Show HN: DRM-Free Books
frequal.comAfter several years of mandatory DRM lockdowns from most commercial book sources, now authors have a choice when it comes to DRM for their books. Pick authors and books that are DRM-free, or download DRM-free classics that are out of copyright.
Bookshop.org lets you filter by drm when you search.
https://www.bloomsbury.com has drm free stuff, and after https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42811332 i respect them even more.
Also might be worth scanning old mentions of such https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The bookshop.org filter works nicely. After searching for a keyword, pick "Formats/Ebook/DRM-free". I'll add a link and a note.
libro.fm for DRM free audio books, buying from there supports local book shops.
We also do the same at ebooks.com, there's a DRM free section too - https://www.ebooks.com/drm-free
> DRM-free classics that are out of copyright.
I started down this road with a few books about two years ago, and I have so many now on my list to read that I hardly ever get to reading a modern book.
I read a lot from Standard Ebooks. But one thing to keep in mind with them- they do edit the books to make changes for readability. Not necessarily a big deal, but something to know.
Same. Ironic that a quirk of modern technology would put classical literature back in fashion.
This happens more than you might expect.
There are several films which became popular staples on television after copyright expired, wasn't renewed, or was improperly registered in the first place (prior to automatic copyright assignment enacted in 1976). It's a Wonderful Life is the canonical example, though there is a long list of other public domain films in the US: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_in_the_public_do...>.
A Wonderful Life fell back into copyright, at least partially, when the musical score was bought by Republic Pictures in 1993.
<https://library.law.uconn.edu/2022/12/08/its-a-wonderful-lif...>
Ted Turner started the Turner Broadcasting System by buying up small local stations with loose licencing arrangement allowing them unlimited reruns of old films and television shows. Shifting to cable distribution for his "superstation" eventually grew into CNN.
(Mentioned in an HN comment about a month ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48038175>.)
I strongly suspect that the popularity of Shakespeare, which grew rapidly through the 19th century, had to do with the demand for popular entertainment combined with the prohibitive cost of contemporary works for many performing companies.
The rise of radio and need to fill airtime likely lead to the popularity of classical music, out of copyright and hence readily available for broadcast, at a time when broadcast rights were at best poorly defined and restricted, if at all. (The concept first appeared in law in 1928, wasn't standardised until 1961, and wasn't globally adopted under the Berne Convention until the 1970s/1980s, or later.)
<https://thelaw.institute/copyright-and-related-rights/evolut...>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention#Adoption_and_...>
A flagged/dead reply notes a case of an unauthorised remake of a film getting wider distribution.
The original, Skeem, was released in South Africa in 2011. The knock-off, John and John, was released in Ghana in 2017. The latter was unauthorised. The writer, director, and producer of the original, Tim Green, opted not to pursue infringement claims against Kofi Asamoah, who produced John and John, as the cost would not be worth any possible recovery.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeem>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_and_John>
@dierogeryoung: I'm not sure why your comments are flagged/dead, but that's a likely outcome if you're using LLMs to write/edit your HN content, which is suggested by your history. See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638>, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48136536>, and <https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated>.
Curious: edit for readability in what way? Surely just layout stuff, not changing the content of the books?
I believe they’d change the spelling of a word if it’s archaic and obscure in the original text.
https://standardebooks.org/about/what-makes-standard-ebooks-...
All of Brandon Sanderson's epubs from his website ( https://brandonsanderson.com -> https://dragonsteelbooks.com ) are DRM-free: https://support.dragonsteelbooks.com/support/solutions/artic...
So after seeing this project on the front page of hackernews. I decided to add my EPUB reader on a submission as well[0]: https://epub.mirror.forum
and although I already previously had the idea of showing books from gutenberg but your idea made me find more importance in it and I ended up doing so in two different implementations: https://guten.mirror.forum and https://gutencf.mirror.forum, so I thank you for that!
[Offtopic: I am/was also surprised to see that there is a lack of API or platforms if suppose I created this app and I wanted to give users genuine ways to pay. Aside from the walled gardens of Kindle or specific apps, I am unable to give my users a way to just search books, pay for them and download it (atleast to my understanding at the moment) which is a sad thing :-( ]
I hope people are able to give love to my submission at [0] / the link down below. Cheers and take care and have a nice day if a real human is being out there reading this :-D
Hope you like or enjoy it and find it useful!
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48710584
All of Cory Doctorow books are DRM free.
https://shop.craphound.com/
I added a link, thanks! Mr. Doctorow seems to include 3 formats in every purchase (PDF, MOBI, and EPUB), which should cover just about any device.
Do you know if you can buy as a gift for someone else?
By the very definition you can buy them and send them to whoever you want. Just, you know, don’t read it yourself and you’ve done it.
You mean don’t read it at the same time.
I’m perfectly satisfied with what I wrote.
Many of his books are Creative Commons licenced, at least in digital form. E.g., Little Brother:
<https://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/>
You can see his other titles on Craphound: <https://craphound.com/>.
My own novel, The Immortal Remains, is DRM-free on Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Google, and other platforms (maybe Apple as well, I'm not sure). Other authors, such as Cory Doctorow, sell their books DRM-free as well.
The uncertainty is part of the problem. Funny that even authors are not sure :)
I can't tell on https://www.amazon.com/Immortal-Remains-Lee-Hauser-ebook/dp/... that it's DRM-free. Amazon loses money in the small this way, but probably considers it more important to train people to not care.
DRM-less on Apple is fairly useless in that the file isn’t exportable or readily found in your filesystem.
I don't see any mention here of books sold by Tor. All their books are DRM-free.
I added it to the list of DRM-free sources at the end, thanks!
Can one buy Tor books without going through Amazon? I had trouble doing that last I tried.
I’ve bought Tor books from Google Play and gotten DRM‐free EPUB files from it.
You can buy them from bookshop.org
At least some Tor.com ebooks are available DRM-free through Amazon. Honor Of The Queen, 2nd in the Honor Harrington Series, specifically says it's sold without DRM on Amazon.
Huh? The Honor Harrington books are published by Baen (who are all DRM-free).
My mistake!
Yes, Kobo, Google Play Books both carry them.
Love their browser. Very convenient for downloading no DRM e-books you bought.
Remove DRM from ebooks you bought with https://github.com/esn/knock
I wish someone would build something like hiring.cafe but for DRM free digital content. One search query => uniform search results with direct link to purchase page on relevant marketplace. Basically just scrape and index every DRM free content marketplace and put it behind a single search interface.
The Pragmatic Programmers have always sold DRM free commercial book (to my knowledge).
https://pragprog.com/
Having commercial publishers that will sell you high quality books without DRM is brilliant and I'll always support that.
Useful list. I wish more book stores made DRM status obvious before checkout.
It feels like this list, if it focuses on individual authors is - if successful - overwhelming in scope. There are, what, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of authors ? If 1%, for argument's sake, this list would have thousands of links.
Nonetheless, I'll promote an author of both non- and fiction ebooks I've bought from, Michael W Lucas [0].
[0] https://www.tiltedwindmillpress.com/
> More Authors with DRM-Free Books
> On Amazon, look for books that offer EPUB and PDF downloads.
Isn't this like saying "to find a needle in a haystack, just look for anything that's metallic"? Technically correct, but not really helping...
Add both my Sci-Fi/Techno-Thriller ePub books to this list DRM Free, and Free as in Beer if you download them off my website. https://rodyne.com/
I made a virtual bookshelf the other day https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48687201 Maybe I can plug some of the books into the virtual shelf
So this is a similar idea to Project Gutenberg?
FWIW https://www.defectivebydesign.org/guide/ebooks
No Starch Press sells all of its books with DRM as well.
Nice. Good to know that Tor books are DRM-free.
all books are DRM-free if you download them from the right place ;)
Yes, but from some of those places the authors receive no compensation.
If their wallet address is available on the internet, that's an easily solved problem.
They chose the DRM path, so they brought this fate upon themselves.