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There are definitely smarter people than me on this, but let me try spelling out some stuff that I understand. Hopefully someone out there will correct my mistakes.
First you need to understand DRM: Digital Rights Management. It is used to make sure that you don't buy a book and then give it away to millions of people on the internet. I understand and support the rights of intellectual property owners to protect their property.
Unfortunately, books that are protected by DRM have limitations that make it difficult for consumers to use the books they actually purchase. Some people describe purchasing a DRM book as 'renting' the book. This is because you might lose access to the book if you change to a different reader in the future, or if your book provider goes out of business.
Calibre can convert books to mobi (to be read on the Kindle) and LRF to be read on the Sony. However, it can only be used to convert books that are not copy-protected (ie, have no DRM).
There are several sources of DRM-free books:
- If you like 'classics' (those copyrighted before 1923 and some other books) then you can get all the books you want here (mobilread) as well as gutenberg.org .
- Baen.com is a wonderful source of books published by Baen. I love them; they are a science fiction and fantasy publisher.
- Many independent writers publish DRM-free.
- Some business books and educational books -- but not most.
However, in general most best sellers and most books published by name-brand publishers are copy protected (ie, have DRM). These books are generally only available if you buy them from the Amazon or Sony stores, respectively.
There may be an additional option. There are programs available that can remove the DRM so that ebooks can be easily moved between devices. One would use one of these programs to remove DRM, and then use Calibre to convert them to the correct format.
However, removing DRM is not legal in some?/many?/most?/all? areas. Therefore this is something that can not be explicitly described here on mobilread.
If you are interested in popular books, and you are not able to remove DRM, then you do need a reader that can access a proprietary book store and you may find yourself 'renting' books instead of buying them.
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