I didn't start buying ebooks from Amazon/Kindle until I realized it was relatively easy to break its DRM. I've never used the files anywhere else but I keep a cracked copy of every purchase just in case. That old story about "1984" being removed gave me too much of a negative impression.
There's actually quite a few eBook stores out there with DRM-free options, you just have to know where to look, and they're usually publisher-specific.
Humble Bundle does a weekly Book Bundle. Wiley, O'Reilly, No Starch, and several other publishers all regularly participate with tech books, geek books, comic books, and manga.
No Starch itself deserves a separate mention just because they're awesome. On their own site, if you buy the print book, the eBook comes free, a nice courtesy you won't pick up buying on Amazon. And of course, all of their stuff is DRM-free.
Informit, which is Pearson's programming and IT book site, sells watermarked, but otherwise DRM-free content (if you really care, watermark stripping likely isn't that hard, but as long as they're not trying to tamper with my ability to open the file where I want to, I don't mind watermarks, I ain't a pirate). Informit includes Adobe Press, Cisco Press, Microsoft Press, VMware Press, Sams, etc. I've gotten a lot of textbooks from here.
Manning Publications sells DRM-free too.
If you're a Trekkie, Simon & Schuster sells Star Trek novels DRM-free on their site as well. They have monthly sales that bring a set of them down to 99 cents a piece, which is good, since their standard prices are obscene.
Even Comixology (from Amazon, of course), has joined the DRM-free game, though only for specific publishers. Neither Marvel nor DC participate, mind you, but many of the smaller publishers do.
Wow, thanks for that list, in particular for Simon & Schuster. I am a Trekkie (that's the origin of my handle, too), and I sometimes bought Star Trek e-books on Amazon (most recently, Department of Temporal Investigations series). I'd much prefer to buy DRM-free.
> I don't mind watermarks, I ain't a pirate
That depends; pirates mind water marks on goods they liberated on the high seas, as they reveal the provenance of the merchandise. They like the marks left by water on their equipment, as a proof of prowess.
One thing I got confused about was where they actually sell these DRM-free ebooks. (Apparently not on their website.) I went out on a limb and bought some Tor books from ebooks.com and they did turn out to be DRM-free, but there was no way to tell in advance.
Thanks to lawyer back and forth Amazon now has an explicit note on Tor (and Baen and a few other similar publisher titles) making it clear that the file is DRM free at publisher request. It seems like funny language in Amazon's store pages because it sounds like they are treating it like a book defect the way it is written, but the bonus is that you can look for that "warning"/"acknowledgment" when you want that best of both worlds situation where you want to get Kindle features on a book but support a DRM-free publisher over alternatives.
They stopped selling ebooks directly to consumers. They still publish them, but now sales are all through third parties. You can get them in PDF or ePub format, DRM-free, from ebooks.com.
Yup. Hence why I only mention them as contributors to Humble Book Bundles. Their site only has what you mention, but Humble Bundle (and other sites like ebooks.com) still sell DRM-free O'Reilly titles outright.
I try not to forget any once I know they are DRM-free! When music switched to DRM-free, it was pretty much just "Apple says all songs are DRM-free now, but books has been a much longer, harder fight. I think it's important we recognize, promote, and patronize DRM-free retailers and publishers.
It's really not that complicated. You download them from a web interface and you drag and drop them into Calibre (with a de-DRM plugin installed). Done, they're now available together with all the ebooks that you got from other sources.
Having all the purchased ebooks in one place is more convenient for me, not less. The alternative isn't a different book store, it's pirating. While I do have an appreciation for all the books I got from DRM-free places, I don't pick what I'm going to read next based on where it's available. The majority of the books I want to read are available on Amazon, and breaking their DRM is very easy. They wouldn't get my money if any of those two were untrue. I'd probably revert back to pirating.
one could argue that you not paid for that kind of usage and basically pirating in the sense that you use it without permission. It has probably even been denied explicitly to you to break the DRM too. In some countries its even illegal by default to circumvent digital protection measurements.
Just saying, you probably could directly pirate the books too. Putting your money where your rights are respected and you are given the freedom to read your books on any device you want is probably a better idea. Even if it is just to make them grow more.
There are far worse intellectual property offenders all around me, and I've never heard of a single person that ever got into trouble within my country. (Coincidentally, I've heard of dozens of cases of people from my country getting slapped with hundreds of euros of fines for pirating while being abroad, all of them in Germany).
The worst thing that could happen to me is that I could have my Amazon account terminated. Everything physical on Amazon gets slapped with an additional $60-80 of taxes (even if the item itself is $10-$20), so I really don't use Amazon for anything else but its bookstore.
Books take months or years to write, and I want to award that behavior with whichever percentage of my $10 ends up in the author's pockets. Don't get me wrong, if I see a book I want to read on Humble Bundle on Kobo, I'll click on it first. But if I don't, I'll pick Amazon over Google Play Books, this Microsoft's one, or any other DRM-enabled store. Not because Amazon is in any way better than them, but because I know I can break the DRM effortlessly and reliably, while still pitching in something to the author. If that wasn't the case, I wouldn't look for a different store — I'd still be pirating.
I respect your choice and would likely do the same now and then. However, i think it could be beneficial if publishers realize DRM free books get pirated less or even bought more often :)
I said publishers but i am not sure who wants this to be enforced in this case. Its just usually the case that its the rights holder like film studios or music labels but in this case i could see amazon wanting it for themselves too.
Untrue for ebooks - I doubt a week's gone by without me having done this for years, without a thought or a problem.
> we shouldn't be expected to deal with it
Agreed, and with this as for many other things perhaps one day (after the revolution) we won't. But railing against the universe won't make books available for me to read today.
> "DRM-stripping is inherently unreliable, by definition."
Which definition is that? I've owned an old model 'Kindle Keyboard' for many years. The only thing needed to strip DRM from those ebooks is to type in the serial number of my kindle into calibre. It's never not worked for me; in actual practice it's very reliable.
I must admit though, these days I typically just go to Library Genesis. Because I'm a dirty rotten thief.
Not a heavy eBook user but I buy all movies and TV shows through iTunes because I have a (lossless) De-DRM program I can use. Works consistently every time on everything. It may stop working altogether someday, but if that happens I’ll stop buying from iTunes. Until then, the program is 100% reliable.
We're a small independent ebook retailer and we're pushing for DRM-free content with publishers. We've added a DRM-free section to the site: https://www.ebooks.com/drm-free and any search that run you can filter by DRM-free content.
We also offer DRM-free PDFs that are correctly formatted, unlike what you'd get from the Google Bookstore (they convert from ePub). This is particularly important for publishers like O'Reilly who no longer sell copies outside a subscription from their site. Some authors help us out a lot by linking to us directly: https://dataintensive.net/buy.html
It's a slow process getting publishers on board, but more are moving across to DRM-free or social DRM (watermarking) which is a step in the right direction.
How does that work? Independent in a physical sense, generally translates to 1 or very few outlets. Online is only ever going to be 1 outlet. Plus none of the independent bookstore features seem amenable to translating to the internet.
Small: They're not operating at Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, Amazon, or any other major book retailer level. Measuring by revenue seems reasonable in this sense. Pick arbitrary numbers to define small/medium/large.
Independent: They're not affiliated with any one single publisher.
Independent suggests more than just being independent, and very little of that seems to be compatible with being an internet company (local, passionate knowledgeable owner, community hub).
I think I may have been wrong regarding independent. Given the context of the thread, it sounds more like platform-independent, rather than publisher-independent. The previous comments are about platform-specific stores.
Thanks for the tip, will consider it next time. I guess I was non-mainstream enough to look into breaking DRM, but not non-mainstream enough to consider less popular sources.
The books I've bought through Kobo are DRM-encumbered. They work on my PocketBook, but only after I set up some Adobe DRM thingamabob. Not sure whether it's easy to break.
Good point. I actually looked for some "No DRM" marketing on the website before I linked it and didn't find it, so I wondered if I was even correct that it was one of their objectives. I've only noticed that the books I've bought from them had no DRM and that's apparently unreliable. Too bad.
Thankfully, better options have been linked in the thread.
It's often not possible, particularly with niche books from small publishers. Many of my sailing books, for example, were available from Amazon only. A DRM copy is always my last choice, but I'll get one and strip DRM if necessary.
The Japanese eBook store BOOKWALKER, owned by publishing giant Kadokawa, is by far the most draconian I've seen in recent years when it comes to eBook DRM: https://bookwalker.jp
Some examples of the lengths they go to:
- They used to have a desktop app that allowed reading offline. Not anymore. They're phasing it out in favor of their web reader which has no offline reading functionality. Presumably because people were cracking the DRM there.
- Their Android app detects root/custom roms and disables itself and starts spamming you with a new browser tab every few seconds, even if you don't try to open it at all (I have no idea why this is even possible on Android). It doesn't just use Android's built-in SafetyNet APIs either, it uses some custom methods that somehow managed to bypass Magisk's root hiding feature until version 18, when I discovered that it finally started working. But soon after that I found my account mysteriously locked, and upon contacting support it sounds like they were able to find out I was running under root somehow, and reinstated my account with the caveat that the next time they catch me my account will be disabled for good. That was the last straw for me, and I vowed never to do business with them again.
With that said, I do hope someone who's more well versed in the dark arts of reverse engineering than I am could take a crack at breaking the DRM in their Android app or Desktop app (they still post a really old version on their site, not sure if it's still usable) dump their entire library on a torrent somewhere and show them the futility of their ways. I honestly think their DRM only survived for so long due to sheer obscurity because they have a such a limited audience and not enough smart people are interested in fucking with them. I'd love to have some means to liberate the library of books I've already regretfully purchased on there (they lured me in with their frequent sales and rewards program).
By the way, if anyone's interested in buying Japanese eBooks, my current go-to store is Kobo (owned by Rakuten): https://books.rakuten.co.jp/e-book/
The biggest differentiator for them is they don't compress their images to oblivion like Amazon and Google Play does, which is really nice for light novels and manga where image quality makes a huge difference. Being Kobo, they also happen to be the only eBook store other than Amazon to offer their own line of eBook reader devices, most of which can be hacked to use a bigger sdcard for more storage (they literally use an sdcard for internal storage instead of emmc).
Of course, their DRM is easily crackable, but I would love to hear recommendations for DRM free Japanese eBook stores if anyone is aware of any.
I was happily surprised to find at least some of the manga (my Japanese is not good enough for light novels just yet) series that I read (or have read) on Kobo. My previous impression was that every publisher was pushing their own application and/or online store with DRM from hell. Unfortunately they seem to price digital editions the same as new physical copies (about JPY 600, which is ~USD 5.50), even for volumes that are well over a decade old. Thus I will probably stick to my current strategy of browsing the Book Off JPY 100 (plus JPY 8 tax) section and carry on reading physical copies as I rarely read the latest stuff anyway – still, wonderful to know that one has an option when you are out of the country. Lastly, bonus points to Kobo in that they appear to run campaigns with a free selection of manga volumes at the moment to get you hooked on a number of series.
Literally the only thing I miss from Bookwalker is their sales. They frequently have sales of 50% off + 30%+ cashback (mostly on Kadokawa published books, but sometimes from other publishers as well), which fueled a lot of my past impulse purchases that I've now come to regret.
The best I've seen so far on Kobo has been a 30% off coupon that requires a 10k yen minimum purchase. If you're price sensitive then used physical books is probably still the way to go. I couldn't recommend Bookwalker in good faith to anyone until their DRM becomes trivial to break, because if they pull what Microsoft pulled here all of your purchased eBooks would disappear without any possibility for recourse.
Ideology aside, my main practical reason for breaking DRM is that I want to read all my books in a single reader of my own choice. With hundreds of books, I'm certainly not willing to try and remember whether I bought each one from Amazon or wherever else. I wouldn't shelve physical books by purchase origin so I'm damned if I'm going to do it with ebooks.
I also prefer Amazon over other ebook stores simply because I know I can break the DRM effortlessly and reliably.
I am well-aware that it's a bad thing to do from a legal perspective (and especially encouraging others to do the same), but legal =/= moral. I'm paying a full price for them and treating them as my property. That includes being able to read them on any screen I want with whichever reader I want, even if I do end up mostly reading on a (physical) Kindle.
I do the same. For a few of my books, the publisher imposed a max number of devices. Around 3 or 4 devices. That limitation especially pissed me off. Whenever I get a new phone or tablet, I make sure I always copy over the de-drmed ebook which previously had the device limit. Kind of a pointless gesture, since I'll probably never re-read those specific ebooks, and the publisher will never know I'm spitting in their eye. But it's a good feeling.
I do the same with Audible. As far as I can tell, there's no way to remove the DRM that is both easy and free, so against my better judgement, I paid $30 for a program to do it for me[0]. I now have every audiobook I've bought in mp3 format, split by chapter and tagged with the correct metadata. Now I can dump them on a USB drive and plug it into my car stereo for road trips (I don't mind listening to good books more than once).
[0] It's called Tuneskit Audible Converter, and I'm surprised they haven't been sued by Amazon yet.
There's a RainbowCrack plugin which allows you to extract your activation_bytes which is both fast and free. Once you're extracted your activation_bytes, it can be saved and re-used to remove the DRM from all your audiobooks.
I'd suggest converting to m4b, which you can achieve by replacing the aax extension with m4b as part of the output_file. This preserves all chapters, metadata, and even the cover art. The m4b format also has a neat feature which lets you bookmark your last position in the same file.
Ah well, I bought the program years ago, and it is pretty convenient—just drag and drop. So I expect I'll continue using it. It has the option to use m4b files too, so maybe I'll try that.
I searched for days before I bought it though, and never came across the ffmpeg method. All sorts of hacks involving virtual CDs and whatnot, but nothing that scaled.
Does this leave enough meta data for other book readers? You can listen to them in a generic audio player but I like having something that understand the chapter breaks.
You have to copy the video as well if you want to keep all the metadata, chapters, and cover art. I'd suggest converting to m4b rather than mp4. I gave an example in my other comment in this thread.
Not really. The hardest part is getting the activation bytes and even that is actually quite simple and you only have to do it once. For the actual converting I have a bash script that can convert all the aax files in a directory and convert them to a m4b format with all the metada intact. Using your approach you would have to manually set the chapters and the cover art. I have thousands of hours worth of audiobooks but even if you only have a single 10 hour book I think this approach is still the easier of the 2.
Easy enough to bypass by staying with an older version of the Kindle client. This downloads books in a format that Calibre (amongst others) can strip DRM from. There are instructions on the Calibre help site somewhere.
They changed the format of the files they send to your kindle or to a kindle app/software, but it is still possible to manually download the old format from the list of your books on the Amazon website.
