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List of DRM-Free Bookshops

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Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#11

Post by AlotOfReading »

amazingamazing wrote: post #8

in my experience no publisher that's producing many hits will make their stuff drm free, and for good reason. looking at the archive ( https://archive.ph/zPBbZ ), almost all of the publishers do not publish popular authors.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…

Tor is a pretty big counterexample here. They're the largest and most awarded SciFi publisher and have been DRM-free for well over a decade now. They've also said that being DRM free hasn't been a problem for them.

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#12

Post by _benj »

I hadn’t really paid attention to DMR because I was so cozy inside the kindle bubble. That notification that Amazon was going to take away the ability to download books was a very strong wake up call…

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?

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#13

Post by didntcheck »

amazingamazing wrote: post #8

in my experience no publisher that's producing many hits will make their stuff drm free, and for good reason. looking at the archive ( https://archive.ph/zPBbZ ), almost all of the publishers do not publish popular authors.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…

Size isn't really a factor - an average connection can download a high-quality movie within minutes. Convenience is the factor - 95% of consumers will not tolerate having to manually manage their collection and manually transfer books to a device [1], even in legal scenarios, such as buying a MOBI/AZW from not-Amazon store and putting it on their Kindle

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

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#14

Post by gcr »

_benj wrote: post #12

I hadn’t really paid attention to DMR because I was so cozy inside the kindle bubble. That notification that Amazon was going to take away the ability to download books was a very strong wake up call… 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 a…

Quick! Go to your Amazon account’s “Manage Content and Devices” and “Download or transfer over USB” to save the .azw3 files to your computer. Then, follow instructions to set up Calibre with the De-DRM plugin.

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

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#15

Post by amazingamazing »

didntcheck wrote: post #13
amazingamazing wrote: post #8

in my experience no publisher that's producing many hits will make their stuff drm free, and for good reason. 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…

Size isn't really a factor - an average connection can download a high-quality movie within minutes. Convenience is the factor - 95% of consumers will not tolerate having to manually manage their collection and manually transfer books to a device [1], even in legal scenarios, such as buying a MOBI/AZW from not-Amazon store and putting it on their Kindle If we were still in the iPod era of manual syncing, then you'd p…

> Size isn't really a factor - an average connection can download several hundred megabytes in under a minute. Convenience is the factor - 95% of consumers will not tolerate having to manually manage their collection and manually transfer books to a device [1], even in legal scenarios, such as buying a MOBI/AZW from not-Amazon and putting it on their Kindle

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.

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#16

Post by badlibrarian »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #11
amazingamazing wrote: post #8

in my experience no publisher that's producing many hits will make their stuff drm free, and for good reason. 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…

Tor is a pretty big counterexample here. They're the largest and most awarded SciFi publisher and have been DRM-free for well over a decade now. They've also said that being DRM free hasn't been a problem for them.

They also refused to make their e-books available to libraries because they said it hurt sales. Which at least is a new wrinkle on the endless DRM debates.

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.

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#17

Post by gcr »

amazingamazing wrote: post #15
didntcheck wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Size isn't really a factor - an average connection can download a high-quality movie within minutes. Convenience is the factor - 95% of consumers will not tolerate having to manually manage their collection and manually transfer books to a device [1], even in legal scenarios, such as buying a MOBI/AZW from not-Amazon store and putting it on their Kindle If we were still in the iPod era of manual syncing, then you'd p…

> Size isn't really a factor - an average connection can download several hundred megabytes in under a minute. Convenience is the factor - 95% of consumers will not tolerate having to manually manage their collection and manually transfer books to a device [1], even in legal scenarios, such as buying a MOBI/AZW from not-Amazon and putting it on their Kindle citation needed. I actually know many authors who do book si…

Anecdote: I have a collection of >x,000 DRM-free ebooks that I legally bought/acquired. No piracy. I manage this with Calibre with a physical sync cable and read on an Onyx device.

We exist! There might even be dozens of us!

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#18

Post by gcr »

plorg wrote: post #5

After the recent press for Bookshop.org I saw an author I like had a new book and thought I'd try out the service - I am okay with paying slightly more for a book if the money is going to someone other than Amazon. But I should have looked twice, because Bookshop ebooks are not DRM free unless the publisher explicitly opts for it, and DRM encumbered books can only be read on their website or in their app. I know that…

Seconding this. Bookshop.org is a terrible experience if you want to read on your own eInk device.

I had to purchase the book I wanted from a different seller at double the cost.

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#19

Post by didntcheck »

amazingamazing wrote: post #15
didntcheck wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Size isn't really a factor - an average connection can download a high-quality movie within minutes. Convenience is the factor - 95% of consumers will not tolerate having to manually manage their collection and manually transfer books to a device [1], even in legal scenarios, such as buying a MOBI/AZW from not-Amazon store and putting it on their Kindle If we were still in the iPod era of manual syncing, then you'd p…

> Size isn't really a factor - an average connection can download several hundred megabytes in under a minute. Convenience is the factor - 95% of consumers will not tolerate having to manually manage their collection and manually transfer books to a device [1], even in legal scenarios, such as buying a MOBI/AZW from not-Amazon and putting it on their Kindle citation needed. I actually know many authors who do book si…

Can you rephrase your comment? I'm not sure what you're asking for a citation on; it sounds like you're agreeing with me. Or are you saying that not-Amazon stores have managed to streamline the experience to not require manual action from the user (presumably via send-to-Kindle email)?

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#20

Post by amazingamazing »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #11
amazingamazing wrote: post #8

in my experience no publisher that's producing many hits will make their stuff drm free, and for good reason. 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…

Tor is a pretty big counterexample here. They're the largest and most awarded SciFi publisher and have been DRM-free for well over a decade now. They've also said that being DRM free hasn't been a problem for them.

pretty hard to do any rigorous analysis without public sales info of all publishers, but yes I have heard that as well. their main competitor, baen also doesn't have drm
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