselves if they don't get an affirmative signal.
(Of course, this has its problems from the publishers' point of view, but as a customer I'd be very pleased with it.)
Theres no reason taking away our rights should be easy for the company when DRM mostly just makes life miserable for anyone trying to buy digital goods legally.
Easy. Lock it with a key that functions like a deadman switch and releases into the Library of Congress
But you already are required to deposit your books (or other copyrighted works) with the British Library upon publication and many other countries do the same thing.
https://bookisbn.org.uk/legal-deposit/
The US should probably do the same thing, but the amount of American works that aren't covered by the British Library are probably minimal.
That's exactly what I've started doing.
Libgen, Anna's Archive, et al do however provide a valuable service in maintaining access to works out of distribution or blocked by censorship.
I'm not an absolutist on piracy in either direction, but when X or Y megacorp and all its affiliates can claim to "sell" you goods and then whimsically restrict access to them in such a way that further, future whimsies let them take away your purchased products, i'd hardly blame anyone for pirating.
Also, a company like Meta can pirate over 80 fucking TB of ebook content for indirectly commercial purposes, have its chief lie about being aware of this, and an average person who just wants content without so much bullshit DRM lock-in hassle should feel guilty about their choice?
Which, paradoxically, calls for the need for more and more intellectual practice, which is a key purpose in the access to culture we have valued for millennia.
(Similar confusion is in that mentioned idea of Meta having done something wrong in processing texts - we can access all available texts.)
Or piracy is actually theft (as it supposedly is when individuals do it) and Meta did millions of counts of it and therefore should pay trillions in damages, be dissolved, have Zuck go to jail, or all three.
"Piracy" in that context is coming into possession of something you are not entitled to own. And this latter point is thin and a stub, just to say that they are different things - the one above is not (it could be expanded but would not change).
This is an odd strawman to tilt at.
LLMs ingests works but does not regurgitate them, so the product can be considered transformative. From my understanding of these models, they do not retain the original works. (There are probably reasons for the companies to retain the original works, but that is an entirely different matter.) So equating a trained model to copyright violations is akin to suggesting the knowledge, rather than the content, is copyrightable. Do we really want to enter that territory?
The other route of attack is via how the materials were acquired. This can create problems from several perspectives. If companies had to purchase each work in order to train a model, the process would only be accessible to very well financed corporations. Libraries as well, since they are essentially in the business of purchasing works (albeit for an entirely different purpose). If you allowed borrowed works to be used while training models, the notion of lending would likely come under attack. I'm not sure we want to go there either. Then there is the question of online materials that are freely available. What would protect them?
I'm not a fan of AI and I am even less of a fan of Meta. I would love to see them have the book thrown at them. I'm just uncomfortable with the potential repercussions of throwing the book at them.
There is a "right to learn". There is a "right to access". And there are values to pursue, and urgencies to tackle (a world collapsing on its own cognitive faults)...
They were stating a fact that some people may not know yet need to be informed of when using these services (for various and personal reasons, not all linked to feeling guilty). As they said, they're not making any moral or ethical assertions about it.
These websites are piracy, and I've used them in the past, still use them, and will probably keep using them. No fuss.
You can request physical books (inter-library loans) and they often offer ebooks as well, although the service is likely to be cumbersome and hard to use because DRM (but if is too complicated you can still borrow the ebook legally in your phone and read a copy from "piracy" sites anywhere you want, with the benefit that the author will get royalties).
It isn't perfect, as in you may not find what you want to read or when you want to read it, but if it works for me, it may work for you as well.
Regarding corporate piracy for AI, I don't think it's just Meta..
I don’t support/condone piracy, but I also don’t support the current trend of taking away user rights.
Next on the list will be the removal of the ability to transfer via email. Just wait.
That being said, all kindles can now be jailbroken: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43073969
So you can use other legit sources when possible.
Here's an odd, maybe edge-case example. Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus stories are clearly outside copyright. It's for sale on Amazon (the first link when I searched, becauseofcourseitis!) but I think we all know that the "copyright" on these published editions is only going to cover the Foreword or whatever the publishing company slapped on.
When I look for it on archive.org I initially thought I could only borrow it [1] but then searched harder and found another copy that I can in fact download [2].
[1] https://archive.org/details/completetalesofu0000harr
[2] https://archive.org/details/the-complete-tales-of-uncle-remu...
All of this aside from very reasonable arguments that copyright shouldn't apply to consumer uses of information.
I don't really share your moral views on piracy, so why both browbeating with them?
Oh, and so far as I can tell they don't label which books are DRM free.
I had to purchase the book I wanted from a different seller at double the cost.
[1]: https://bookshop.org/info/ebooks ("Can I read my ebooks on my Kindle, Kobo, Nook, etc.?")
Personally I'm fine with this compromise solution. I've read whole books in the Kindle desktop web interface. The usual line is that it's somehow bad on the eyes, but I figure that I already spend my days reading documents and articles on a screen and it's irrational to imagine a "book" is somehow fundamentally different.
the main reason i switched was so i could install syncthing and which makes the whole process of getting books onto the ereader as simple as dropping a file into a certain folder on my laptop. no more nonsense like emailing a file to your kindle or having to plug it in to sync with calibre
Anyone who cares enough to comment about this on hn would do well to comment on it to the people whose paychecks depend on what you think about them:
I did manage to get in after a bit though, and... it's not quite what I expected? It's a fascinating resource, but it's essentially a vast collection of quite small and niche stores, magazines, webcomics, and so on. If you're expecting "Amazon/Kobo, but without the DRM" then it probably isn't what you're looking for.
It is very cool though, it's just that "DRM Free" isn't the best description of this eclectic discovery machine of a page.
looking at the archive (https://archive.ph/zPBbZ), almost all of the publishers do not publish popular authors.
it's just too easy to share the books. you can get tens of thousands of books for what, a gigabyte? without drm that stuff will spread like wildfire, but drm can easily be broken by those who know what they're doing - but I guess for publishers, luckily the vast majority of the popular wouldn't bother to break it.
here's one moderately popular author's take:
Hell, if I ran a publishing company I'd remove DRM just so I wouldn't have to listen to Cory Doctorow rant about it. Having to proofread his books is punishment enough.
All of the big 5 publishers (including Tor under Macmillan) have incredibly bad terms for digital lending though. Wouldn't be surprised if they were doing the common thing of terminating the backcatalog on top of limiting initial access.
If we were still in the iPod era of manual syncing, then you'd probably be right, but we're now in the "cloud consuming" era. Hence the trajectory of music piracy. When people were used to managing their CDs and MP3s, ordinary consumers absolutely did engage in opportunistic (often friend-to-friend) piracy, but then streaming came and made both legal and illegal MP3s almost a footnote
[1] Of course you can upload your own "personal documents" to your Kindle library via send-to-Kindle, but few people know that outside of tech/enthusiast circles. Even knowing what an EPUB or AZW3 is almost puts you in that bubble
Errata: rephrased the first sentence from "several hundred megabytes" to "a high-quality movie", to better explain the point that download size is rarely a barrier for piracy
citation needed. I actually know many authors who do book signing. most people who have ebooks don't even ever deal with the files in any respect.
We exist! There might even be dozens of us!
The average pop song at average bitrates would fit that limit, though, too, even with less room to spare.
Brandon Sanderson publishes his novels without DRM. All the TOR books are un-DRM-ed as well.
> without drm that stuff will spread like wildfire, but drm can easily be broken by those who know what they're doing - but I guess for publishers, luckily the vast majority of the popular wouldn't bother to break it.
Books are so small, that even simply clicking through them and OCR-ing the screenshots is a feasible method. DRM isn't even going to buy a day or two of exclusivity. But it will annoy users.
I've been using Amazon Kindle books exactly because it was so easy to de-DRM the books and read them on my devices. Now that they're removing it, I'll switch to other providers.
They are already spreading like wildfire (Hint: Library Genesis). But I still buy ebooks from time to time
(And https://www.bloomsbury.com sells quite major "hits" like Sarah Maas, Madeline Miller and Ann Patchett, without DRM – doesn't seem to have hurt their sales.)
It provides a better return for the authors, has a very simple UI/UX without dark patterns, makes it easy to grab newer book versions, and never has DRM.
Not sure if it's listed on the site, as it seems we've hugged it to death.
Ironically this has allowed me to read books legally that I wouldn't be able to otherwise. DRM is an accessibility nightmare to the point that I think it ought to be considered illegal discrimination.