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Posted by captn3m0 4 days ago

Amazon will allow ePub and PDF downloads for DRM-free eBooks(www.kdpcommunity.com)
629 points | 336 commentspage 2
jrm4 4 days ago|
Haha, what a headline.

The internet "allows" ePub and PDF downloads for ALL books. Adjust yourselves accordingly.

everdrive 4 days ago||
Amazon deserves a lot of criticism in the general sense, but this can only be seen as a positive move. Most importantly, if they set an industry standard, others might follow.

Fundamentally, I prefer a physical book to a digital one. But, the primary reason I'd never even entertain a digital book is the lack of ownership. Ownership is incredibly important, and we need to celebrate victories when they happen.

freedomben 4 days ago|||
I agree this is a positive step, but this is like notch 1 on a scale of 0 to 100, 0 being maximum abuse of your customer. I think it's downright evil not to allow this for DRM free books, which they have been doing for many years now. It is positive that they reduced the level of evil by a little bit, and I'll give them credit for that, but this movement is so minor in the scope of things that it does not sway me whatsoever to go back to buying from their Kindle store
TheCoelacanth 4 days ago||||
It's a positive move, but too little, too late. These same publishers have already been available DRM-free from other stores for a long time.
jrm4 4 days ago|||
Why?

Genuine question.

What's to "celebrate?" This is like "celebrating" a ketchup company removing the rat hairs.

IAmBroom 4 days ago||
Not every person likes sailing under the Jolly Roger, matey.
jrm4 4 days ago|||
Oh, as a lawyer, I must insist that you should never do piracy and its wrong, which is why I try to inform people as much about this thing so that they can avoid it.

:)

NoMoreNicksLeft 4 days ago|||
Too much convenience, selection, and the prices are all too low!
monomial 4 days ago||
Do yourself a favor and go get a Kobo reader, install KO Reader on it and never look back.
mapontosevenths 4 days ago|
I like to be able to price shop, but I do want to support the authors. So I use Kobo & Kindle, then buy it wherever it's cheapest usually.

Then I use epubor ultimate to convert to epub and read it on my generic e-ink reader. Some folks object to the licensing or whatever with epubor (unattributed GPL?) but it works, it's easy, and when Amazon tightens up the DRM they always find a way around it eventually.

freedomben 4 days ago||
Dang, it's unfortunate they don't support Linux
drnick1 3 days ago||
I'll never use Amazon for anything that isn't physically delivered to my door. They can keep their Fire tablets, TVs, and other spyware.
caseysoftware 4 days ago||
I've "collected" 500+ Kindle titles over the years and stopped buying from them completely when they blocked downloads earlier this year. When they enable these downloads, I'm going to export the ones I didn't get last time and continue NOT buying from them.

Fool me once..

nottorp 4 days ago||
For all three DRM-free titles?
literalAardvark 4 days ago||
Not even, it's opt-in.
NetMageSCW 4 days ago||
There are thousands.
IlikeKitties 4 days ago||
The current experience of using a Kobo Libre Color, Koreader, any webdav mounted in koreader and pirating everything on annas archive et. al. cannot be beat by any commercial offering. Unsuprisingly my copy of 1984 has never been deleted from my NAS
WolfeReader 4 days ago||
I love breaking DRM, but you should at least buy the books. Authors, editors, illustrators, and translators all deserve to be paid for their work.
kstrauser 4 days ago||
That's my take. I break the DRM off books I've bought. I own those copies. I'll format shift them for my own convenience. Bought on Kindle but want to read on my Kobo? It's impossible to make me feel guilt about that.

But I don't read books I haven't legally acquired, whether through a paid bookstore, or temporarily borrowed via Libby, or Standard Ebooks or whatever. I won't yell at other people for doing that, but I don't do it myself. In a nutshell, I follow the same rules as with physical books I own (or temporarily possess).

stringsandchars 4 days ago|||
> pirating everything on annas archive et. al. cannot be beat by any commercial offering

While I understand people pirating movies - there are hundreds of movies I'd happily pay to watch, but which are literally unavailable to me because of some arbitrary 'regional' restriction imposed by the distributors. But I can't think of a single book that isn't available in most parts of the world - certainly they're available wherever a Kobo is for sale.

So how are new books going to be published in the future, if people like you don't pay writers for their work? Would you like your work to be pirated, so you wouldn't be able to even buy another Kobo?

spidermonkey23 4 days ago|||
I feel like if the platform is unwilling to give you access to books you posted for, you should be able to download them from arrr without authors or publishers being affected financially - buy first pirate later.
IAmBroom 4 days ago||||
People have been writing for much longer than writing has been a profession. And their work has been published by the means of the day, which pre-Gutenberg in the West meant hand-copying.

It's not immoral in any way to make a living off of your own creations, but - artists gonna art.

NoMoreNicksLeft 4 days ago||||
>Would you like your work to be pirated,

Imagine being so good at writing, that people out there are trying to get a copy of it that they can upload to The Pirate Bay. Hell yeh, I'd love that... seems like reaching the big leagues.

kmeisthax 4 days ago|||
Datahoarders with hard drives full of pirated books are not nearly as much of a threat to writers as, say, AI slop making it difficult to market new books. If you pirate a book and read it, the author can still sell you the sequel. Not so much if you don't even know who the author is.
Suggger 4 days ago||
You are essentially a distributed Fahrenheit 451 node.
Bridged7756 3 days ago||
I have a kindle. And it's really good, I've never read as much. Ive never bought a single thing from its store, only sideloaded though. And seeing the recent events im more worried about Amazon pulling the plug on side loading stuff. Turns out it's not that complicated to jailbreak your kindle though, so that's what I'm doing this weekend.
Snacklive 3 days ago||
Recently i bought a book from Kindle because i couldn't find it in any other platform and I'm so happy it only cost me 1$ because i haven't been able to download the ePub version, none of the methods on the internet have worked for me or they need to use a physical kindle device. God it's so frustrating i just want to read a 1$ book on my Kobo
derwiki 3 days ago|
What book?
1970-01-01 4 days ago||
This is all very interesting news. From a sales standpoint, they're nearly admitting they cannot manage DRM properly and at Amazon scale. From a copyright standpoint, antipiracy will be extremely hard to enforce. The only middle ground is targeting honest buyers, and we all know how well that works. We should not expect this to be a permanent change. Perhaps it will be more of a very short, DRM-free golden age until another Amazon executive comes down and ends this experiment.
wrxd 4 days ago|
This is not about making all books DRM-free. It's about allowing downloads for the ones that are already DRM-free, if the publishers opt-in
1970-01-01 4 days ago||
Thanks, I missed the key detail!
zenethian 4 days ago|
Too little too late. I’ve already ditched Amazon for ebooks in favor of Kobo’s ecosystem. It’s not flawless but it’s not soul sucking either.
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