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?
I've been saying for a while now that I'd love to see rules restricting the use of the term "Buy" such that it can only apply to digital products when they are DRM-free and fully downloadable. Anything where the seller retains the right to claw back their product post-sale is more of an indefinite lease or purchase of rights rather than "buying" the product itself.
I think a relatively small proportion of people buying media online fully comprehend that—based on a contract negotiation gone wrong or just the whim of a senior exec—the things they've "bought" can simply be taken away from them. Sellers should be required to make it fully clear (e.g. not just in their 73 page ToS) that they're selling something impermanent and entirely unlike owning physical media.
I agree though I have actually noticed that Amazon is more clear about this than they used to be. They now clearly say you’re buying a license not the book and it may have just been a Europe thing but I think it even made me confirm that I knew some of the implications of that distinction.
Unlike a lot of people on here I think I don’t have fundamental problems with DRM, but I think consumers absolutely should be guaranteed more rights over the things they buy. Maybe something like.
* access is non revokable and if any part of the drm scheme stops working the provider must provide a drm stripping tool
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
already did like at 2 AM... a friend of mine also tried to do it but it turns out that “Download or transfer over USB” only works if you own a kindle, which he doesn't... so there's that too
Yup. Same for movies, games, music, etc. It's pretty wild how many hard-won rights we abdicated in the move to digital pseudo-property. Not wild in the sense that it's surprising consumers would place a priority on convenience when it came to making purchasing decisions. Wild that legally there's such a huge difference between physical and digital goods. Like, all the consumer rights and protections built up over centuries were deemed invalid on a technicality. "Move fast and break things" indeed.
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.
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.
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 commercial purposes, have its chief lie about being aware of this, and an average person who just wants content without so much bullshit DRM lock-in hassle should feel guilty about their choice?
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].
My motivation? I'd think it's pretty clear. I'm offering (for those few who don't know) an options for obtaining books DRM-free and free in a landscape that has become positively shitty to any standard notion of owning the things you bought to supposedly own them. If Amazon and others want to do this, then I have no obligation to respect their DRM, and if authors want to sell their books through such a rigged format, I also shouldn't feel guilty about respecting rules against piracy.
All of this aside from very reasonable arguments that copyright shouldn't apply to consumer uses of information.
I don't really share your moral views on piracy, so why both browbeating with them?
I bought a book on Amazon recently and when it got delivered, I was too lazy to get off the couch to get it and I just downloaded it. Now I have the physical book and a copy that's convenient to open/reference whenever and wherever I am.
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.
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 copyright landscape is rough for that sort of things, but this was a huge miss. For it to cost $5 more and be tied to a service that is not currently available on any dedicated e-readers is frankly insulting.
Oh, and so far as I can tell they don't label which books are DRM free.
dedicated ereaders are another thing to get away from if possible. onyx boox ereaders for example run android as the OS so you can install whatever apps you like, kindle, nook, bookshop.org or just any basic epub or pdf reader.
the main reason i switched was so i could install syncthing and which makes the whole process of getting books onto the ereader as simple as dropping a file into a certain folder on my laptop. no more nonsense like emailing a file to your kindle or having to plug it in to sync with calibre
My approach has been to purchase books from bookshop.org (or directly from the author if that is an option), and then immediately go find a DRM-free backup copy to send to my e-ink device.
At least they appear to be partnering with Kobo "later this year" [1]. I've been a big fan of Kobo's devices so this is a nice plus. (I just wish they could figure out some way to get Kindle exclusives, but well that's a contradiction in terms, so...)
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 articles on a screen and it's irrational to imagine a "book" is somehow fundamentally different.
Is it really drm free if you can't save the books? Maybe there's technically no encryption but it's not like you're free to do with the book as you please either.
There is no EME DRM, but they actually go through some means to prevent the user from downloading the ebooks. That includes anti-devtools mitigations and storing much of the ebook contents encrypted in the cloud.
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.
I did manage to get in after a bit though, and... it's not quite what I expected? It's a fascinating resource, but it's essentially a vast collection of quite small and niche stores, magazines, webcomics, and so on. If you're expecting "Amazon/Kobo, but without the DRM" then it probably isn't what you're looking for.
It is very cool though, it's just that "DRM Free" isn't the best description of this eclectic discovery machine of a page.
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 what they're doing - but I guess for publishers, luckily the vast majority of the popular wouldn't bother to break it.
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.
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
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
> 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.
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.
> looking at the archive (https://archive.ph/zPBbZ), almost all of the publishers do not publish popular authors.
Brandon Sanderson publishes his novels without DRM. All the TOR books are un-DRM-ed as well.
> without drm that stuff will spread like wildfire, but drm can easily be broken by those who know what they're doing - but I guess for publishers, luckily the vast majority of the popular wouldn't bother to break it.
Books are so small, that even simply clicking through them and OCR-ing the screenshots is a feasible method. DRM isn't even going to buy a day or two of exclusivity. But it will annoy users.
I've been using Amazon Kindle books exactly because it was so easy to de-DRM the books and read them on my devices. Now that they're removing it, I'll switch to other providers.
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.)
I'm still a fan of LeanPub and try to buy a book there if possible. It's an older site/storefront now, but still active and with new books mainly in the software/tech space.
It provides a better return for the authors, has a very simple UI/UX without dark patterns, makes it easy to grab newer book versions, and never has DRM.
Not sure if it's listed on the site, as it seems we've hugged it to death.
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.
Readit News
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?
I think a relatively small proportion of people buying media online fully comprehend that—based on a contract negotiation gone wrong or just the whim of a senior exec—the things they've "bought" can simply be taken away from them. Sellers should be required to make it fully clear (e.g. not just in their 73 page ToS) that they're selling something impermanent and entirely unlike owning physical media.
Unlike a lot of people on here I think I don’t have fundamental problems with DRM, but I think consumers absolutely should be guaranteed more rights over the things they buy. Maybe something like.
* access is non revokable and if any part of the drm scheme stops working the provider must provide a drm stripping tool
* access is transferable
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
Yup. Same for movies, games, music, etc. It's pretty wild how many hard-won rights we abdicated in the move to digital pseudo-property. Not wild in the sense that it's surprising consumers would place a priority on convenience when it came to making purchasing decisions. Wild that legally there's such a huge difference between physical and digital goods. Like, all the consumer rights and protections built up over centuries were deemed invalid on a technicality. "Move fast and break things" indeed.
That's exactly what I've started doing.
Libgen, Anna's Archive, et al do however provide a valuable service in maintaining access to works out of distribution or blocked by censorship.
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 commercial purposes, have its chief lie about being aware of this, and an average person who just wants content without so much bullshit DRM lock-in hassle should feel guilty about their choice?
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...
All of this aside from very reasonable arguments that copyright shouldn't apply to consumer uses of information.
I don't really share your moral views on piracy, so why both browbeating with them?
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.
Oh, and so far as I can tell they don't label which books are DRM free.
Anyone who cares enough to comment about this on hn would do well to comment on it to the people whose paychecks depend on what you think about them:
https://uk-support.bookshop.org/en/support/tickets/new
the main reason i switched was so i could install syncthing and which makes the whole process of getting books onto the ereader as simple as dropping a file into a certain folder on my laptop. no more nonsense like emailing a file to your kindle or having to plug it in to sync with calibre
I had to purchase the book I wanted from a different seller at double the cost.
[1]: https://bookshop.org/info/ebooks ("Can I read my ebooks on my Kindle, Kobo, Nook, etc.?")
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 articles on a screen and it's irrational to imagine a "book" is somehow fundamentally different.
I did manage to get in after a bit though, and... it's not quite what I expected? It's a fascinating resource, but it's essentially a vast collection of quite small and niche stores, magazines, webcomics, and so on. If you're expecting "Amazon/Kobo, but without the DRM" then it probably isn't what you're looking for.
It is very cool though, it's just that "DRM Free" isn't the best description of this eclectic discovery machine of a page.
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 what they're doing - but I guess for publishers, luckily the vast majority of the popular wouldn't bother to break it.
here's one moderately popular author's take:
https://ilona-andrews.com/blog/flowers-and-questions/
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.
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
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.
Brandon Sanderson publishes his novels without DRM. All the TOR books are un-DRM-ed as well.
> without drm that stuff will spread like wildfire, but drm can easily be broken by those who know what they're doing - but I guess for publishers, luckily the vast majority of the popular wouldn't bother to break it.
Books are so small, that even simply clicking through them and OCR-ing the screenshots is a feasible method. DRM isn't even going to buy a day or two of exclusivity. But it will annoy users.
I've been using Amazon Kindle books exactly because it was so easy to de-DRM the books and read them on my devices. Now that they're removing it, I'll switch to other providers.
They are already spreading like wildfire (Hint: Library Genesis). But I still buy ebooks from time to time
(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.)
It provides a better return for the authors, has a very simple UI/UX without dark patterns, makes it easy to grab newer book versions, and never has DRM.
Not sure if it's listed on the site, as it seems we've hugged it to death.
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.