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List of DRM-Free Bookshops

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Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#71

Post by tene80i »

eek2121 wrote: post #70
tene80i wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.yc…

That appears to justify jail breaking or drm-free books, not screwing authors out of any kind of compensation for their labour.

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#72

Post by jesuslop »

tene80i wrote: post #71
eek2121 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.yc…

That appears to justify jail breaking or drm-free books, not screwing authors out of any kind of compensation for their labour.

The irony is that this will zero the e-book purchases of people that read only in unsupported devices.

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#73

Post by JKCalhoun »

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?

For myself, I would never pirate a book that was still in print. Over the past so many years though a lot of books on archive.org (for example) are borrow only (and I like cultivating an offline-life).

Here's an odd, maybe edge-case example. Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus stories are clearly outside copyright. It's for sale on Amazon (the first link when I searched, becauseofcourseitis!) but I think we all know that the "copyright" on these published editions is only going to cover the Foreword or whatever the publishing company slapped on.

When I look for it on archive.org I initially thought I could only borrow it [1] but then searched harder and found another copy that I can in fact download [2].

[1] https://archive.org/details/completetalesofu0000harr

[2] https://archive.org/details/the-complete-tales-of-uncle-remu...

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#75

Post by Mindwipe »

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.

Is there anyone who opposes piracy who does not think that Meta should get the figurative book thrown at them?

This is an odd strawman to tilt at.

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#76

Post by Mindwipe »

Galatians4_16 wrote: post #39
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…

>This is unenforcable even in the presence of good will. (If a company goes bankrupt, they might simply not have the resources Easy. Lock it with a key that functions like a deadman switch and releases into the Library of Congress

There's no key system like that that could possibly work.

But you already are required to deposit your books (or other copyrighted works) with the British Library upon publication and many other countries do the same thing.

https://bookisbn.org.uk/legal-deposit/

The US should probably do the same thing, but the amount of American works that aren't covered by the British Library are probably minimal.

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#77

Post by Mindwipe »

badlibrarian wrote: post #16
AlotOfReading wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No publisher has done anything other than laugh at Cory for years now.

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#78

Post by Mindwipe »

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 is absolutely a factor in that most ebooks can be trivially attached to emails under the 10MB size limit, which other forms of media usually can't.

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#79

Post by Mindwipe »

bluebarbet wrote: post #24
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…

The desktop web-app reader is interesting in that it's a DRM-free legal way to access otherwise DRM-encumbered e-books. Last I checked the EME DRM browser sandbox was still not required. Personally I'm fine with this compromise solution. I've read whole books in the Kindle desktop web interface. The usual line is that it's somehow bad on the eyes, but I figure that I already spend my days reading documents and articl…

It doesn't use EME (EME isn't designed to protect text so it couldn't), but it's very likely what it does would be considered to be a "technical protection measure" in most courts and reverse engineering it is probably illegal in most territories.

Re: List of DRM-Free Bookshops

#80

Post by space_fountain »

Mindwipe wrote: post #76
Galatians4_16 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is unenforcable even in the presence of good will. (If a company goes bankrupt, they might simply not have the resources Easy. Lock it with a key that functions like a deadman switch and releases into the Library of Congress

There's no key system like that that could possibly work. But you already are required to deposit your books (or other copyrighted works) with the British Library upon publication and many other countries do the same thing. https://bookisbn.org.uk/legal-deposit/ The US should probably do the same thing, but the amount of American works that aren't covered by the British Library are probably minimal.

The us does have the same thing https://www.copyright.gov/mandatory/
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