Show HN: DRM-Free Books (frequal.com)
52 points by TeaVMFan 6 hours ago
After 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.
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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.
The Pragmatic Programmers have always sold DRM free commercial book (to my knowledge).
Having commercial publishers that will sell you high quality books without DRM is brilliant and I'll always support that.
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.
> 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.
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-...
Same. Ironic that a quirk of modern technology would put classical literature back in fashion.
All of Cory Doctorow books are DRM free.
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?
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.
I don't see any mention here of books sold by Tor. All their books are DRM-free.
Can one buy Tor books without going through Amazon? I had trouble doing that last I tried.
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.
Yes, Kobo, Google Play Books both carry them.
I’ve bought Tor books from Google Play and gotten DRM‐free EPUB files from it.
You can buy them from bookshop.org
I added it to the list of DRM-free sources at the end, thanks!
Remove DRM from ebooks you bought with https://github.com/esn/knock
Useful list. I wish more book stores made DRM status obvious before checkout.
So this is a similar idea to Project Gutenberg?
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.
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!
Nice. Good to know that Tor books are DRM-free.