this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2025
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DRM

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A community for the discussion of topics surrounding DRM, Digital Rights Management.

All media that DRM can be applied on can be discussed here, for example books, movies, music or games.

Digital rights management (DRM) is the management of legal access to digital content. Various tools or technological protection measures, such as access control technologies, can restrict the use of proprietary hardware and copyrighted works. DRM technologies govern the use, modification and distribution of copyrighted works (e.g. software, multimedia content) and of systems that enforce these policies within devices. DRM technologies include licensing agreements and encryption.

Wikipedia

Guides and useful tools

Quick and dirty way to rip an eBook from Android

2025 Guide for freeing books from Amazon (after D&T was removed)

Guide to Removing DRM From Amazon Kindle E-Books

Liberate your Kindle books before leaving Amazon (Tutorial)

How to setup Calibre to remove DRM from ebooks on Linux/Archive mirror

Guide on removing DRM from Kobo & Kindle eBooks (reddit mirror, Archive link)

Extracting content from an LCP "protected" ePub

DeDRM tools for eBooks: a plugin for Calibre for removing Adobe DRM, Obok etc.

Calibre eBook Management

Miscellaneous links

DRM - Frequently Asked Questions by DefectiveByDesign

Guide to DRM-Free Living by DefectiveByDesign

founded 5 months ago
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Additions are welcome! Please post in the comments if you're missing any. While I realize other sources and shadow libraries exist, I want this list to be about supporting the sites, stores and authors that make an effort to supply legal, DRM-free alternatives.

Ebook Stores

Ebooks.com DRM-Free section

Weightless Books (Sci-Fi magazines)

StoryBundle

Smashwords

Angry Robot

Delphi Classics

Humble Bundle

Kobo's DRM free section

Publishers

Tor Books

Baen Books

Authors

Cory Doctorow (Sci-Fi)

Greg Egan (Sci-Fi)

Honor Raconteur (Fantasy/YA)

Juliet Marillier (Fantasy)

Brandon Sanderson on Bookshop.org (Sci-Fi, US-only)

Brandon Sanderson on eBooks.com (Sci-Fi)

Libraries

The Anarchist Library

The Internet Archive

Project Gutenberg (American/General Public Domain, has many other countries and languages as well)

Project Gutenberg Canada (Canadian Public Domain)

Project Gutenberg Australia (Australian Public Domain)

Standard eBooks (Formatted Public Domain eBooks)

French eBooks

Ebooks libres et gratuits (French Public Domain)

French Bibiliothèque Nationale's Gallica (French Public Domain)

Les classiques des sciences social, with a large selection of essays and academic papers

La bibliothèque numérique Romande (Swiss fiction)

7switch

Le Belial (Sci-Fi/Fantasy)

Dystopia Editions (Sci-Fi/Fantasy)

Nordic eBooks

Litteraturbanken (Swedish Public Domain)

Runeberg (Swedish Public Domain)

Nasjionalbiblioteket (Norwegian Public Domain)

The National Library of Finland (Finnish Public Domain)

Audiobooks

LibriVox (Narrated public domain eBooks)

Libro FM

Games

GOG

Itch

Zoom

Music

Bandcamp

7digital UK/7digital US

Qobuz

Honorable mention, SomaFM: free and non-commercialized internet radio.


A note, if your native language is for example German, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Polish or similar, you can usually find DRM-free ebooks in your native language through your national stores. The ePubs are usually just watermarked. This might be applicable to other countries as well, even though I'm aware that some countries like Japan or South Korea have even stricter DRM schemes than the English-speaking world.

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[–] Flatworm7591@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Awesome community you've setup here. Thanks for contributing to our instance :)

[–] Yingwu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 5 months ago

Thanks for the kind words! Just gotta get more content posted :)

[–] Auster@thebrainbin.org 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Is it still being updated? If so, might have a few more names:

  • Itchio: maybe counts as overall contents too, even if scale tips to games?

  • iTunes for music. Files come as .m4a and can convert to .mp3 within ITunes itself. Accessing the store requires an Windows or Apple device with the ITunes program installed, and at least on Windows, you can open Apple Music links directly on the ITunes Store by swapping https for start itms and adding ?app=itunes at the end of the link, and then running on the DOS terminal.

  • Fireflower Games (https://fireflowergames.com/): for games

  • Steam: would it count considering this list? Also for music without caveats.

  • Peertube: each video has a native download button from what I observed

  • Fanatical: mainly for book bundles

  • Humble Bundle: also for games

  • Humble Widgets: some stuff can only be found through those, and usually you need to find them manually as those widgets are made to be put in developers' sites.

  • Ototoy: for music; some stuff is geolocked outside of Japan, though somewhat rare from my experience

  • Supraph Online (https://www.supraphonline.cz/), for music. According to the guy behind IsThereAnyDeal, it's a company he sees retail stores in the Czech Republic, so appears legit, I think

  • Amazon US: it has a selection of DRM-free games in the store, but they seem to be slowly delisting the titles there, maybe due to most being at least about as young as Windows Vista. Also has musics in .mp3 format, but apparently with geoblocking, at least in my country.

  • Nigel Stanford, 6502 Workshop, Learn Japanese to Survive, Neofid's Studio, Red Candle Games and Slitherine's respective platforms. Aside from Stanford's (musics & music videos), all others are for games.

  • Lexaloffle Games: only familiar with the PICO-8 side of the site, so can only talk about the games posted in that part - every game can be downloaded if it has a pink cartridge icon under their games' respective web players - click the icon, download the "image" that opens, and either run or recompile through the PICO-8 player, or play through emulators.

  • MAME and Retroarch both make some ROMs available, according to them, with permission from the rights holders, the former through a page on their site, and Retroarch afaik only through the downloader within the frontend (maybe it's somewhere like Libretro's buildbot too, but can't remember).

  • Also multiple smut platforms, but unsure if I should comment further on them since, well, smut

[–] Yingwu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 month ago

Thank you! I'll look over the list and add them later. Yes, I'm active, but I wish more people would be active here as well :)

[–] pixelmeow@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Brandon Sanderson offers many of his ebooks on bookshop.org DRM-free: https://bookshop.org/beta-search?keywords=Brandon+Sanderson

[–] Yingwu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 5 months ago

Thanks, unfortunately US only but Sanderson is published by TOR who pretty much releases all of their books DRM-free.

[–] Libb@jlai.lu 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

In case anyone is interested to read in French, may I suggest those specific addresses some free some not free:

  • Public domain French authors (mostly fiction): Ebooks libres et gratuits (free)
  • The official French Bibiliothèque Nationale's Gallica. Teh website is, like most institutional things not the best experience one could wish for (I am being polite, here) but they offer a lot of free PDFs as well as a limited selection of Epubs (Free).
  • Les classiques des sciences social, with a large selection of essays and academic papers (free)
  • [La bibliothèque numérique Romande](https://ebooks-bnr.com/: Swiss fiction writers, with quite a few gems to be found in there too (free)
  • 7switch.com. Not all their ebooks are DRM-free but its mentioned... or at least it was I have not purchased from them in quite a few years ($)
  • Le Belial a small but excellent science-fiction/fantasy publisher. No DRM and they sell through their own store. I've been their customers for countless years ($)
  • An even smaller publisher SF/Fantasy, but as good : Dystopia Editions. Obviously, DRM-free ($)

If you would rather limit the list to English, you're more than welcome to delete my comment ;)