Don't "buy" e-books from Oxford University Press | Hacker News Reader

Don't "buy" e-books from Oxford University Press

kelar.org

36 pointspvdebbe18 comments

The screenshot mentions a 14 day return policy. If that doesn’t work, your credit card company is likely willing to help you force a refund (unless you agreed to a contract during checkout).

The dead tree version is about a dollar more than the silly lease-under-onerous-terms-pretending-to-be-purchase version. Do the world a favor and opt for the physical book so you don’t contribute to the anti-consumer digital distribution company.

I won't use printed academic books, ctrl+f and inline links are far too useful in ebooks.

Then buy the physical to support the ~authors~ publishers and pirate a DRM-free ebook.

That seems the worst of options, because the I'd have a useless shelf of dead wood that only serves as a backdrop to make me look smart on zoom calls.

Ok, then buy the DRM version and then pirate it.

This, I can get behind.

Regarding the 14 day return policy:

> You must not have viewed or printed, in total, more than five percent (5%) of the e-book.

-- from <https://global.oup.com/academic/help/ebooks/?cc=ca&lang=en&#...>

According to that I'm not covered because I tried to print more than that percentage of the book to PDF (and was presented with the kind of unusable garbage output shown in my post).

Chargeback that shiz

Piracy is the answer to consumer hostility. Ironically companies that abuse DRM in this fashion are pushing more people to consider piracy.

Exactly. That's probably why Anna's Archvie grew so much. Modern DRM and digital media solutions are trash compared to just getting the ePub on Anna's archive or Libgen. Until the official solutions are as easy as that, piracy will continue.

Say I want to buy "The Catholic Reformation: A Very Short Introduction", published by Oxford University Press. What are my options if I want a DRM-free copy, legally? Amazon no longer lets me download the books themselves so I can strip the DRM locally, so that's no longer an option. Apparently Oxford University Press also don't offer DRM-free reading. So what really can I do here if I want to buy it in digital form?

I guess it's easy to say "Don't buy X from Y", but if it's the only option, what can one individual really do about it, besides just not purchasing it at all or pirating it?

Not ideal, but you could either scrape the browser pages to reproduce the pages without DRM, or even get hold of a physical copy (e.g. from a library) and scan the pages yourself. If you manage to produce a good enough version, don't forget to make a torrent available.

(There's a bunch of physical copies available on eBay)

It's still "easy" to strip DRM from Amazon books but you need an actual Kindle to do so. If it's something that you would like to do, it might be worth investing in a cheap used Kindle even if you never plan to use it to read.

I thought they removed that, even with a hardware Kindle? I managed to download all my ebooks via a python script before that, as I've purchased 100s of books via Kindle throughout the years, but seems they've disabled the approach I took at least:

> As of 26th February 2025, Amazon has removed the ability to download backups of your Kindle books. Unfortunately, this means that this tool is no longer functional - https://github.com/treetrum/amazon-kindle-bulk-downloader

After removing that feature I kind of feel like it'll just be too much of a hassle, so stopped buying books via Kindle. But haven't found any better alternative either to be honest.

That's for downloading files from the website.

You can still use Calibre to remove & decrypt the files via USB from a Kindle.

Buy it from Kobo then strip the DRM.

I 100% avoid e-books. Until they come as an unencumbered standard PDF that I can view on any OS I have, I will stick with paper.

Nothing wrong with epub - as long as its unencumbered.

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