Baen Books is my favorite for science fiction. (www.baenebooks.com) O'Reilly Media for technical books. (http://shop.oreilly.com/category/ebooks.do) Calibre eBook store. (http://drmfree.calibre-ebook.com/) Project Gutenberg for the classics. (http://www.gutenberg.org/)
There are quite a few more, but I don't want to link them because I haven't personally used them. I'm also hoping DRM-Free eBook bundles catch on (https://www.humblebundle.com/).
If there are books that I "desperately" want to read and can't find them in DRM-Free form, I visit the local library. If the library doesn't have it, I will buy a print version. As long as it isn't a technical reference manual I will use frequently, I then donate it to the library when I'm done with it.
Which are all not available outside the US. I could only find 4 books on that entire site that were actually available to be purchased outside the US.
The one thing I don't buy on Kindle are the rare books I expect to want to keep a long time. For everything else, I'm willing to accept that I might somehow lose access or be unable to read it in several years.
Some people are not going to break any laws, even if those laws are mostly technical and not going to be enforced. And providing means to remove DRM is more problematic because the law is enforced a bit more rigorously there.
There is an exception to users whose ability to make legal use of the protected material is impeded, but only after the Librarian of Congress rules that the given type of user of the given type of work qualifies for the above exception.
The exception mentioned above also, explicitly, does not apply to the following provision: "No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that-- `(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; `(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or `(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person's knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c105:1:./temp/~c105hq5...:
Every item I purchase from these content owners contributes to the efforts they are making including to privatize and balkanize the Internet. Therefore, I will no longer spend my money in a fashion that contributes to this.
A fellow in... France, I believe, wrote a very pointed and eloquent article/post on precisely this point, some months back.
This is straight Stallman: if you don't fundamentally control your computing environment, you don't own it, and you have no freedoms within it save those granted by the entity that does control that environment.
A Lessig might modify that slightly and say that your freedoms are actually balanced between four influences: Law, Norms, Market, Architecture. In the case of DRMd works on proprietary hardware, law and architecture are both opposed to the rights of the individual. Presumably Amazon responded to social norms and market pressures.
I prefer having more power on my side. It's a key reason I've avoided the e-reader game to date, despite some interest in going there.
No, I don't have the power to program the thing myself, so Stallman wouldn't approve it, but then again he wouldn't approve of most computer operating systems or the vast majority of laptops sold either, so I don't see why e-readers are different....
If the answer to any of these questions is "yes", then no, you do NOT have complete control over the device.
(Edit: It's never hooked up to the Internet, except when plugged into my computer, so I don't see how Amazon or anyone else is going to be able to touch it.)
I consider it a pretty fair tradeoff. They're not stopping you from churning your own butter, so to speak, but do count on you deciding it's easier to just run their stock stuff. Like a lot of semi-locked hardware, it's not like they'd be such floozies about proliferating the hardware if they weren't making a lot of it back in book sales.
http://www.epubsoft.com/how-to-remove-drm-from-azw-on-kindle...