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Comment by nathantotten | Hacker News Reader

> Microsoft will refund customers in full for what they paid, plus an extra $25 if they made annotations or mark-ups.

Doesn’t seem all that nefarious. Get your money back, order the paperbacks. No DRM issues again.

And what about the hours of effort put into reading, annotating, and jotting down notes on the ebook? (Typical of serious reading/research) That is worth way more than $25 -- MS is robbing people of the value they tried to create/store for their future selves. What use is a "platform" if it can't support that?

This happens every week for people using some SaaS product that gets cancelled.

DRM is content as a service, and by definition, all DRM will either be cracked or will become inaccessible eventually with probability approach 1 over time.

It's more a trust issue in a technology. Pirated ebooks don't have DRM and never expire, can be opened on any device and you keep the money anyway.

Or never buy DRM books to start with.

I own a Kindle, however I only buy ebooks from stores that offer epub and PDF as well. At max with watermarks.

Any recommendations for such stores?

I know of https://www.downpour.com for audio books and I get all my audio books from them since they are DRM-free.

Would love to know of such a service for ebooks, but for fiction.

tor is a scifi/fantasy+adjacent publisher that famously offers drm-free ebooks

https://www.tor.com/

Baen Books

https://www.baen.com/

They have always been very customer friendly. They have a "free library" section, too. (Often has such things as the first book in a series.)

J Novel Club

https://j-novel.club/top

Translated Japanese light novels. There's a membership that lets you read along as they translate, but if you purchase the ebook when they're done, it's DRM free.

And of course http://www.gutenberg.org/

If you live in the US and have a library card, try Overdrive. You can check out a huge catalog of eBooks for essentially free (since it’s paid via your local library).

Overdrive ebooks are DRMed (or at least the majority of them are).

Overdrive primarily uses Adobe's DRM system. You can "liberate" the titles with the use of the DeDRM toolset or get the resources directly off their "libby" platform, which simply requires reassembling the assets into an EPUB

Looks like some people are forgetting the first rule of Fight Club.

I know you can break it, but this is in response to someone asking a question about how to buy DRM-free ebooks.

It’s not too hard to break this DRM. My library lets me ‘borrow’ ebooks and sometimes they are due back and I haven’t finished them.

It’s so ridiculous.

I contribute to Standard Ebooks that takes PD text (primarily from Gutenberg but also elsewhere) and reformats it with good typography and consistent styling, before re-releasing it as public domain again. We’re coming up to 300 titles now, any problems you find can be fixed with a pull request on github if you want: https://standardebooks.org/

It's not the same as buying DRM free, but stripping DRM from most eBook formats is pretty trivial these days, afaik. Unless something has changed in the last few years since I last bought a kindle edition of a book (which I stripped of DRM so something like this couldn't happen).

It’s not trivial for Kindle anymore. I did it recently on a Mac, and it took a fair bit of work, was complicated and confusing, and required finding an old version of the Kindle reader program and somehow preventing it from checking in with Amazon’s servers. My brother in law recently tried and failed after having done it in the past.

It's still trivial AFAIK (I last did it one or two years ago) if you have an old kindle device, and can therefore convince Amazon to send you the poorly encrypted files meant for old kindles. I use a "Kindle Keyboard" e.g. the 3rd gen. Amazon has stopped selling new-old-stock, but it seems you can still find them on ebay for somewhere between $20-50.

Incidentally this model of Kindle also comes with text-to-speach, which is a really nice feature which I believe is missing from all newer models (removed to avoid cannibalizing audio book sales.)

Keep in mind that by buying DRMed books you give companies an incentive to produce them. If you're opposed to DRM, it may be better to pirate instead. Especially if you live in a jurisdiction in which removing DRM is illegal so you're breaking the law anyway.

Packt, Manning, O'Reilly

I buy mostly technical e-books.

Don’t forget https://www.humblebundle.com/ for frequent book bundles.

My method is to torrent the ebook, then purchase the paperback from the author's website when I finish it.

That's still showing the dark side of DRM. However it is also Microsoft handling that dark side in a professional way.

If a game developer shuts down their game servers, do they release the binaries? Some do, I guess. I've even seen some software companies release the source if/when they shut down.

Seems very unlikely that MS can unilaterally release other people's books without DRM.

This assumes that the paperback exists. It ought to be the responsibility of the vendor to offer either a full refund or a hard copy, at the vendor's expense, including any annotations that were made on the digital copy.

While having such an option may be a good idea, one of the main appeals of ebooks for me is that I already have far too many linear feet of paper books. Giving me a hard copy adds to this problem.

Either way, let me annotate my own paper book TYVM.

Get your money back, order the paperbacks.

From where? The bookstores that no longer exist? Or hope that there is a 1/1000 chance you might get lucky and find one on fleaBay?

At least this time it's Microsoft closing down gracefully. I can't see the same happening if it's a smaller, specialized business going bankrupt and going away without the ability to mitigate the shutdown.

In a perfect world they would have put their keys + unlock tools in escrow with a service that would publish them at the first sign of a major outage.