Show HN: DRM-Free Books(frequal.com) After several years of mandatory DRM lockdowns from most commercial book sources, now authors have a choice when it comes to DRM for their books. Pick authors and books that are DRM-free, or download DRM-free classics that are out of copyright. |
https://www.bloomsbury.com has drm free stuff, and after https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42811332 i respect them even more.
Also might be worth scanning old mentions of such https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I started down this road with a few books about two years ago, and I have so many now on my list to read that I hardly ever get to reading a modern book.
I read a lot from Standard Ebooks. But one thing to keep in mind with them- they do edit the books to make changes for readability. Not necessarily a big deal, but something to know.
There are several films which became popular staples on television after copyright expired, wasn't renewed, or was improperly registered in the first place (prior to automatic copyright assignment enacted in 1976). It's a Wonderful Life is the canonical example, though there is a long list of other public domain films in the US: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_in_the_public_do...>.
A Wonderful Life fell back into copyright, at least partially, when the musical score was bought by Republic Pictures in 1993.
<https://library.law.uconn.edu/2022/12/08/its-a-wonderful-lif...>
Ted Turner started the Turner Broadcasting System by buying up small local stations with loose licencing arrangement allowing them unlimited reruns of old films and television shows. Shifting to cable distribution for his "superstation" eventually grew into CNN.
(Mentioned in an HN comment about a month ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48038175>.)
I strongly suspect that the popularity of Shakespeare, which grew rapidly through the 19th century, had to do with the demand for popular entertainment combined with the prohibitive cost of contemporary works for many performing companies.
The rise of radio and need to fill airtime likely lead to the popularity of classical music, out of copyright and hence readily available for broadcast, at a time when broadcast rights were at best poorly defined and restricted, if at all. (The concept first appeared in law in 1928, wasn't standardised until 1961, and wasn't globally adopted under the Berne Convention until the 1970s/1980s, or later.)
<https://thelaw.institute/copyright-and-related-rights/evolut...>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention#Adoption_and_...>
https://standardebooks.org/about/what-makes-standard-ebooks-...
and although I already previously had the idea of showing books from gutenberg but your idea made me find more importance in it and I ended up doing so in two different implementations: https://guten.mirror.forum and https://gutencf.mirror.forum, so I thank you for that!
[Offtopic: I am/was also surprised to see that there is a lack of API or platforms if suppose I created this app and I wanted to give users genuine ways to pay. Aside from the walled gardens of Kindle or specific apps, I am unable to give my users a way to just search books, pay for them and download it (atleast to my understanding at the moment) which is a sad thing :-( ]
I hope people are able to give love to my submission at [0] / the link down below. Cheers and take care and have a nice day if a real human is being out there reading this :-D
Hope you like or enjoy it and find it useful!
<https://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/>
You can see his other titles on Craphound: <https://craphound.com/>.
I can't tell on https://www.amazon.com/Immortal-Remains-Lee-Hauser-ebook/dp/... that it's DRM-free. Amazon loses money in the small this way, but probably considers it more important to train people to not care.
Nonetheless, I'll promote an author of both non- and fiction ebooks I've bought from, Michael W Lucas [0].
Having commercial publishers that will sell you high quality books without DRM is brilliant and I'll always support that.
> On Amazon, look for books that offer EPUB and PDF downloads.
Isn't this like saying "to find a needle in a haystack, just look for anything that's metallic"? Technically correct, but not really helping...
The original, Skeem, was released in South Africa in 2011. The knock-off, John and John, was released in Ghana in 2017. The latter was unauthorised. The writer, director, and producer of the original, Tim Green, opted not to pursue infringement claims against Kofi Asamoah, who produced John and John, as the cost would not be worth any possible recovery.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeem>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_and_John>
@dierogeryoung: I'm not sure why your comments are flagged/dead, but that's a likely outcome if you're using LLMs to write/edit your HN content, which is suggested by your history. See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638>, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48136536>, and <https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated>.