John Beezer built the Weed Share P2P music sharing service built on top of Microsoft's DRM. Microsoft discontinued the service without notice. All the music everyone bought was lost (unplayable).
This is the second time I've lost eBooks to Microsoft. The first time was some time in the late 90s, when I used to read books on the bus on my Compaq iPAQ PocketPC PDA, using an app which I think was called Microsoft Reader? The books were of course DRM'd.
Eventually the app disappeared and those files are now useless.
Yeah, I bought a few LIT format eBooks off of Amazon back in the day (predating Kindle, I believe). I think I might still have them somewhere with the DRM broken, but obviously, newer formats are nicer.
Isn't it technically a crime though? That's the kicker: the legislative backing to the schemes. Its a matter of time until this GS are so locked down that circumvention becomes impractical, even if its several years in the future. The 'it doesn't work' argument is temporary unless there is enough pushback (as happened with music, thankfully)
This lockdown is what organisations like EFF are trying to fight. Once I have paid for a product, I am its owner. I should be legally allowed to use it, disassemble it, or repair it in any manner I choose to.
My main concern is that my book collection in all probability will outlast Amazon as a company. When they go away, should my books be unreadable? Will I get a refund when Amazon goes bankrupt?
DRM violates the transactional nature of business by tying the product eternally to the seller to be usable at all.
DRM is technically a crime, too. It's infringing upon First Sale Doctrine. You, as someone buying media, actually have rights to what you purchase. The general public has just accepted the industry trampling on those rights and lobbying for laws that conflict with them.
I would argue you're not, because when you buy a book you can choose between hardcopy and kindle - and there's nothing visibly telling you that with one option you get to own the book, with the other you're merely licensing.
> DRM is technically a crime, too. It's infringing upon First Sale Doctrine.
First sale doctrine says that you aren't violating copyright by selling any lawfully made particular copy that you own. I don't see anything in it that says the publisher can't use means other than copyright to try and stop you from doing that.
The main reason it didn't happen with (sold) music was that audio cds were already unencumbered. So it made even less sense than usual to tack on additional DRM. And finally, the most popular form of consuming music now is streaming, which does have DRM generally.
It did happen with sold music. Most downloadable music sold in the early to mid 2000s had DRM. It wasn't until Steve Jobs wrote an open letter in early 2007 calling for the music industry to drop this did it start to change widely [1].
One label, EMI, then agreed to go DRM-free on iTunes. Another, Warner, said that Jobs was an idiot and they would never go DRM free. Within a year or so most labels came to agree with Jobs, and when Amazon Music launched in early 2008 it was DRM-free, including music from Warner.
It took something like another year for iTunes to go fully DRM-free, because Warner was holding out there.
I'm aware of that, but the crucial bit is that CDs existed (and still do for the most part) as it is pointed out in the letter. So even if it weren't for apple, sooner or later things would have taken a similar turn. And that's also why this didn't extend to any other form of media.
Install Calibre and DeDRM, download everything to Kindle for PC and add to calibre, which will break the DRM and ensure you have a copy regardless of what happens with Amazon.
I've personally had an Amazon account blocked along with access to all my Kindle books, which sucks. Now I download every book as soon as I purchase it and add to calibre.
This is not specific to amazon, but I'm kind of OK with vendors who use mild easily-broken drm if it helps them (and the creators) stay in business. i.e., If they want to use it as a casual deterrent, fine by me. I'm not a casual user. So it doesn't affect me.
Books are often harder to pirate, especially less popular ones. It's rare to find a movie or TV show that's not available, it's common to find ebooks that aren't.
I always also get a pirated version of whatever Kindle book I buy to put in my personal electronic library. It's only fair to pay the author, publisher and distributor their price for it, but I also want to be able to re-read that book decades from now. I'm confident that I'll still be able to read a txt or epub file in 2050, but there's no particular reason to think that I would still be able to access my Kindle eBooks then.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
I'm unfamiliar with Microsoft's eBook offerings and the format upon which they're offered. The old Microsoft would have had a proprietary format unique to themselves but that may not be the case.
Why couldn't they convert them to a standard format and put them up on an S3 with a login that pointed people to their virtual folders?
One assumes they'd put them up on Azure's version of S3, but that aside, no doubt no one knows if they can legally offer these things without DRM because of the contracts involved, and no one wants to take the risk.
Or they know they can't and don't want to go through the effort of getting new contracts.
Microsoft's eBooks are EPUB-based. (The current version of Edge works as both an EPUB and PDF reader natively.) If you dig into Edge's data cache, you discover the books are stored in an "MSEPUB" format, and there's another file that contains the license for it.
I imagine it is unlikely to be significantly harder DRM to strip than for other DRM'd EPUBs, but I'm not sure if anyone's bothered to dig in and see if Microsoft changed the file extension because they added some special sauce.
It's an issue if there were ebooks exclusive to Microsoft and not available anywhere else. You've lost access to something that you can't get access to (legally) again at any price.
The ebook no longer exists. That's the point. Whether or not the item is available in print is irrelevant as the person who paid for it did not pay for a physical copy.
Hypothetical? Every major ebook platform offers annotations (and I just checked — this platform did too). MS apparently recognizes the additional inconvenience to people who have annotated, as they are offering an extra $25 to anyone who has made annotations. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4497396
I agree that this closure is not world-ending, and I think the point of the article is that if MS can do this to your ebooks, then other big tech companies could do it to your other content too.
Your thoughts? Deeply engaging with a book, particularly a non-fiction one, involves more than just bouncing words off your retinas.
Personally, while I might not expend the effort on some random novel (though I do highlight quotes I find particularly insightful or funny), I do make a lot of in-line notes & highlights on non-fiction books, both paper and digital. I'd be really pissed off if a book I studied disappeared with all annotations. That's why I learned to procure PDFs of e-books I care about, and I recently started to maintain a separate folder with "reading notes", into which I retype my annotations and thoughts on them after I'm done with reading (this means essentially re-reading the book, albeit much faster, as I have annotations to guide me to important thoughts).
You're getting down-voted, but I agree with you on this particular point.
The vendor is providing a full refund to customers including an additional $25 credit for customers who used the annotation service.
DRM is an annoying customer unfriendly solution to a problem that I'm not convinced exists... but people have been given full access to these books for a while. They've been able to read them from date of purchase until now. Some of them are probably finished reading the books and I'm sure "more than a few people" have exported their books to open formats.
Microsoft has handled this as gracefully as it could, all things told.
If I had bought all my books on Microsoft, I'd be very happy right now. I would be getting hundreds or even thousands of dollars back, that I could use to buy new books.
People bought these ebooks for a reason. Refunding solves nothing if you want the ebook. If someone replaced my bookcase with a check i would be rather pissed too.
Yes and they enjoyed them and probably forgot about them already. If someone would buy my old books I'd be thrilled for most of them. For some selected others devastated, but these I would copy. If they wanted to chip in with another 25$ to pay for my sweet annotations I probably wouldn't even accept it.
This is a bit like that scene in the Godfather where the mafia smash some reporters' cameras, then chuck some money on the ground for them. Yeah, it's a bit classier than common theft, but it's not exactly kosher either.
The concept of ownership is not necessarily the same for digital content. Streaming services for example extended this idea and I don’t believe this is a bad thing. It gives us access to more content for less money. Yes, someone can take it away from you again but there are many advantages to this type of distribution that you could not enjoy if there was a guarantee for lifetime ownership.
How many people who bought those books do you think understood they were buying a revocable license that gave microsoft the right to remotely delete them from their devices?
According to Microsoft statistics and the fact they are paying 100% refunds to every user, the answer to "how many" in this actual situation is probably "very few".
Some people interact with books differently than you do. You might be ok with the refund. Others aren't. But everyone is forced to take it regardless. Maybe just accept that people have different points of view on this, instead of feigning disbelief that this is even an issue.
> But with the 5G boom about to hit, experts will tell you we’re set to see a massive increase in connected devices and appliances, many of which we’ll probably only be able to licence, rather than own.
Why is this more likely with 5G than 4G? What appliances are not suitable for IOT right now, but will be with 5G? Would most of my appliances be in my home, where I have wifi?
This is the usual marketing nonsense. But unless mobile carriers start offering very cheap plans for IOT devices (which is in itself unlikely), I don't see this happening any time soon. WiFi is pretty much here to stay, and is much more reliable indoors than 4/5/6/7/..G
Maybe manufacturers will pay a flat fee to carriers for all their devices in a country. Then when the manufacturer stops paying / doesn't pay enough / shuts down those devices become useless.
> But unless mobile carriers start offering very cheap plans for IOT devices (which is in itself unlikely)
I would have thought there was something equivalent of the electricity duck curve for *G and they've got plenty of bandwidth to sell at certain times of day.
For me it's not a matter of bandwidth, just the cost of the number of SIMs needed. I have hundreds of devices in the field, many in locations with no wifi or wired internet available. They all have sim slots, but the cost (in Belgium) makes it an impossible venture.
5G is subject to more overhype than No Man's Sky. You'll be able to blow through the data cap on your "unlimited" plan in ten minutes instead of forty-five.
Every game in a Humble _Indie_ Bundle has always been available DRM free. Titles in their "Humble Trove" (a monthly subscriber perk) are also DRM free. Other bundles Humble Bundle sells are often Steam only.
I find it slightly sad that Humble Bundle watered down their brand by allowing Steam-only sales in the (Not So) Humble Store, then further by increasingly having Steam-only bundles.
Note that some games on Steam are DRM free, you can download the game via Steam and then make a zip with the files for your own safekeeping.
Sadly it isn't obvious (nor mentioned anywhere, except some very incomplete lists in various wikis) which games are DRM free and which are not and the only way to figure out is to buy the game and try to run it outside of Steam (with Steam itself not running and its folder temporarily renamed to something else). In general if a game doesn't have steam_api.dll, it should be DRM-free but if it does then it is a crapshoot if the Steam integration is necessary or the game can function without it (e.g. Dementium II HD, a game i just tried yesterday, does have the DLL but it can work without it). Also some functionality that in theory could be available without Steam (such as multiplayer) will not work.
Another curious situation drm-demanding publishers have created for themselves is the lack of control and leverage against the stores. With the closed Kindle ecosystem in such a major position, Amazon (with its poor drm) has tremendous leverage over the publishers.
Same here. Every amazon book I've read has been on my kindle, after I've unnecessarily stripped the DRM. Just so I know that the process of removing the DRM was successful.
The instant I no longer can is the same day I'll stop buying DRMed books.
Won't the books remain on the reader device, even if the store closes?
The discussion is also old. I realized that I end up lending only a small fraction of books to other people, and my kids will probably not care about most of my books. Storage of paper books also costs money, so rebuying the few books I want to pass on or reread may be cheaper than buying and keeping physical copies of books. So I chose ebooks.
I assume books are encrypted on the ebook reader and the reader operates by going to Microsoft each time someone tries to open a book and getting an encryption key show the book unencrypted.
That's not how it usually works, does it with Microsoft? It would be very limiting and annoying to be unable to read books without internet access (say on the beach on holidays, for example). Certainly not the case on Kindle.
There were cases were people's Amazon accounts were cancelled, so they couldn't buy new books from Amazon. The books they already bought remained on their kindles, though.
There were also cases of Amazon deleting books from kindles, when the books became illegal.
Any reason to assume Microsoft operated in a very different way?
Presumably the tech is different, but Zune DRM for music bought before 2012 would've stopped working in 2017. The service itself closed down in 2015. So maybe they have a model where the license is valid for e.g. 5 years, and at that point in time the devices would've been clever enough to download new licenses.
Has anyone made "ZuneBook" puns yet?
Edit: hah Zunebook was an MS tablet that was supposed to compete with Amazon Kindle tablets...
I pay for my content but I also pirate copies of everything I like. Every DVD, ebook, audible audiobook, favored Netflix series, and graphic novel has a version in my personal archive. Hell, I even keep offline copies of my favorite YouTube videos and site mirrors of my favorite webcomics. Go down the list of your "liked" YouTube videos and take note of how many of them are now lost to you, through account terminations or being marked private. If you don't take control of the things that're important to you, you leave the door open for someone to take them away.
That's why I love the way we get ebooks in Poland. When we buy an ebook, we usually get a pack of files (epub/pdf/mobi), without any DRM, but with watermarks, some visible, some hidden. Same for audiobooks. There's no DRM, there's some piracy, as always, but the system works and it works pretty damn well. I wish american ebook and audiobook stores were like this.
I believe he means polish e-bookstores. They're way more popular than Kindle store because they offer books in polish language. IIRC some of the stores started offering DRM-free books, others followed and generally it became kind of a standard in Poland.
There is no Kindle in Poland. In fact, there is no Amazon in Poland either(which is almost ironic considering that there are a couple huge Amazon warehouses in Poland - they serve customers of Amazon.de, as they are both very close to the German border - I suspect the labour costs are lower in Poland hence it makes more sense to have the warehouses there. Incidentally, going to Amazon.pl redirects you to Amazon.de instead).
However, in the absence of Amazon, domestic services have sprouted instead - there's a few very big ebook stores, an excellent Audible replacement(with huge superproductions involving famous Polish actors voicing the lines being made regularly), instead of Amazon and Ebay we have Allegro(which in my personal opinion has leapfrogged ebay by about a century worth of development, it's just a much nicer experience). Ebay tried entering the Polish market a few times with huge marketing campaigns and lots of deals, but Allegro's dominance is just so untouchable that I think they have just given up now. I suspect Amazon doesn't even try for the same reason - it's not even localized to Polish(although Polish customers can still order items from any Amazon site, they get delivered to Poland without any issues and for free if you have Prime).
I get my books from Google play books and it does allow downloading as epub. I'm not sure if it includes any kind of drm in it though. I always assumed all of them allowed downloading
# Edit: apparently you need something called Adobe digital Editions to read that epub later. So there is some kind of drm.
Because you can't trivially make identical - down to cuts, paper type, print fidelity - copies of a physical book. But you can trivially make identical copies of a digital one.
Watermarks are an attempt at reproducing rules of physical space in digital space.
These aren't visual watermarks like what you'd get on physical paper. They just alter the digital copy so that it can be traced back to the buyer, and people are deterred from sharing it on the web. It's a very elegant solution if the 'watermark' can be made hard enough to remove, and I can see quite a few workable approaches.
It's not that kind of watermark. Rather, usually at the beginning, there'll be some text saying who bought the book, along with some kind of identifier. The id can also be hidden inside the file.
The books I've investigated had a text saying "This copy belongs to: %s" where %s was an email address at the beginning, and an invisible hex string at the end of every chapter. The string had a width and height of 1px, so most conventional readers didn't show it at all.
These watermarks only appear a few times in places like beside the page number. You'll have to provide a darn good explanation to convince me it makes the book harder to read.
And yes, it's still trivially copyable, but that makes it better in any way than DRM: it can be traced back to the original owner but doesn't make it unnecessarily hard to read it on multiple devices.
If your watermarked version appears online it is an indication that you might have uploaded (or not properly protected) it. This might not be enough to prove this in a court, but enough for the publisher's lawyers to annoy you.
But hardly any uploader would keep watermarks in, which makes them more of a way for faithful users to not give the book I.e. to friends since there is a visible reminder about being your personal copy.
An uploader can easily edit the watermark out of the book, if he is so inclined, and he probably is. It only annoys those who were not bent on uploading it in the first place.
Also, I specifically would not abide to any kind of law saying I cannot give a book I bought to a friend.
Many readers can't (they could learn it though) enough however indeed can.
That's why, from publisher's view, the second point is so important: Remind readers all the time that "it" (without going into details) is illegal so they continue buying.
It's trivial even with a watermark and all other forms of DRM. As demonstrated by the article, DRM only punishes paying customers that don't understand what they're paying for.
DRM always restricts the paying customer. With DVDs they got the unskippable piracy warnings, while people who downloaded the ripped version wouldn't see it ...
The hope publishers have is that it slows distribution a bit and they use it as attempt to manipulate people to allow stronger punishment of infringers.
It's actually not that easy for most books, because most books aren't popular enough to sustain a torrent. A PDF of a book is usually tens or hundreds of megabytes, which is too big to get through most mail servers. Mass-sharing an ebook takes just enough work that it won't happen for anything that's not a best-seller.
Mass sharing a scanned book, particularly one that was not OCRed, indeed usually takes too much work. EBooks, or rather most of them, are tiny epub files with little to no images, 5mb maximum. There are sources distributing ebooks at scale, libgen.io is a prime example, the ebooks channel on IRC highway and myanonamouse, a private ebook and audiobook torrent tracker that some people apparently use also exist. There are rumours of private collections spanning millions of titles that fit on a single, albeit large, hard drive.
Gotcha -- an epub/mobi of a novel is tiny and easy to host. I was thinking of more design-heavy books with figures and images, which tend to be much larger.
Still, if people torrent audiobooks (and they do), then eBooks, even with figures, can't be that bad. I've seen hosted collections of audiobooks ranging in the gigabytes and they were not best sellers. No reason why you couldn't do that for ebooks.
I'm fine with watermarks. The only downside to them is that they are traceable to the original buyer if someone else gets their hands on your and decides to distribute it online, so lending them to a friend is risky.
But the watermarks really only matter when they get illegally copied around, and don't hurt the owner in the way more restrictive forms of DRM do.
in the blind community I'm a part of, there are a lot of ebooks floating as plaintext files, with watermarks either stripped or replaced by something like "there was a watermark here, but it has been stripped. Keep trying".
There will always be hacking. When you sell ebooks without drm and with just reasonable watermarking, you remove all the incentive for ethical hacking. This remains only the unethical hacking (the thieves).
Risky how? Is there some punishment for not perfectly securing bytes? That would be insane because companies aren't punished for sharing your stuff by accident or even selling it on purpose.
Well, that “downside” is the entire point. Czech publishers call this “social DRM”, which conveys the point well: if the book says it was printed for me, visibly, I won’t be inclined to distribute it illegally. It isn’t about enforcement (see sibling comment). And yes, you can strip visible watermarks, but this still discourages casual pirates well.
audioteka.pl. They offer mp3s. They're apparently pretty weirdly encoded sometimes, but there's no real DRM. Of course, if you want to, you can use their own mobile apps which don't let you extract the content and provide gimmicks like remembering your last position. There are also some smartphone-only deals, but you can usually get the book in mp3 for a higher price.
Importantly, a digital watermark can also be used to track which citizens are reading subversive literature. I'll admit, the modern internet has so much tracking that this point is a bit moot. But, why add one more bit of tracking?
I think the reason why no-DRM approach took off in Poland is because Amazon has been slow to enter the market. None of the competitors were large enough to develop and maintain a DRM ecosystem (with reading apps, readers etc). I'm sure they would have liked to (corporate brainlessness knows no limits), but they were not able to pull it off.
The result is indeed great: E-books are reasonably priced, they get auto-delivered (as "docs") to your Kindle if you wish, or you can get an ePub version if you prefer. You really do own them: the publisher might disappear, but if you keep your files, you keep the books.
I don't think piracy is a factor. It's way too easy to buy the real thing at this point.
I REALLY don’t agree with giving Amazon money (ethically) but I am a hypocrite and end up buying a lot of ebooks and audiobooks from them, I do my best to back up the files using calibre but I‘m sure they could lock down devices / files using DRM and their latest DRM incarnation is very hard to remove. I try to buy DRM-free ebooks and audiobooks whenever possible but I think mostly due to market domination authors and publishers end up at least mostly exclusively providing content via Amazon.
If you are already using Calibre, it's not hard to protect yourself from Amazon. I have a Kindle PaperWhite that's about ~3 years old and it only connected to the Internet once during initial setup. I've put it in flight mode after that and it will never go online again.
As for books, when I buy them on Amazon I select "transfer via USB" which let's me download it and when I add it to Calibre, the DRM is stripped by DEDRM_tools [1][2] before transfering into the Kindle.
I’ve used deDRM a lot in the past, but it doesn’t work with the latest DRM on (I think AWZ3 files) - but perhaps it’s been updated since I last checked about 6 months ago or so.
I use it with AWZ3 just fine, but then I also haven't allowed my Kindle to update its software in years, so maybe Amazon is giving me files with older DRM.
I bought a few books a couple of months ago from Amazon for use with their PC viewer and the first thing i did was to remove the DRM (so i can read it on my phone using my preferred ebook reader... and i trust myself more than Amazon to keep the books around) so i think they managed to break the latest version too.
Check out this list of DRM-free bookstores, maintained by Libreture [1].
I usully buy my DRM-free ebooks from Weightless Books [2], and also subscribe to "The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction" and "Interzone" from that site.
Well, I couldn't download half of the albums I bought 5-6 years ago in iTunes because they're no longer available in my country and there is no way to re-download them. An this store is far from being closed...
296 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 249 ms ] threadHere's the cite:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/05/media_player_weedsh...
I misremembered the technical details, but the end result is the same: user's lost the content they purchased.
Eventually the app disappeared and those files are now useless.
My main concern is that my book collection in all probability will outlast Amazon as a company. When they go away, should my books be unreadable? Will I get a refund when Amazon goes bankrupt?
DRM violates the transactional nature of business by tying the product eternally to the seller to be usable at all.
First sale doctrine says that you aren't violating copyright by selling any lawfully made particular copy that you own. I don't see anything in it that says the publisher can't use means other than copyright to try and stop you from doing that.
The main reason it didn't happen with (sold) music was that audio cds were already unencumbered. So it made even less sense than usual to tack on additional DRM. And finally, the most popular form of consuming music now is streaming, which does have DRM generally.
One label, EMI, then agreed to go DRM-free on iTunes. Another, Warner, said that Jobs was an idiot and they would never go DRM free. Within a year or so most labels came to agree with Jobs, and when Amazon Music launched in early 2008 it was DRM-free, including music from Warner.
It took something like another year for iTunes to go fully DRM-free, because Warner was holding out there.
[1] http://macdailynews.com/2007/02/06/apple_ceo_steve_jobs_post...
Ten years ago, so was smoking dope.
I've personally had an Amazon account blocked along with access to all my Kindle books, which sucks. Now I download every book as soon as I purchase it and add to calibre.
Quit paying them for the abusive media. Pirate. You have to break the law anyways even if you pay legit.
[0] It's called Tuneskit Audible Converter, and I'm surprised they haven't been sued by Amazon yet.
ffmpeg -activation_bytes 1CEB00DA -i test.aax -vn -c:a copy output.mp4
Then you can use ffmpeg to convert the .aax file:
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.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.
Try buying from https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebooks where possible (DRM-free).
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.
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.
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 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.
You're joking, right? DRM-stripping is inherently unreliable, by definition. It's a last resort only, and we shouldn't be expected to deal with it.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
(Yes, I had to.)
Thankfully, better options have been linked in the thread.
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.
So is it ownership structure? 'vibe'?
Independent in this context includes many different things, most of which I'm not sure are particularly relevant to an online business.
You don't get a knowledgeable enthusiastic shop owner to talk to, it isn't a gathering space, it doesn't keep money in the local community.
So I'm asking what independent actually means in an online context.
> How does that work?
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).
If some one told me about a small independent record store, or small independent coffee shop, I would have certain expectations.
Platform independent seems reasonable given the context though.
I have a Kobo. Every book I've bought from there has DRM.
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.
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).
They have an English site too if language barrier is an issue: https://global.bookwalker.jp/
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.
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.
Why couldn't they convert them to a standard format and put them up on an S3 with a login that pointed people to their virtual folders?
Or they know they can't and don't want to go through the effort of getting new contracts.
I imagine it is unlikely to be significantly harder DRM to strip than for other DRM'd EPUBs, but I'm not sure if anyone's bothered to dig in and see if Microsoft changed the file extension because they added some special sauce.
I agree that this closure is not world-ending, and I think the point of the article is that if MS can do this to your ebooks, then other big tech companies could do it to your other content too.
Personally, while I might not expend the effort on some random novel (though I do highlight quotes I find particularly insightful or funny), I do make a lot of in-line notes & highlights on non-fiction books, both paper and digital. I'd be really pissed off if a book I studied disappeared with all annotations. That's why I learned to procure PDFs of e-books I care about, and I recently started to maintain a separate folder with "reading notes", into which I retype my annotations and thoughts on them after I'm done with reading (this means essentially re-reading the book, albeit much faster, as I have annotations to guide me to important thoughts).
The vendor is providing a full refund to customers including an additional $25 credit for customers who used the annotation service.
DRM is an annoying customer unfriendly solution to a problem that I'm not convinced exists... but people have been given full access to these books for a while. They've been able to read them from date of purchase until now. Some of them are probably finished reading the books and I'm sure "more than a few people" have exported their books to open formats.
Microsoft has handled this as gracefully as it could, all things told.
I just committed theft and should go to jail. Once you sell something you don't have the right to take it back if you later regret the transaction.
Microsoft did not sell the books (or their content), though.
How many people who bought those books do you think understood they were buying a revocable license that gave microsoft the right to remotely delete them from their devices?
Why is this more likely with 5G than 4G? What appliances are not suitable for IOT right now, but will be with 5G? Would most of my appliances be in my home, where I have wifi?
I would have thought there was something equivalent of the electricity duck curve for *G and they've got plenty of bandwidth to sell at certain times of day.
Like this?
https://hologram.io/pricing/
https://www.particle.io/pricing/#cellular-data
(I still like my Steam library, but the games I really care about are bought on GOG/HIB when possible.)
Sadly it isn't obvious (nor mentioned anywhere, except some very incomplete lists in various wikis) which games are DRM free and which are not and the only way to figure out is to buy the game and try to run it outside of Steam (with Steam itself not running and its folder temporarily renamed to something else). In general if a game doesn't have steam_api.dll, it should be DRM-free but if it does then it is a crapshoot if the Steam integration is necessary or the game can function without it (e.g. Dementium II HD, a game i just tried yesterday, does have the DLL but it can work without it). Also some functionality that in theory could be available without Steam (such as multiplayer) will not work.
The instant I no longer can is the same day I'll stop buying DRMed books.
The discussion is also old. I realized that I end up lending only a small fraction of books to other people, and my kids will probably not care about most of my books. Storage of paper books also costs money, so rebuying the few books I want to pass on or reread may be cheaper than buying and keeping physical copies of books. So I chose ebooks.
There were cases were people's Amazon accounts were cancelled, so they couldn't buy new books from Amazon. The books they already bought remained on their kindles, though.
There were also cases of Amazon deleting books from kindles, when the books became illegal.
Any reason to assume Microsoft operated in a very different way?
Has anyone made "ZuneBook" puns yet?
Edit: hah Zunebook was an MS tablet that was supposed to compete with Amazon Kindle tablets...
However, in the absence of Amazon, domestic services have sprouted instead - there's a few very big ebook stores, an excellent Audible replacement(with huge superproductions involving famous Polish actors voicing the lines being made regularly), instead of Amazon and Ebay we have Allegro(which in my personal opinion has leapfrogged ebay by about a century worth of development, it's just a much nicer experience). Ebay tried entering the Polish market a few times with huge marketing campaigns and lots of deals, but Allegro's dominance is just so untouchable that I think they have just given up now. I suspect Amazon doesn't even try for the same reason - it's not even localized to Polish(although Polish customers can still order items from any Amazon site, they get delivered to Poland without any issues and for free if you have Prime).
# Edit: apparently you need something called Adobe digital Editions to read that epub later. So there is some kind of drm.
Watermarks are an attempt at reproducing rules of physical space in digital space.
That's right. They are trivially copyable, but the copies are easily traceable. Compute now?
Except they often are visual. "Owned by X" and such.
And yes, it's still trivially copyable, but that makes it better in any way than DRM: it can be traced back to the original owner but doesn't make it unnecessarily hard to read it on multiple devices.
But hardly any uploader would keep watermarks in, which makes them more of a way for faithful users to not give the book I.e. to friends since there is a visible reminder about being your personal copy.
Also, I specifically would not abide to any kind of law saying I cannot give a book I bought to a friend.
That's why, from publisher's view, the second point is so important: Remind readers all the time that "it" (without going into details) is illegal so they continue buying.
The hope publishers have is that it slows distribution a bit and they use it as attempt to manipulate people to allow stronger punishment of infringers.
Because digital things can be copied for free without loss of fidelity.
> Your printed books aren't. Watermarks are ugly.
A digital watermark can be invisible.
But the watermarks really only matter when they get illegally copied around, and don't hurt the owner in the way more restrictive forms of DRM do.
The result is indeed great: E-books are reasonably priced, they get auto-delivered (as "docs") to your Kindle if you wish, or you can get an ePub version if you prefer. You really do own them: the publisher might disappear, but if you keep your files, you keep the books.
I don't think piracy is a factor. It's way too easy to buy the real thing at this point.
As for books, when I buy them on Amazon I select "transfer via USB" which let's me download it and when I add it to Calibre, the DRM is stripped by DEDRM_tools [1][2] before transfering into the Kindle.
[1] https://github.com/apprenticeharper/DeDRM_tools
[2] Note that the tool only removes the DRM, it doesn't anonymise the file. It's still associated with your account.
I’ve used deDRM a lot in the past, but it doesn’t work with the latest DRM on (I think AWZ3 files) - but perhaps it’s been updated since I last checked about 6 months ago or so.
If I can download a “legacy” file format - I might try that.
Thanks again for your input!
https://bokon.se/
I usully buy my DRM-free ebooks from Weightless Books [2], and also subscribe to "The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction" and "Interzone" from that site.
[1] https://www.libreture.com/bookshops/
[2] https://weightlessbooks.com/