Purchasing a product no longer necessarily equates to owning it. Electronic books (eBooks) are perhaps the best example of this and exemplify why software freedom is so important.
Most eBook purchases are actually content license purchases, not purchases of the content itself. Furthermore, the content is usually distributed with Digital Rights Management (DRM).
In short, even though you may have paid for an eBook, you do not own it. Through DRM and law, the seller can determine where and how you read the eBook (1, 2, 3, 4), take away access to the eBook (5, 6), and even change the content of the eBook without providing a record of the changes (or even letting you know that there were changes at all).
There are ways to remove DRM from your eBook purchases (7, 8, 9), but they may not always work. The best option may be to avoid purchasing eBooks with DRM whenever possible.
Luckily, there are many places to freely obtain or purchase DRM-free eBooks. The following list is a collection of such sources.
- Baen Books
- DRM-free Science Fiction and Fantasy eBooks.
- eBooks.com
- DRM-free eBooks section of eBooks.com.
- Fadedpage
- Archive of eBooks that are provided completely free to everyone.
- Haymarket Books
- DRM-free eBooks section.
- InformIT
- DRM-free technical eBooks.
- Internet Archive Text Archive
- Freely downloadable DRM-free eBooks and texts.
- Leanpub
- DRM-free technical eBooks.
- Manning
- DRM-free technical eBooks.
- Nantucket E-Books
- DRM-free eBook catalog.
- No Starch Press
- DRM-free technical eBooks.
- Project Gutenberg
- A library of over 75,000 free eBooks.
- Project Gutenberg Australia
- Australian branch of Project Gutenberg. May contain titles not present in Project Gutenberg.
- Smashwords
- DRM-free eBooks retailer.
- Standard Ebooks
- A volunteer-driven project that produces new editions of public domain eBooks that are lovingly formatted, open source, free of U.S. copyright restrictions, and free of cost.
- Tor Publishing Group
- DRM-free eBooks.
- Verso Books
- DRM-free radical and independent eBooks.
- Wikibooks
- DRM-free open content textbooks collection.
If you need an eBook that is only available with DRM, try borrowing a physical copy from your local library. If you want to own the eBook that is only available with DRM, try purchasing a physical copy from a local bookstore or an online retailer like Bookshop.org, which donates a portion of each sale to independent bookstores.
If you have physical books that you want (or need) to get rid of, try donating them to your local library or to your community's little free library.
By supporting projects, authors, publishers, and retailers like those in this post, you help support the continued access to, and ownership of, physical and electronic books.
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Kindle Is Making It Harder to Switch to Rival eReader Brands ↩
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Amazon Is Not To Be Trusted Anymore With Their Kindle E-reader ↩
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DRM In School eBooks: When Life Imitates Dystopian Stories ↩
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Microsoft's eBook store: When this closes, your books disappear too ↩
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Use Calibre to Remove DRM from Kindle Books and Convert to PDF ↩