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.
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
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?
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.
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.
Isn’t goodreads owned by Amazon?
Anyone else notice that the download interface page for Anna’s archive has suddenly changed? I can’t figure it out.
The best books are on IRC.
Fuck you Jeff!
Switched to kobo.
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.
Amazon is making it impossible for me to consider a Kindle.
I’m shocked at this unforeseeable turn of events.
The current timeline is truly a constant stream of unanticipated surprises
again displaying, that DRM only hurts legitimate users. a pirate has never had the problem of backing up, moving or sharing his library…
It annoys me so much that they have convinced anyone that this stuff is for protecting against piracy of something like that, while this is just another tool for them to force you into using their platform and ecosystem. It does nothing against piracy.
Yeah you can easily pirate any book, or even just get them free at the library. This just fucks over the authors and people who want to buy their books legally. People don’t buy books because they have to, they want to.
Yep, I could pirate all my books and audio books if I wanted. All it would do is fuck over the author tho.
As much as I hate audible it’s the only legal choice I have for many of the books I listen to. Since basically every other legal option has out of the nearly 500 or so audio books I have less then 50 of them.
It’s annoying.
Books were among the first things to be pirated and are still among the easiest because the amount of data is so small. People we’re doing that on dial up Internet.
And to repurchase. Never forget that aspect of the scam. Sell but don’t actually sell, make the customer keep on paying.
This entire thing has been made needlessly complicated. Easy fix though.
- Get whatever ebook you want.
- Borrow some code from GitHub and teach a raspberry pi with a camera and a few servos to snap pictures of pages, turn the pages, snap again into a PDF.
- A script then parses all the images and OCRs them for the final PDF.
- You now own a backup of your DRM book, which you own forever. Pretty sure this is actually legal under DMCA since you are taking a backup of something you allegedly own. The encryption circumvention is irrelevant.
- now, break the law and throw the PDF on the internet to everyone. Go little bot! Go go go!
The encryption circumvention is irrelevant.
Oh you sweet summer child, judges will bend over backwards to slap people with multi-decade-to-life charges for ‘hacking,’ even if the ‘hacking’ is just the rightsholder accidentally presenting data to you.
To be fair, if you OCR the pages via camera, you haven’t actually circumvented DRM. That means it’s a completely legal backup, as the DRM on the original file was untouched and unaltered. This definitely does fall under fair use.
Theoretically, yes. Realistically, judges historically believe anything prosecutors tell them about hacking and circumvention.
There’s been people thrown in jail for the rest of their life for the crime of clicking a public URL that the company didn’t intend to be public.
There’s been people thrown in jail for the rest of their life for the crime of clicking a public URL that the company didn’t intend to be public.
Source?
The closest i’ve heard was a journalist being accused of hacking for the crime of choosing “view source” in the right-click menu of a web-browser.If you scroll down a bit, I actually already answered that question in this exact threat, one reply down.
In general I agree, but I am going to have to ask you for a source on that last one.
Looks like I mixed up two different cases- the cause of one, and the duration of another.
weev (who apparently is a giant asshole) was the one who got sent to jail for accessing a completely public URL AT&T wished he didn’t in 2010. The EFF took up his case. His sentence was later vacated by another court because so many civil rights lawyers kept joining his team pro-bono so the court tossed it out on a blatant technicality to get the issue to go away, so he only served ~2y.
As for the CFAA being used to slap people with life sentences, there’s too many examples to know which one I was mixing it up with. Aaron Swartz is the classic example.
so he only served ~2y.
Still 2y more than he should’ve, geez…
You didn’t circumvent it by breaking the encryption, but I’d say you still circumvented it.
They already ruled on this in favor of allowing you to back up what you already own. See video games, DVDs and CDs, video tapes, this is well established already.
They actually walked that back using blu-rays as an excuse. If there’s any sort of DRM/encryption/etc, you’re completely unallowed to circumvent it, even for personal backup.
Just do it in a country with reasonable laws
The goold old analog hole.
Why not just remove the Amazon from the ebooks?
amazon: finally we defeated piracy
one kid with a computer: snickers
