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
> * access is non revokable and if any part of the drm scheme stops working the provider must provide a drm stripping tool
This is unenforcable even in the presence of good will. (If a company goes bankrupt, they might simply not have the resources, or, if relevant programmers leave, then they might not have the ability, to distribute a stripping tool.) A practical measure in this direction might be to mandate that DRM schemes "phone home," which they surely do already, and that they are required to disable themselves if they don't get an affirmative signal.
(Of course, this has its problems from the publishers' point of view, but as a customer I'd be very pleased with it.)
Make it a legal requirement during development of any DRM that the tool is created with the DRM. Release of the source code for the tool during bankruptcy, release of the tool and hosting as a legal requirement if they no longer want to support it indefinitely.
Theres no reason taking away our rights should be easy for the company when DRM mostly just makes life miserable for anyone trying to buy digital goods legally.
I think there should also be a limit of how long you can use DRM. Something like 5 or 10 years. After that for most things your sales have plummeted and now you're just punishing the consumer. If you want people to buy again for some new format or whatever you need to add actual value. Working on the new thing when purposefully ignoring the old is not value.
There's no key system like that that could possibly work.
But you already are required to deposit your books (or other copyrighted works) with the British Library upon publication and many other countries do the same thing.
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
Definitely do not tell that friend to head to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Library and use one of the URLs listed there to go to that website and find and download a DRM-free backup copy of all the books they have bought and paid for in the past.
You can find your serial number for your kindle in your Amazon account. Forget exactly where but it’s something like “manage content and devices. You don’t need the physical device.
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.
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 wasn’t browbeating. I was curious about your moral justification, and you’ve made that clear. You feel that anyone who publishes using DRM (whether they have any idea or not, or any choice or not) doesn’t deserve to be compensated for your enjoyment of their labour. You won’t boycott them or sacrifice anything, as a principled stand against this thing you object to. You’ll just read their books and not pay.
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.
Yes this approach is great. Everybody is being paid, and you have the freedom of multiple formats. No one is getting screwed, because no one expects people to buy books in multiple formats (except perhaps audiobooks, which are different because you also have the reader who deserves to be paid). It would be nice to see publishers embrace this sort of flexibility (e.g. with a download code printed in the book?), but the use case might be quite niche for most readers so it feels unlikely.
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.
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?
Also consider checking your local public library services.
You can request physical books (inter-library loans) and they often offer ebooks as well, although the service is likely to be cumbersome and hard to use because DRM (but if is too complicated you can still borrow the ebook legally in your phone and read a copy from "piracy" sites anywhere you want, with the benefit that the author will get royalties).
It isn't perfect, as in you may not find what you want to read or when you want to read it, but if it works for me, it may work for you as well.
They were stating a fact that some people may not know yet need to be informed of when using these services (for various and personal reasons, not all linked to feeling guilty). As they said, they're not making any moral or ethical assertions about it.
These websites are piracy, and I've used them in the past, still use them, and will probably keep using them. No fuss.
I think part of the point of OP is that if your main concern is DRM (being able to actually own your books) and you also care to a non-zero extent about the author getting paid for their work (yes, authors receive a much smaller share of sale price than they should, but it's still a substantial percentage), then you should try to buy from DRM-free bookshops and only if that fails sail the high seas.
Regarding corporate piracy for AI, I don't think it's just Meta..
Some people are more concerned about a world so dumb or in such bad faith that can make and tolerate confusion between "questionable possession" and "theft".
Which, paradoxically, calls for the need for more and more intellectual practice, which is a key purpose in the access to culture we have valued for millennia.
(Similar confusion is in that mentioned idea of Meta having done something wrong in processing texts - we can access all available texts.)
Either Meta did nothing wrong and therefore individuals who pirate ebooks do nothing wrong as well and the concept of piracy should not exist/not be illegal;
Or piracy is actually theft (as it supposedly is when individuals do it) and Meta did millions of counts of it and therefore should pay trillions in damages, be dissolved, have Zuck go to jail, or all three.
What is the accusation: having had an automaton read a million books? I repeat from the previous post: we are entitled to having read all the published available books. (And more than entitled: encouraged to.) That is what libraries are for.
"Piracy" in that context is coming into possession of something you are not entitled to own. And this latter point is thin and a stub, just to say that they are different things - the one above is not (it could be expanded but would not change).
I think any answer to that question needs to be considered carefully, at least in a legal context, since it could end up having unintended consequences.
LLMs ingests works but does not regurgitate them, so the product can be considered transformative. From my understanding of these models, they do not retain the original works. (There are probably reasons for the companies to retain the original works, but that is an entirely different matter.) So equating a trained model to copyright violations is akin to suggesting the knowledge, rather than the content, is copyrightable. Do we really want to enter that territory?
The other route of attack is via how the materials were acquired. This can create problems from several perspectives. If companies had to purchase each work in order to train a model, the process would only be accessible to very well financed corporations. Libraries as well, since they are essentially in the business of purchasing works (albeit for an entirely different purpose). If you allowed borrowed works to be used while training models, the notion of lending would likely come under attack. I'm not sure we want to go there either. Then there is the question of online materials that are freely available. What would protect them?
I'm not a fan of AI and I am even less of a fan of Meta. I would love to see them have the book thrown at them. I'm just uncomfortable with the potential repercussions of throwing the book at them.
Critical points nailed. This current weird state of the world is missing the basic principles, which must be stressed. I find them trivial, but the social (and political) issue is, they are not to many actors.
There is a "right to learn". There is a "right to access". And there are values to pursue, and urgencies to tackle (a world collapsing on its own cognitive faults)...
We just need money that can be made to disappear from the seller and return to the buyer when the product that was "bought" is withdrawn and no longer exists...
You can get an income for your work by many other way than getting it behind a paywall. Like another user said i'd rather download the book and send 10$ to a creator I like than paying a monthly subscription to a "digital library" that will only give crumbles to the author and prevent me from reading my book "offline".
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.
Yes yes I understand. My point is that I personally find it easy to read text in a desktop web browser, and this is the unique way of consuming rights-encumbered content without needing to install black-box spyware.
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.
I hadn't heard that they limited availability, only that it was on a 4 month delay after consumer publication.
All of the big 5 publishers (including Tor under Macmillan) have incredibly bad terms for digital lending though. Wouldn't be surprised if they were doing the common thing of terminating the backcatalog on top of limiting initial access.
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.
Anecdote: I have a collection of >x,000 DRM-free ebooks that I legally bought/acquired. No piracy. I manage this with Calibre with a physical sync cable and read on an Onyx device.
Can you rephrase your comment? I'm not sure what you're asking for a citation on; it sounds like you're agreeing with me. Or are you saying that not-Amazon stores have managed to streamline the experience to not require manual action from the user (presumably via send-to-Kindle email)?
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 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.
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 understand that inspiration for posting this was the Amazon taking away the ability to "Download and transfer over USB". Can anybody tell me if downloading will still work via Kindle for PC? That's how I download my books before removing DRM in Calibre.
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
* access is transferable
> * access is non revokable and if any part of the drm scheme stops working the provider must provide a drm stripping tool
This is unenforcable even in the presence of good will. (If a company goes bankrupt, they might simply not have the resources, or, if relevant programmers leave, then they might not have the ability, to distribute a stripping tool.) A practical measure in this direction might be to mandate that DRM schemes "phone home," which they surely do already, and that they are required to disable themselves if they don't get an affirmative signal.
(Of course, this has its problems from the publishers' point of view, but as a customer I'd be very pleased with it.)
Make it a legal requirement during development of any DRM that the tool is created with the DRM. Release of the source code for the tool during bankruptcy, release of the tool and hosting as a legal requirement if they no longer want to support it indefinitely.
Theres no reason taking away our rights should be easy for the company when DRM mostly just makes life miserable for anyone trying to buy digital goods legally.
I think there should also be a limit of how long you can use DRM. Something like 5 or 10 years. After that for most things your sales have plummeted and now you're just punishing the consumer. If you want people to buy again for some new format or whatever you need to add actual value. Working on the new thing when purposefully ignoring the old is not value.
>This is unenforcable even in the presence of good will. (If a company goes bankrupt, they might simply not have the resources
Easy. Lock it with a key that functions like a deadman switch and releases into the Library of Congress
There's no key system like that that could possibly work.
But you already are required to deposit your books (or other copyrighted works) with the British Library upon publication and many other countries do the same thing.
https://bookisbn.org.uk/legal-deposit/
The US should probably do the same thing, but the amount of American works that aren't covered by the British Library are probably minimal.
The us does have the same thing https://www.copyright.gov/mandatory/
Under content and devices Amazon list ebooks by "date acquired" not date bought. It seemed a very specific choice of language.
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
Definitely do not tell that friend to head to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Library and use one of the URLs listed there to go to that website and find and download a DRM-free backup copy of all the books they have bought and paid for in the past.
I certainly will not
I left my kindle in a train in Italy last week… am I boned?
You can find your serial number for your kindle in your Amazon account. Forget exactly where but it’s something like “manage content and devices. You don’t need the physical device.
Thanks. couple hundred clicks to go but successfully downloading the files
> One “owns” it at the “goodwill” of Amazon?
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.
> I’ll consider buying physical books and when necessary “finding” the digital versions of it
That's exactly what I've started doing.
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.
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].
[1] https://archive.org/details/completetalesofu0000harr
[2] https://archive.org/details/the-complete-tales-of-uncle-remu...
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 wasn’t browbeating. I was curious about your moral justification, and you’ve made that clear. You feel that anyone who publishes using DRM (whether they have any idea or not, or any choice or not) doesn’t deserve to be compensated for your enjoyment of their labour. You won’t boycott them or sacrifice anything, as a principled stand against this thing you object to. You’ll just read their books and not pay.
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.
Yes this approach is great. Everybody is being paid, and you have the freedom of multiple formats. No one is getting screwed, because no one expects people to buy books in multiple formats (except perhaps audiobooks, which are different because you also have the reader who deserves to be paid). It would be nice to see publishers embrace this sort of flexibility (e.g. with a download code printed in the book?), but the use case might be quite niche for most readers so it feels unlikely.
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.
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.
That appears to justify jail breaking or drm-free books, not screwing authors out of any kind of compensation for their labour.
The irony is that this will zero the e-book purchases of people that read only in unsupported devices.
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.
Oh gosh, I had no idea!
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?
Also consider checking your local public library services.
You can request physical books (inter-library loans) and they often offer ebooks as well, although the service is likely to be cumbersome and hard to use because DRM (but if is too complicated you can still borrow the ebook legally in your phone and read a copy from "piracy" sites anywhere you want, with the benefit that the author will get royalties).
It isn't perfect, as in you may not find what you want to read or when you want to read it, but if it works for me, it may work for you as well.
Don't get so hung up and sarcastic.
They were stating a fact that some people may not know yet need to be informed of when using these services (for various and personal reasons, not all linked to feeling guilty). As they said, they're not making any moral or ethical assertions about it.
These websites are piracy, and I've used them in the past, still use them, and will probably keep using them. No fuss.
I think part of the point of OP is that if your main concern is DRM (being able to actually own your books) and you also care to a non-zero extent about the author getting paid for their work (yes, authors receive a much smaller share of sale price than they should, but it's still a substantial percentage), then you should try to buy from DRM-free bookshops and only if that fails sail the high seas.
Regarding corporate piracy for AI, I don't think it's just Meta..
Some people are more concerned about a world so dumb or in such bad faith that can make and tolerate confusion between "questionable possession" and "theft".
Which, paradoxically, calls for the need for more and more intellectual practice, which is a key purpose in the access to culture we have valued for millennia.
(Similar confusion is in that mentioned idea of Meta having done something wrong in processing texts - we can access all available texts.)
Either Meta did nothing wrong and therefore individuals who pirate ebooks do nothing wrong as well and the concept of piracy should not exist/not be illegal;
Or piracy is actually theft (as it supposedly is when individuals do it) and Meta did millions of counts of it and therefore should pay trillions in damages, be dissolved, have Zuck go to jail, or all three.
What is the accusation: having had an automaton read a million books? I repeat from the previous post: we are entitled to having read all the published available books. (And more than entitled: encouraged to.) That is what libraries are for.
"Piracy" in that context is coming into possession of something you are not entitled to own. And this latter point is thin and a stub, just to say that they are different things - the one above is not (it could be expanded but would not change).
Is there anyone who opposes piracy who does not think that Meta should get the figurative book thrown at them?
This is an odd strawman to tilt at.
I think any answer to that question needs to be considered carefully, at least in a legal context, since it could end up having unintended consequences.
LLMs ingests works but does not regurgitate them, so the product can be considered transformative. From my understanding of these models, they do not retain the original works. (There are probably reasons for the companies to retain the original works, but that is an entirely different matter.) So equating a trained model to copyright violations is akin to suggesting the knowledge, rather than the content, is copyrightable. Do we really want to enter that territory?
The other route of attack is via how the materials were acquired. This can create problems from several perspectives. If companies had to purchase each work in order to train a model, the process would only be accessible to very well financed corporations. Libraries as well, since they are essentially in the business of purchasing works (albeit for an entirely different purpose). If you allowed borrowed works to be used while training models, the notion of lending would likely come under attack. I'm not sure we want to go there either. Then there is the question of online materials that are freely available. What would protect them?
I'm not a fan of AI and I am even less of a fan of Meta. I would love to see them have the book thrown at them. I'm just uncomfortable with the potential repercussions of throwing the book at them.
Critical points nailed. This current weird state of the world is missing the basic principles, which must be stressed. I find them trivial, but the social (and political) issue is, they are not to many actors.
There is a "right to learn". There is a "right to access". And there are values to pursue, and urgencies to tackle (a world collapsing on its own cognitive faults)...
We just need money that can be made to disappear from the seller and return to the buyer when the product that was "bought" is withdrawn and no longer exists...
Promoting specific piracy sites is not a good look and ,I’ll go further, shouldn’t be allowed in this forum
no fun allowed
Do you like being paid for your work? Why deprive others of the fun of getting it for free?
You can get an income for your work by many other way than getting it behind a paywall. Like another user said i'd rather download the book and send 10$ to a creator I like than paying a monthly subscription to a "digital library" that will only give crumbles to the author and prevent me from reading my book "offline".
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.
> 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
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
Seconding this. Bookshop.org is a terrible experience if you want to read on your own eInk device.
I had to purchase the book I wanted from a different seller at double the cost.
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...)
[1]: https://bookshop.org/info/ebooks ("Can I read my ebooks on my Kindle, Kobo, Nook, etc.?")
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.
Yes yes I understand. My point is that I personally find it easy to read text in a desktop web browser, and this is the unique way of consuming rights-encumbered content without needing to install black-box spyware.
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 think we hugged that one a little hard.
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.
here's one moderately popular author's take:
https://ilona-andrews.com/blog/flowers-and-questions/
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.
I hadn't heard that they limited availability, only that it was on a 4 month delay after consumer publication.
All of the big 5 publishers (including Tor under Macmillan) have incredibly bad terms for digital lending though. Wouldn't be surprised if they were doing the common thing of terminating the backcatalog on top of limiting initial access.
No publisher has done anything other than laugh at Cory for years now.
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.
Anecdote: I have a collection of >x,000 DRM-free ebooks that I legally bought/acquired. No piracy. I manage this with Calibre with a physical sync cable and read on an Onyx device.
We exist! There might even be dozens of us!
Can you rephrase your comment? I'm not sure what you're asking for a citation on; it sounds like you're agreeing with me. Or are you saying that not-Amazon stores have managed to streamline the experience to not require manual action from the user (presumably via send-to-Kindle email)?
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.
> can be trivially attached to emails under the 10MB size limit, which other forms of media usually can't
The average pop song at average bitrates would fit that limit, though, too, even with less room to spare.
> 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.
> without drm that stuff will spread like wildfire
They are already spreading like wildfire (Hint: Library Genesis). But I still buy ebooks from time to time
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.)
Just email the author five dollars and then grab their book from AA
I like this idea. I do it when the author has a Patreon. How do you email random people five dollars?
Check if there's a PayPal account tied to that email. Often there is. PayPal is a shit company, but no worse than Patreon.
AA?
Anna's Archive
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.
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.
Can scan the archive.today capture:
https://archive.ph/zPBbZ
I understand that inspiration for posting this was the Amazon taking away the ability to "Download and transfer over USB". Can anybody tell me if downloading will still work via Kindle for PC? That's how I download my books before removing DRM in Calibre.
Apparently you need an older version of the app and that doesn't allow downloading books published since 2023. So it's not a complete solution
The FSF also has their own list
https://www.defectivebydesign.org/guide/ebooks
I’m pleasantly surprised to see that Black Library is already on there for fans of terrible Warhammer fiction.
Wonderful. I also want to say that very often Tor sells DRM free books. As a fantasy buff, I always try to find them
Thank you; the world needs more of that.
Now that is a clever domain name.