Back when Randall Munroe released his "What if" in eBook format, it essentially was only available with DRM.
When I emailed him about it, asking for a place to buy it without DRM, he responded with DRM unfortunately being mandated by his publisher, and finished his email with a link to this comic of his:
https://xkcd.com/488/
this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2025
690 points (98.5% liked)
Technology
75707 readers
3650 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Amazon is making it impossible for me to consider a Kindle.
What does this mean? What prevents me from OCRing the pages on a video that quickly goes through it?
You are making a common mistake of being too literal with headlines! What you described is quite difficult and laborious. Nothing prevents you from doing that. Please try in the future to read headlines knowing the editor has written them to attract your attention, using a provocative word like "impossible", while the piece itself might still provide useful information. This is an important aspect of media literacy.
Well yeah, but fearmongering about text DRM is just annoying to see. There are many battles to fight, and epub extraction from a Kindle is very low on the priority list
Authors would be foolish to publish on Amazon. Guarantees your book will be forgotten.
There are so, so many better ebook readers to choose from. Honestly just a phone with an oled screen is better than kindle.
Kindles are pretty decent ereaders if you don't connect them to amazon's ecosystem and just keep them in airplane mode. And unlike phones, they can hold a charge after a few years.
No it isn't Eink is eink
Don't buy Amazon products. Fairly simple concept.
The problem is some authors signing exclusivity deal with Amazon, which means breaking the DRM and converting it is the only way to read it on a different e-reader.
Too bad. Then theres no sale unless I can crack the DRM ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This. All of these problems are solved by people not giving money. But often it seems difficult for people to actually stand behind principle when the time comes -- convenience is a helluva drug.
load more comments
(1 replies)
The problem is some authors signing exclusivity deal with Amazon
Well then those authors can go straight to corpo-sellout hell and die a painful death, I'd rather never read a book again than buy from amazon.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(5 replies)
- https://www.gutenberg.org/
- https://openlibrary.org/
- https://www.planetebook.com/
- https://archive.org/
- https://www.smashwords.com/
- https://books.google.com/
- https://www.freetechbooks.com/
- https://www.getfreebooks.com/
- https://www.openculture.com/free_ebooks
- https://www.goodreads.com/
- https://www.oreilly.com/ (trial)
- https://annas-archive.org/
- https://pdfcoffee.com/
- https://singlelogin.re/
- https://www.ereaderiq.com/freebies/
- https://www.bookbub.com/ebook-deals/free-ebooks
- https://digilibraries.com/
- https://www.overdrive.com/
- https://manybooks.net/
there’s so many others and of course torrents
It is remarkable how many books available for free on Gutenberg are sold in the same format on Amazon (it'd be one thing if they were special editions, new translations etc, but they're the same!)
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(13 replies)
I'm shocked at this unforeseeable turn of events.
The current timeline is truly a constant stream of unanticipated surprises
I will never, ever purchase a book I can't remove the DRM from.
And there are people out there who are absolutely fanatical about book preservation. They will photograph every single page and run it through OCR and recreate an ebook just so it gets preserved. DRM is absolutely pointless and stupid.
Exactly this. As an idiot I purchase DRM music when Microsoft had its own music store. Some years later they closed it and there was no way to validate music keys.
But thankfully I still have an old Roxio9( I think) CD, and back then Roxio didn't know what DRM was and would take the mp3 and burn it to DVD anyway, bypassing the key check, then I would just rip it back off the DVD...DRM is useless
For real.
When I still had Netflix and Disney+ I'd want to watch a show on my PC, but I'd just get black screen with only audio, because something about my setup the DRM didn't like. (Possibly that I have USB displaylink monitors.)
So I had to watch on another device.
DRM isn't stopping content being ripped. It's just making life a pain for paying customers.
load more comments
(7 replies)
Kobo is cool Now just fyi. Works well with calibre.
The biggest issue I have is ebooks are almost all excusevly sold on amazon. I would give authors my money and not sail the high seas if it ment no DRM.
I'm sorry but the idea that most ebooks are exclusive to Amazon is absurd. While they are trying and would love that to be true, it's just not.
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(18 replies)
Why not just remove the Amazon from the ebooks?
amazon: finally we defeated piracy
one kid with a computer: snickers
I've been slowly filling my wife's Kindle Oasis full of pirated books over the last 2 years. I got it initially because it had internet service everywhere and I could just email her the epubs to simplify loading things.
A couple of weeks ago, even though airplane mode is always on for this thing, (so no wifi either) -- this thing wipes something like 400 books from her library overnight. Granted, they were all pirated, but they're doing some nasty stuff there. It looks like there's renewed effort to combat this.
Sooooo, I sold it and bought her a Kobo Libra Color. Now, I just have her open up https://send.djazz.se/ -- give me the 4 digit code, and I can upload books to her that way. Goodbye Amazon. Don't let the door hit you.
load more comments
(12 replies)
This entire thing has been made needlessly complicated. Easy fix though.
- Get whatever ebook you want.
- Borrow some code from GitHub and teach a raspberry pi with a camera and a few servos to snap pictures of pages, turn the pages, snap again into a PDF.
- A script then parses all the images and OCRs them for the final PDF.
- You now own a backup of your DRM book, which you own forever. Pretty sure this is actually legal under DMCA since you are taking a backup of something you allegedly own. The encryption circumvention is irrelevant.
- now, break the law and throw the PDF on the internet to everyone. Go little bot! Go go go!
load more comments
(13 replies)
Tangent, but I have had an incredibly poor experience getting a library eBook onto a kindle. Libby gives out time restricted epubs - fair enough, I am actually borrowing the book, that makes sense. Kindle, despite being the "goto" ereader, and epubs being a standard format, cannot read them.
So, despite wanting to legitimately borrow and read the book, instead I am borrowing and DeDRM'ing it (which is its own convoluted process).
Why is Amazon pushing so hard for piracy? Its one thing to make their store easier to use, but breaking all other valid use cases just leaves the one remaining option...
load more comments
(29 replies)
I don't know why people buy an stuff like this and get surprised when this happens.
Plenty of other electronics that you have full control over.
load more comments
(19 replies)
It annoys me so much that they have convinced anyone that this stuff is for protecting against piracy of something like that, while this is just another tool for them to force you into using their platform and ecosystem. It does nothing against piracy.
And to repurchase. Never forget that aspect of the scam. Sell but don't actually sell, make the customer keep on paying.
load more comments
(3 replies)
I have five published books, all without drm. Amazon better not put that shit ON my books. It's not there for a reason; I want people to share.
load more comments
(5 replies)
I would recommend people buy their books off ZLibrary instead, where they come with no DRM.
Why are people "buying" DRM infested books? They don't own anything. "Their" books can be taken away at the whim of the seller. Their rights can change with a change to the EULA. There are other legal ways to use e-readers (not Kindles) that let you keep and back up what you buy.
load more comments
(1 replies)
view more: next ›