On: ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

[wlesieutre]

Kobo doesn’t force books to use DRM, for example: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-way-of-kings-1

  Tor Publishing Group
  Release Date: August 31, 2010
  Imprint: Tor Books
  ISBN: 9781429992800
  Language: English
  Download options: EPUB 3 (DRM-Free)

But if you’re only browsing the books that choose not to use it, it’s certainly a smaller selection

[lxgr → wlesieutre]

Not even Amazon forces publishers to use it! There are DRM-free Kindle books available.

Unfortunately, I don't know of a way to explicitly search for DRM-free titles, but the description for these usually has a sentence like "made available DRM-free at the publisher's request", or is lacking the reference to "use limited to x devices simultaneously".

[rendaw → lxgr]

Comixology as part of their Amazon acquisition just got rid of their old DRM-free offerings: https://twitter.com/comixology/status/1492222215139459072

[bentley → rendaw]

This is why I not only favor purchasing DRM-free media, but also keep a local archive of all such purchases.

    $ ls /mnt/comixology | wc -l
    239

(This can be a bit difficult for larger‐sized media, such as video games, but I do it anyway—my GOG archive is over two terabytes.)

I also have a small collection of DRM‐free music I had purchased and downloaded from Amazon that no longer seems to be accessible online. Certainly I have no plans to purchase anything digital from them in the future.

[vidarh → lxgr]

Including in KDP. There's a tickbox for whether you want DRM or not. Personally I'd never add DRM to mine because it's so trivial to strip anyway and just an inconvenience.

[feanaro → lxgr]

If Amazon doesn't demand it, then it must be the book publishers that are actually demanding it. So it's not just big bad Amazon after all. That's interesting.

[Blackthorn → wlesieutre]

I wouldn't mind so much if the books that do use their DRM were able to work with other ereaders, but they aren't because this technology is garbage.

[blooalien → Blackthorn]

Main reason I mind is because DRM a) creates "artificial scarcity" of an effectively "infinitely" and freely duplicate-able resource (digital bits of data) mostly to fulfill the bottomless greed-hole of corporate entities (rather than to enrich the original creator for their part in it), and b) (and this is the main reason I hate DRM) because it gives some bottomless pit of greed corporate entity the ability to arbitrarily deprive me of something I paid for, or restrict my ability to use / access it at some unknown point in time down the road, forcing me to maybe have to pay again for something I already paid for. (Nope. Not gonna do that. If I'm backed into that corner, I'll choose to "fly the Jolly Roger" and acquire a DRM-free copy some other way.)

Given the option to support content creators in some way that doesn't screw me over as a content "consumer", I'ma prefer that option all day long, every day; However, too many corporate entities these days would rather not offer that option, if they think they can find a way to make you pay every single time you lay eyeballs on something… (That is the ultimate goal of some of 'em, to be certain.)

[lxgr → blooalien]

I see it less as bottomless greed, and much more as a fear or inability to adapt to a new situation, desperately clinging to the past via technological means instead.

The music industry was the same, initially – and maybe MP3s would still be sold with DRM by default if it wasn't for Steve Jobs and the iTunes store back in the day.

There's hope, though: With very few exceptions, German e-books are also sold without DRM these days.