Show HN: DRM-Free Books

61 pointsposted 7 hours ago
by TeaVMFan

30 Comments

technothrasher

5 hours ago

> DRM-free classics that are out of copyright.

I started down this road with a few books about two years ago, and I have so many now on my list to read that I hardly ever get to reading a modern book.

I read a lot from Standard Ebooks. But one thing to keep in mind with them- they do edit the books to make changes for readability. Not necessarily a big deal, but something to know.

bluebarbet

3 hours ago

Same. Ironic that a quirk of modern technology would put classical literature back in fashion.

Lio

3 hours ago

The Pragmatic Programmers have always sold DRM free commercial book (to my knowledge).

https://pragprog.com/

Having commercial publishers that will sell you high quality books without DRM is brilliant and I'll always support that.

philips

5 hours ago

All of Cory Doctorow books are DRM free.

https://shop.craphound.com/

TeaVMFan

4 hours ago

I added a link, thanks! Mr. Doctorow seems to include 3 formats in every purchase (PDF, MOBI, and EPUB), which should cover just about any device.

AtheistOfFail

3 hours ago

Do you know if you can buy as a gift for someone else?

themadturk

2 hours ago

My own novel, The Immortal Remains, is DRM-free on Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Google, and other platforms (maybe Apple as well, I'm not sure). Other authors, such as Cory Doctorow, sell their books DRM-free as well.

babblingfish

6 hours ago

I don't see any mention here of books sold by Tor. All their books are DRM-free.

kreyenborgi

4 hours ago

Can one buy Tor books without going through Amazon? I had trouble doing that last I tried.

themadturk

2 hours ago

At least some Tor.com ebooks are available DRM-free through Amazon. Honor Of The Queen, 2nd in the Honor Harrington Series, specifically says it's sold without DRM on Amazon.

mrec

17 minutes ago

Huh? The Honor Harrington books are published by Baen (who are all DRM-free).

chocochunks

2 hours ago

Yes, Kobo, Google Play Books both carry them.

bentley

4 hours ago

I’ve bought Tor books from Google Play and gotten DRM‐free EPUB files from it.

TeaVMFan

6 hours ago

I added it to the list of DRM-free sources at the end, thanks!

rickcarlino

3 hours ago

I wish someone would build something like hiring.cafe but for DRM free digital content. One search query => uniform search results with direct link to purchase page on relevant marketplace. Basically just scrape and index every DRM free content marketplace and put it behind a single search interface.

murats

6 hours ago

Useful list. I wish more book stores made DRM status obvious before checkout.

Nzen

43 minutes ago

It feels like this list, if it focuses on individual authors is - if successful - overwhelming in scope. There are, what, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of authors ? If 1%, for argument's sake, this list would have thousands of links.

Nonetheless, I'll promote an author of both non- and fiction ebooks I've bought from, Michael W Lucas [0].

[0] https://www.tiltedwindmillpress.com/

Leptonmaniac

5 hours ago

So this is a similar idea to Project Gutenberg?

teravor

3 hours ago

all books are DRM-free if you download them from the right place ;)

themadturk

2 hours ago

Yes, but from some of those places the authors receive no compensation.

jMyles

an hour ago

If their wallet address is available on the internet, that's an easily solved problem.

Imustaskforhelp

5 hours ago

So after seeing this project on the front page of hackernews. I decided to add my EPUB reader on a submission as well[0]: https://epub.mirror.forum

and although I already previously had the idea of showing books from gutenberg but your idea made me find more importance in it and I ended up doing so in two different implementations: https://guten.mirror.forum and https://gutencf.mirror.forum, so I thank you for that!

[Offtopic: I am/was also surprised to see that there is a lack of API or platforms if suppose I created this app and I wanted to give users genuine ways to pay. Aside from the walled gardens of Kindle or specific apps, I am unable to give my users a way to just search books, pay for them and download it (atleast to my understanding at the moment) which is a sad thing :-( ]

I hope people are able to give love to my submission at [0] / the link down below. Cheers and take care and have a nice day if a real human is being out there reading this :-D

Hope you like or enjoy it and find it useful!

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48710584

shmerl

6 hours ago

Nice. Good to know that Tor books are DRM-free.