this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2025
56 points (100.0% liked)

Books

7784 readers
1 users here now

A community for all things related to Books.

Rules

  1. Be Nice. No personal attacks or hate speech.
  2. No spam. All posts should be related to books.
  3. No self promotion.

Official Bingo Posts:

Related Communities

Community icon by IconsBox (from freepik.com)

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
dresden@discuss.online
dresden_do@lemmy.world
JaymesRS@literature.cafe
JaymesRS@lemmy.world
dresden@piefed.world
56
What publishers and authors sell DRM-free eBooks? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 1 year ago by Yingwu@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/books@lemmy.world
20 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I don't mind supporting authors, but I'd preferably like to avoid supporting DRM. What publishers or authors out there sell their books without DRM?

top 20 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] ClassyHatter@sopuli.xyz 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Cory Doctorow sells his books DRM-free (e-book and audiobook) on his webpage. Some of them are even pay-what-you-want.

[–] Yingwu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's always the sci-fi authors haha

[–] ClassyHatter@sopuli.xyz 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

He also writes non-fiction. You might be familiar with the term "enshittification". He is the author who coined that term.

[–] Yingwu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My favorite word as of recently. Super cool.

[–] ClassyHatter@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

In that case you might be interested of his book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

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

Appreciate it!

[–] e0qdk@reddthat.com 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Tor Books and Baen Books, IIRC. You can get DRM-free Sci-Fi from authors that publish with them.

Most ebooks I read are free out-of-copyright content from Project Gutenberg or freely published stories (e.g. fanfic, web original content) though.

[–] Yingwu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 year ago

Nice, awesome. Yeah I use Gutenberg and Standard eBooks liberally.

[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Baen library is pretty great. They have been around for a very long time. They give you all the drm free files for books.

Check out their free library for some free books.

[–] Yingwu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How's the general quality of the books they publish?

[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 5 points 1 year ago

I'm a fan. They give you the full epubs + many other formats you never think about like pdf, html, txt, etc....

Just click on any of the books to give it a shot: https://www.baen.com/categories/free-library.html

[–] jonathan@lemmy.zip 8 points 1 year ago

If you're interested in audiobooks too, https://libro.fm/ is DRM-free.

[–] Limonene@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Greg Egan's books are on Smashwords, which is DRM-free. Most of them have the first chapter available on his website, which is good because some of it is REALLY hard sci-fi. I chipped a tooth reading Dichronauts (metaphorically speaking). Scale is more accessible. Diaspora is my favorite.

[–] Yingwu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks! How's the quality on the rest of the website? Many books just look like sloppy erotic novels...

[–] Limonene@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Oh wow, I just now visited the rest of Smashwords, and yeah, it looks like mostly cheap romance. I've already read a lifetime supply of that as a kid, from fanfiction.

[–] other_cat@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 year ago

Juliet Marillier.

[–] Crackhappy@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/drm-free/

[–] white_nrdy@programming.dev 4 points 1 year ago

https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/ has a filter when searching for DRM free content.

[–] temporal_spider@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Honor Raconteur sells her books on her website, I believe. https://www.raconteurhouse.com/

[–] atomic@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

I've been using Weightless Books to get sci-fi magazines like Clarkesworld, and they have a lot more categories.