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Comment by chomp | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think I would ever buy an e-book. It makes no sense to me. If I want a copy for my personal collection I’ll keep it in hardcover. Otherwise I’ll just use Libby and check it out when it becomes available.

There are cases where I will toss an independent author a few dollars in exchange to read their book, but there’s no way I would ever pay Amazon or another publisher.

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I really want to find a good way to buy DRM-free ebooks. Libby was great early on and is still fine, but at least in my library system the wait times for a lot of titles are measured in months.

I know some people make this work by just having a queue that's constantly cycling, but I don't read print books (as opposed to audiobooks) like that. There's only a subset of all books that I would ever want in print at all, and when I want them I want them for a specific purpose (to consult for a quote or something) now, not months from now. Purchased ebooks fill that role, but I'm only interested in buying if they're DRM-free.

Some publishers sell DRM-free e-books directly on their website. This is the best way to buy books, because it grants the greatest amount of money to the original author.

If you browse on Kobo, each book will tell you if it's DRM-free or not. Lots of small publishers will also sell books directly from their website, DRM-free in my experience. And Humble Bundle book collections are DRM free too.

> And Humble Bundle book collections are DRM free too.

Not all of them. I've had at least one bundle where you redeem it via the Kobo store for DRMed ePubs. Most I've got via Humble Bundle have been DRM-free though.

Amazon will tell you if a book is DRM-free as well. As with Kobo, you have to scroll to the bottom of the book description.

And will Amazon then let you download the book on any device? That would be neat if true.

Good question, especially after this policy change. Obviously they will as of this moment, but how DRM-free books will be treated by Amazon after Wednesday is an unknown.

Ebooks.com has a filter for DRM free ebooks, unfortunately it's only a small subset of publishers that allow it currently

In retrospect all the ebooks I bought were a waste of money because I can't get them off Kindle easily, if at all, to digest via an LLM.

You can (could?) get all of them up until the end of the month when Amazon removes the ability to download them from your amazon.com account page.

There may or may not be easily findable plugins for [popular ebook desktop app] to remove the DRM.

I buy ebooks, remove DRM, and store them on my network storage drive so I can read them on any device I own.

Calibre and DeDRM are the apps you're looking for; DeDRM doesn't include the decryption keys, you'll need to supply your Kindle's serial number or extract the keys from an old version of the Kindle app.

Yeah I did this with all the kindle books I ever bought before switching to a Kobo. Just need to try and get my partner out of the Amazon ecosystem now.

Awhile back I worked with someone who wrote a script to scroll through ebooks he purchased, screenshot each page and then aggregate the screenshots into a single PDF file.

The simplicity of the approach seemed pretty awesome

I’ve bought some stuff from sites like Humble Bundle. I think that’s still okay

When I delay amazon shipping til the next week, they give me digital credits. I have over $35 in digital credits right now. I love to spend them on ebooks to support an artist or author directly with them bezos bucks.

I buy a lot of hardcovers but sometimes an ebook is just easier to read

As someone living abroad with a high chance of moving, even though I love having a library, I switched to buying e-books.

There are times when I would like to read a book on a digital device, without waiting for weeks for it to become available.

Oh, if Libby does it, you are paying already. My local library has almost nothing.

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