Back when Randall Munroe released his “What if” in eBook format, it essentially was only available with DRM.
When I emailed him about it, asking for a place to buy it without DRM, he responded with DRM unfortunately being mandated by his publisher, and finished his email with a link to this comic of his:
https://xkcd.com/488/
I would recommend people buy their books off ZLibrary instead, where they come with no DRM.
again displaying, that DRM only hurts legitimate users. a pirate has never had the problem of backing up, moving or sharing his library…
We’ll soon be back to monks transcribing at this rate.
Amazon is making it impossible for me to consider a Kindle.
I have a pocketbook instead of a Kindle cause of this lol
This is why I bought some Chinese android ereader than an amazon Kindle.
What does this mean? What prevents me from OCRing the pages on a video that quickly goes through it?
Authors would be foolish to publish on Amazon. Guarantees your book will be forgotten.
There are so, so many better ebook readers to choose from. Honestly just a phone with an oled screen is better than kindle.
Don’t buy Amazon products. Fairly simple concept.
The problem is some authors signing exclusivity deal with Amazon, which means breaking the DRM and converting it is the only way to read it on a different e-reader.
Too bad. Then theres no sale unless I can crack the DRM ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This. All of these problems are solved by people not giving money. But often it seems difficult for people to actually stand behind principle when the time comes – convenience is a helluva drug.
i was dumbfounded that so many people stood up against Disney. it was so opposite of what modern americans do.
The problem is some authors signing exclusivity deal with Amazon
Well then those authors can go straight to corpo-sellout hell and die a painful death, I’d rather never read a book again than buy from amazon.
It’s only takes one person to crack those books and spread them across the high seas and the only way to force authors to abandon Amazon.
There are always people who extra motivated by these challenges. The fact that these are written texts and shown on a screen means there will always be away to scrap the content off even if that involves a camera on a second device.
DRM only hurts customers who want to pay for content.
Yep, I had a Kindle library of a few dozen books, when they started their shenanigans locking down the desktop client earlier this year I downloaded all of them, de-drmed and converted to epub with Calibre. Hosting them on Calibre-web and accessing with KOreader on a Kobo. I continue to buy books on Kobo and Google Books, which let me download copies (albeit with DRM).
Makes me wonder after all these years why Amazon is locking down ability to move books around. I wonder if they’re starting to feel some real competition and feel threatened! The market of cheap e-ink Android ereaders seems to be growing more and more
I started that process and hit a road block after getting all the books downloaded to my pc. Can you recommend any tutorials or guides that might help get everything converted?
I used this guide from a thread on Reddit. It relies on Calibre and a set of plugins https://www.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/1c2ryfz/2024_guide_to_dedrm_kindle_books/
Awesome, thanks!
I wonder if they’re starting to feel some real competition and feel threatened!
Probably the opposite. They’re confident they won’t lose sales over this because they’re too firmly established as a monopoly. And they know that with Trump in office they’re not going to face any pushback from the FTC.
- https://www.gutenberg.org/
- https://openlibrary.org/
- https://www.planetebook.com/
- https://archive.org/
- https://www.smashwords.com/
- https://books.google.com/
- https://www.freetechbooks.com/
- https://www.getfreebooks.com/
- https://www.openculture.com/free_ebooks
- https://www.goodreads.com/
- https://www.oreilly.com/ (trial)
- https://annas-archive.org/
- https://pdfcoffee.com/
- https://singlelogin.re/
- https://www.ereaderiq.com/freebies/
- https://www.bookbub.com/ebook-deals/free-ebooks
- https://digilibraries.com/
- https://www.overdrive.com/
- https://manybooks.net/
there’s so many others and of course torrents
Isn’t goodreads owned by Amazon?
It is remarkable how many books available for free on Gutenberg are sold in the same format on Amazon (it’d be one thing if they were special editions, new translations etc, but they’re the same!)
People out to make a quick buck are banking on suckers not knowing about Project Gutenberg, or failing to check it, or not wanting to do a couple of extra steps to get something onto their Kindle.
Check out standard ebooks. They take public domain books and “clean” them up with really good typesetting, spelling fixes, and other things. All free too
Standard is fantastic! The books are better quality than what they charge for on “marketplaces” and can be read for free or downloaded wholesale for a song. Add to that they host an opds catologue that fbreader can browse and you have incredibly convenient public domain books right to the ereader.
Shoutout to Anna.
Have you noticed that the download interface page for Anna’s archive has suddenly changed? I can’t figure it out!
I have not but I believe you.
What URL are you using?
You can also use Book Bounty to integrate LibGen support into Readarr. It’s a workaround for one of Readarr’s biggest weaknesses, as torrents historically aren’t great for ebooks.
Didn’t readarr get discontinued a few weeks ago?
It was officially unsupported, but it still works just fine if you use a third-party metadata provider. There haven’t been any breaking changes on the backend, so (unless sites change things) it will continue to work fine.
Assuming you have a card from a participating library.
Every time I go to checkout a book on Libby it’s like 6-10 weeks’ wait. If I put a hold on it then I’m just not in a place to read/listen at that time and then I feel bad for hogging it instead.
Better to just pirate or buy from a non-DRM distributor.
The best books are on IRC.
Anyone else notice that the download interface page for Anna’s archive has suddenly changed? I can’t figure it out.
I’m shocked at this unforeseeable turn of events.
The current timeline is truly a constant stream of unanticipated surprises
I will never, ever purchase a book I can’t remove the DRM from.
And there are people out there who are absolutely fanatical about book preservation. They will photograph every single page and run it through OCR and recreate an ebook just so it gets preserved. DRM is absolutely pointless and stupid.
Exactly this. As an idiot I purchase DRM music when Microsoft had its own music store. Some years later they closed it and there was no way to validate music keys.
But thankfully I still have an old Roxio9( I think) CD, and back then Roxio didn’t know what DRM was and would take the mp3 and burn it to DVD anyway, bypassing the key check, then I would just rip it back off the DVD…DRM is useless
For real.
When I still had Netflix and Disney+ I’d want to watch a show on my PC, but I’d just get black screen with only audio, because something about my setup the DRM didn’t like. (Possibly that I have USB displaylink monitors.)
So I had to watch on another device.
DRM isn’t stopping content being ripped. It’s just making life a pain for paying customers.
Offering a clean, ad free, usable storefront to purchase media would do more to prevent piracy than anything.
But corpos dont like that.
This is the entire foundational point Gabe made with steam.
Hell I still get a chuckle when people bitch able steam “drm”. Since it’s entirely optional and can literally be turned off by just adding a text file with the steam ID in basically every case. If it’s even there to begin with
99% of the time the “drm” people bitch about is just the steam overlay dll crashing if steam is off. Cause you know trying to load something that’s off doesn’t really work.
You can literally just remove a single dll from like 95% of steam games and you have an entirely “drm” free game.
Silksong is a great example with how popular it’s been Iv seen thousands of people bitching moaning and crying about how it has drm on steam when it for a fact doesn’t. It just has the single dll so it can use the overlay. Just deleting the dll so it doesn’t load up the overlay and ta-da its fucking drm free.
That could’ve been iTunes if their interface didn’t suck ass and if they didn’t go for the subscription-only model in Apple Music.
I swear for years it was THE place to buy music. I mean I never did, I didn’t have access to a card with online payments enabled as a teen, so I just pirated everything anyway. But it seemed like the default place.
I was so out of the loop a few years ago I found out they killed iTunes and was like WHY. idiotic.
Of course. It’s all about control. They see users as property, an object to be sold and traded.
Do not ever allow yourselves to be disrespected like this.
Try explaining any of this to my friends lol. Obsessed with Google, the tok, xitter, and shitty data stealing llms. Disgusting garbage.
I couldn’t get Netflix to play at high resolution on my old Roku because of some DRM crap. And I was a legit customer! Once again, piracy would have provided a superior experience.
