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Comment by rolobio | Hacker News Reader

This is correct. My answer is simply to not buy any Kindle books. In the future, I may buy some again if I can strip DRM.

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Not all Kindle books have DRM. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy to figure out which books have it and which do not.

Is there a place that sells ebooks that with easily strippable DRM?

Not that I know of. I had a book I was trying a buy a couple weeks ago, everywhere I found it had DRM. So I gave up. They lost a sale.

We need a gog equivalent with a no drm in books policy

So far we’ve had some individual publishers do that, but no retailer yet.

At this point I think Apple’s really the only candidate for it. Everyone else is either helped by DRM (Amazon, B&N, Kobo), too small, or just don’t seem like a good fit (Google). I was hoping they’d do it after doing so with music, but at this point I’ve given up.

Ten years ago, the largest bookstores in Germany formed an alliance together with Deutsche Telekom and created exactly that. The name is Tolino, there are e-ink ebook readers, designed principally to be the anti-kindle, there is a web reader, there are iOS and Android apps and everything is synced by a cloud account you can upload your own books to or download any books you purchase from any of the bookstores. You can link your bookstore accounts to your tolino account and you get to read anything you buy from them however you want. Apart from the German ones, Belgian, Italian and Dutch bookstores joined in a few years later.

So what happened afterwards?

Deutsche Telekom sold the infrastructure to Rakuten, the Japanese owners of Kobo , in 2017. Interestingly, 6 years later, Tolino still exists with the same DRM-free architecture and new devices are actually developed by Rakuten.

Kobo, Google Play. Kobo uses there own or Adobe DRM depending if you download it through the app or website. Both are supported by DeDRM tools with the former by the "Obok" tool. Google uses Adobe DRM.

Google Play will significantly downgrade the quality of any images, and doesn’t allow some books to be downloaded at all (mostly comics that I’ve noticed but I’m not sure if that’s all). Kobo is a much better first choice.

Are you saying Google books in general have bad image quality, or that stripping the DRM somehow alters the images?

The former. (At least, in the downloads on desktop through ADE. Not sure if the mobile app and website use the same low-resolution images.)

I think everything released in 2023 has the new DRM system which is not really removable. There might be a way using a specific kindle device but I was never able to get it to work. It stinks

We should really be supporting places that sell without drm, there are some. Vote with your wallet and all that.

Good idea but does that exist? Is there a place I can buy a Michael Creighton book DRM-free?

I buy from ebooks.com mostly, and recently there have been a few drm free books there. Didn't investigate the selection like.

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