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List of DRM-Free Bookshops

libreture.com

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Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#61

Post by internet_points »

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 looking at the archive ( https://archive.ph/zPBbZ ), almost all of the publishers do not publish popular authors.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…

It's easier to just pirate a book than to buy it from amazon and open a windows vm and strip drm in order to read it where I want. DRM doesn't stop people copying.

(And https://www.bloomsbury.com sells quite major "hits" like Sarah Maas, Madeline Miller and Ann Patchett, without DRM – doesn't seem to have hurt their sales.)

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#62

Post by paintman252 »

southernplaces7 wrote: post #46

Casually worth noting the obvious: There are also services like Libgen and Anna's archive that are completely DRM free and have pretty much anything you can get on Amazon except, well, for free, aside from also being DRM-free.

Promoting specific piracy sites is not a good look and ,I’ll go further, shouldn’t be allowed in this forum

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#63

Post by contravariant »

I make a point to store a DRM free copy from any books I purchase. So far with success. The DeDRM tool for Calibre is very useful for this.

Ironically this has allowed me to read books legally that I wouldn't be able to otherwise. DRM is an accessibility nightmare to the point that I think it ought to be considered illegal discrimination.

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#64

Post by gherard5555 »

paintman252 wrote: post #62
southernplaces7 wrote: post #46

Casually worth noting the obvious: There are also services like Libgen and Anna's archive that are completely DRM free and have pretty much anything you can get on Amazon except, well, for free, aside from also being DRM-free.

Promoting specific piracy sites is not a good look and ,I’ll go further, shouldn’t be allowed in this forum

no fun allowed

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#65

Post by gnomewascool »

southernplaces7 wrote: post #49
Kelvin506 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also worth noting that such sites technically are piracy. I am not making any moral or ethical assertions about it, but people need to know that so they can make an informed decision before doing so. And no, it's not inherently obvious to everyone. Libgen, Anna's Archive, et al do however provide a valuable service in maintaining access to works out of distribution or blocked by censorship.

Oh gosh, I had no idea! I'm not an absolutist on piracy in either direction, but when X or Y megacorp and all its affiliates can claim to "sell" you goods and then whimsically restrict access to them in such a way that further, future whimsies let them take away your purchased products, i'd hardly blame anyone for pirating. Also, a company like Meta can pirate over 80 fucking TB of ebook content for indirectly commer…

I think part of the point of OP is that if your main concern is DRM (being able to actually own your books) and you also care to a non-zero extent about the author getting paid for their work (yes, authors receive a much smaller share of sale price than they should, but it's still a substantial percentage), then you should try to buy from DRM-free bookshops and only if that fails sail the high seas.

Regarding corporate piracy for AI, I don't think it's just Meta..

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#66

Post by mdp2021 »

hofrogs wrote: post #54
mdp2021 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people are more concerned about a world so dumb or in such bad faith that can make and tolerate confusion between "questionable possession" and "theft". Which, paradoxically, calls for the need for more and more intellectual practice, which is a key purpose in the access to culture we have valued for millennia. (Similar confusion is in that mentioned idea of Meta having done something wrong in processing texts -…

Either Meta did nothing wrong and therefore individuals who pirate ebooks do nothing wrong as well and the concept of piracy should not exist/not be illegal; Or piracy is actually theft (as it supposedly is when individuals do it) and Meta did millions of counts of it and therefore should pay trillions in damages, be dissolved, have Zuck go to jail, or all three.

What is the accusation: having had an automaton read a million books? I repeat from the previous post: we are entitled to having read all the published available books. (And more than entitled: encouraged to.) That is what libraries are for.

"Piracy" in that context is coming into possession of something you are not entitled to own. And this latter point is thin and a stub, just to say that they are different things - the one above is not (it could be expanded but would not change).

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#67

Post by tene80i »

gherard5555 wrote: post #64
paintman252 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Promoting specific piracy sites is not a good look and ,I’ll go further, shouldn’t be allowed in this forum

no fun allowed

Do you like being paid for your work? Why deprive others of the fun of getting it for free?

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#68

Post by tene80i »

southernplaces7 wrote: post #46

Casually worth noting the obvious: There are also services like Libgen and Anna's archive that are completely DRM free and have pretty much anything you can get on Amazon except, well, for free, aside from also being DRM-free.

Genuinely, what is your motivation here? People often justify piracy in terms of their opposition to DRM, but here someone is showing you how to get DRM-free books, and your response is "But over here they are free." They clearly aren't meant to be free, and people put substantial amounts of work into creating them. Don't you care?

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#69

Post by goosedragons »

Larrikin wrote: post #38
JadeNB wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * access is non revokable and if any part of the drm scheme stops working the provider must provide a drm stripping tool This is unenforcable even in the presence of good will. (If a company goes bankrupt, they might simply not have the resources, or, if relevant programmers leave, then they might not have the ability, to distribute a stripping tool.) A practical measure in this direction might be to mandate that D…

Make it a legal requirement during development of any DRM that the tool is created with the DRM. Release of the source code for the tool during bankruptcy, release of the tool and hosting as a legal requirement if they no longer want to support it indefinitely. Theres no reason taking away our rights should be easy for the company when DRM mostly just makes life miserable for anyone trying to buy digital goods legall…

I think there should also be a limit of how long you can use DRM. Something like 5 or 10 years. After that for most things your sales have plummeted and now you're just punishing the consumer. If you want people to buy again for some new format or whatever you need to add actual value. Working on the new thing when purposefully ignoring the old is not value.

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#70

Post by eek2121 »

tene80i wrote: post #68
southernplaces7 wrote: post #46

Casually worth noting the obvious: There are also services like Libgen and Anna's archive that are completely DRM free and have pretty much anything you can get on Amazon except, well, for free, aside from also being DRM-free.

Genuinely, what is your motivation here? People often justify piracy in terms of their opposition to DRM, but here someone is showing you how to get DRM-free books, and your response is "But over here they are free." They clearly aren't meant to be free, and people put substantial amounts of work into creating them. Don't you care?

Have you read the news lately? Amazon is about to restrict the rights of kindle users. They are about to remove the ability to download and transfer books via USB.

I don’t support/condone piracy, but I also don’t support the current trend of taking away user rights.

Next on the list will be the removal of the ability to transfer via email. Just wait.

That being said, all kindles can now be jailbroken: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43073969

So you can use other legit sources when possible.

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