How many books are actually available DRM-free? This reads a bit like "Amazon will provide free land, construct a paddock and provide feed for life if you order a unicorn, except unicorns don't exist".
You'd be surprised. Tor and Solaris both offer DRM free books on Amazon. Also anything self published tends to be DRM free.
I saw the writing on the wall and downloaded my books from Amazon a few months before their announcement. Out of around 1000 books I had 300ish that were DRM free.
Dumb question, but: is there a way to find/filter ones that are? (I can't seem to find anything in the (web) UI that makes it clear which books are downloadable.)
There wasn't when I went through my collection. Reading the announcement from Amazon it looks like the existing DRM free books will not be automatically flagged to be downloadable.
The publisher/author will have to go through a process to have their books be downloadable again.
I have some tor books, but I used to download them as .azw even though they had the "this book is drm free ..." blurb at the beginning. (was back before amazon stopped downloads)
Now they could actually be distributed as unencrypted .epub
Books enter the public domain. Project Gutenberg and others produce DRM-free versions. Many academics and people who wish to share their knowledge also publish works DRM-free, sometimes under permissive (copyleft), licenses.
The fact you see DRM as the norm and non-DRM as “a unicorn” that “doesn’t exist”, is mildly sad. You should explore all of the above a lot more, and much more besides.
I assumed that that was clear from the context, but let me rephrase it then:
"being made available DRM-free on Amazon" (and I'd narrow that down to "primarily/only on Amazon")
Of course public domain books are DRM free but I'm getting those from Gutenberg, not Amazon. Likewise, the copyleft books I'll most likely download from their own homepages, not Amazon.
I'm aware that DRM free media exists, including for currently copyrighted content that Amazon distributes ;)
Mildly sad is also that you seem to fault GP for not “exploring” more, instead of the insane practice of DRMing everything in the first place.
I never have purchased DRM protected media and never will - I’d rather pirate everything digital and but physical hard copies.
I don’t actually think it’s their fault, and if they feel I’m faulting them, that wasn’t the intention.
I think it’s sad that what we thought everyone saw as a nonsense is now so normalised that alternatives are just disappearing from view. Everyone should be encouraged to explore.
Piracy is your preferred option, but when that became more mainstream we actually ended up creating the market for more DRM, in the form of iTunes, Spotify and others. I’m not sure I want the future of digital media to be entirely subscription-based like that.
What might be a better solution is showing that media creators can achieve more of their own objectives through releasing media without DRM. This only works if their objectives are not entirely around making money from media sales, and more aligned to influence, or audience building.
I’m actually surprised at this point that musicians - given they don’t make money from streaming services and see them as tools to build audiences for live tours where they really make their money - don’t just jump over already.
I was just talking about books, but sure for music there are tons of alternative options as well.
I detest streaming platforms and it’s pretty easy to buy music directly from the creators in almost all cases - except maybe the top “superstars” but I would argue that they are probably doing fine anyway…
Also physical records still exist for music as well.
Lots of artists can do just fine with living from media sales.
Look I’m not saying “pirate everything and never pay the artists” - I’m saying “never pay the predatory tech companies that have inserted themselves between us and artists”
...and then they get re-packaged with DRM on Amazon's store, mostly because people uploading public domain books on Amazon have no idea what they're doing.
> Project Gutenberg and others produce DRM-free versions. Many academics and people who wish to share their knowledge also publish works DRM-free, sometimes under permissive (copyleft), licenses.
You can read DRM-free stuff on a Kindle already, so that's not particularly relevant here.
> The fact you see DRM as the norm and non-DRM as “a unicorn” that “doesn’t exist”, is mildly sad.
When every big publisher is doing it, it is the norm. That doesn't mean there doesn't exist any book publisher which doesn't do this, but the vast, vast majority of the books actually sold today contain DRM. We don't have to like that norm, but pretending it isn't one is just denying reality.
While lots public domain books are on Amazon's store, most of those books are not free, both in the sense of "free or charge" and "DRM free". A lot of literature classic are released by a major publishing house with foreword and annotations, which to be fair, are copyrighted works and provide value. And they cost a bit of money. The "real" public domain versions provide by Amazon are barebone. Those versions are often good enough for many people, but you don't need to get them from Amazon in the first place.
In other words, public domain or not does not have much to do with DRM-free or even Amazon.
I assume GP was referring to Tor Books, (which name confused me immensely at first since I've been using the Tor project for many years) but that would have been an absolutely hilarious joke and I think you interpreting it as a joke is totally reasonable given how prominent the onion router project is.
It's not exactly nothing, but it's a pretty small change . Some publishers sell DRM-free on other platforms, and to be honest I was under the impression Amazon used to allow this in the past as well.
Of course if they really believed in the concept they would publish their own works DRM-free, but that would conflict with the business model of the publishing arm.
All of Cory Doctorow's books are DRM-free. Actually, he insisted on it as a contractual rider with his publisher, so he isn't available on any platform that doesn't have a DRM-free option. I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon re-allowing downloads for DRM-free is specifically because Doctorow's publisher is angry at them.
In practice, the biggest store that doesn't have a DRM-free option is Audible... which has a near-monopoly on audiobooks. So Cory Doctorow has to do crowdfunding campaigns for all his audiobooks. Of course, that doesn't stop his books from getting illegally reposted to Audible anyway, and Amazon doesn't care about enforcing rights they can't have. Which led to him actually publishing this gem on Audible: https://www.amazon.com/Why-None-Books-Available-Audible/dp/B...
Kobo does sell some other books DRM-free, so perhaps this is some sort of error. You can buy it directly from the publisher without Adobe DRM, there it has a watermark instead.
