Show HN: DRM-Free Books
43 points
4 hours ago
| 12 comments
| frequal.com
| HN
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.

https://frequal.com/Perspectives/DrmFreeAuthors.html

dest
4 minutes ago
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Remove DRM from ebooks you bought with https://github.com/esn/knock
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rickcarlino
17 minutes ago
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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.
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teravor
4 minutes ago
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all books are DRM-free if you download them from the right place ;)
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kreyenborgi
1 hour ago
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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...

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TeaVMFan
1 hour ago
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The bookshop.org filter works nicely. After searching for a keyword, pick "Formats/Ebook/DRM-free". I'll add a link and a note.
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Lio
25 minutes ago
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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.

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technothrasher
2 hours ago
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> 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.

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bluebarbet
30 minutes ago
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Same. Ironic that a quirk of modern technology would put classical literature back in fashion.
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philips
2 hours ago
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All of Cory Doctorow books are DRM free.

https://shop.craphound.com/

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TeaVMFan
1 hour ago
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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.
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AtheistOfFail
24 minutes ago
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Do you know if you can buy as a gift for someone else?
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babblingfish
3 hours ago
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I don't see any mention here of books sold by Tor. All their books are DRM-free.
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kreyenborgi
1 hour ago
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Can one buy Tor books without going through Amazon? I had trouble doing that last I tried.
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bentley
1 hour ago
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I’ve bought Tor books from Google Play and gotten DRM‐free EPUB files from it.
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TeaVMFan
3 hours ago
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I added it to the list of DRM-free sources at the end, thanks!
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murats
3 hours ago
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Useful list. I wish more book stores made DRM status obvious before checkout.
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Leptonmaniac
2 hours ago
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So this is a similar idea to Project Gutenberg?
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Imustaskforhelp
2 hours ago
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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

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shmerl
3 hours ago
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Nice. Good to know that Tor books are DRM-free.
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