Amazon to allow downloads of DRM free books

[jonathan2022]

jhowell do you have epub downloads yet enabled

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by jonathan2022

jhowell do you have epub downloads yet enabled

Not yet.

Update: I have it now.

[jonathan2022]

Originally Posted by Yapyap

I seem to have the “Download available in additional formats” text added to a couple of my Amazon-bought books now in the Digital Content > Books section, which weren’t marked as such yesterday, so I guess it’s a slow process.

As others have said, nothing to indicate on the book page itself that there would be a DRM-free option available if one purchases the book though.

If it’s Amazon’s aim to get people with other devices to buy books from Amazon, not Kobo or ebooks.com etc, I would hope that they’ll actually eventually make it very obvious on a book’s page if it can be downloaded and read on other devices, not just Kindles or Kindle apps.

They May have to for other reasons too. Returns on ebooks that dont have drm free epubs enabled. That have always been drm free. The only reason I can think they arent currently labeling, is publishers/authors dont want to be punished for wanting DRM. or It may just be a case of taking time to label books DRM free. Personally my hope is that once they have gone through the initial weeks . That DRM free outsell DRMed ebooks. Then more go the DRM free route. As much as i have appreciated the time and effort of the NoDrm project. I dont want to worry about a new DRM scheme every so many months and rely on others to crack .

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Yapyap

If it’s Amazon’s aim to get people with other devices to buy books from Amazon, not Kobo or ebooks.com etc, I would hope that they’ll actually eventually make it very obvious on a book’s page if it can be downloaded and read on other devices, not just Kindles or Kindle apps.

I have no reason to believe that Amazon is aiming for anything of that sort. They're simply looking for a way to say they're complying with a publisher/author's wish to provide their title DRM-free. I'm certain they've caught a considerable amount of flak for the KFX format not being able to provide a truly DRM-free ebook. So an obscure link to a poorly formatted, DRM-free epub is merely their way of saying, "See? We ARE providing a DRM-free version for those publishers who request it.

[slm]

"poorly formatted" seems to be a bit extreme. The reports we've seen so far suggest that the epubs are nicely formatted from the reader's point of view and comform well to the KFX appearance.

The fact that the underlying code is poor should be an issue for most people.

[el_vandragon]

I just got access to downloads, and noticed a couple things.

Mine do not come as .zip files and are thankfully .epub files but they do have the nasty name that means nothing to humans. As mentioned before the formatting is messy in the source with css for each xhtml file and use of divs everywhere. When I opened one of the books in Sigil it complained that some of the xhtml pages were missing a <DOCTYPE> as well.

The button on Amazon says "Download EPUB/PDF" but I have seen no PDF files downloaded or even a prompt asking which format I want for the around 10 books I was able to download. I am not sure if this is something that can be chosen by the author/publisher or if it is just part of the slow roll out from Amazon.

It seems it is still rolling out as far as I can tell, even for people who have access. A series from a non-major publisher has books 10, 8, 6, and 5 available as DRM free but not 9, 7, or 4-1. I cannot say for certain but I assume they also marked books 9 and 7 as DRM free and it just hasn't rolled out to me yet, although this is just a guess as it is possible that they didn't.

With regards to "Simultaneous device usage", for the series I have mentioned above books 10 and 8 no longer mention this (and are DRM free) but book 9 (not DRM free at this time) still shows it. Not sure if this means anything, just wanted to mention it.

[DNSB]

I've now downloaded 6 books and each one has the same atrocious internals. From what I've seen, it does appear that @jhowell in message #18 in this thread was correct and Amazon is generating the ePub from a KPF using Kindle Create or similar code.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by slm

"poorly formatted" seems to be a bit extreme. The reports we've seen so far suggest that the epubs are nicely formatted from the reader's point of view and comform well to the KFX appearance.

The fact that the underlying code is poor should be an issue for most people.

Agreed. I didn't mean to sound so harsh. I'm sure they're fine from most readers' points of view. I should have just said it's probably a bit slap-dash from a coding point of view.

My main point was that I don't think they're doing any of this to try and lure epub device owners to the Amazon store for new purchases. They're doing it because they've been ignoring (some) people's wishes to sell drm-free ebooks for a long time now (because of KFX's baked-in encryption). I think Amazon would probably be just as happy if no one ever downloaded these epubs. They just want to be able to point to them and say, "there's your drm-free version."

[ElizabethN]

Nothing enabled yesterday, today 1/21/26, I have 5 books out of the 20 on page one of MYCD that presented that option. All were published before 1/20/26.

Interestingly 2 of the 5 were KU books that I had purchased.

At this time there is nothing I can find on the book's amazon page that would let me know prior to purchase if the download other formats option is available.

All downloaded as a random named zip file that I had to rename to an epub file to load into calibre.

Metadata - all were unknown for author, all had covers and only one had a blurb.

Formatting - readable in calibre. Haven't had an opportunity to load one onto my kobo yet to confirm usage on other devices. I'm afraid to look under the hood and see how poor the coding is.

Next day off, I'll cruise through MYCD and see if any other older purchases are enabled.

Bottom line I'd still purchase elsewhere if available, as I dislike amazon for many reasons but especially the book error reporting tool.

For KU restricted books ot would be nice to know prior to purchasing if the other formats option would be available, but it ultimately wouldn't affect my purchasing decision.

YMMV in this amazon feature.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by DNSB

I've now downloaded 6 books and each one has the same atrocious internals. From what I've seen, it does appear that @jhowell in message #18 in this thread was correct and Amazon is generating the ePub from a KPF using Kindle Create or similar code.

I looked at the newest 250 Kindle book purchases on my account and of those 21 were downloadable. Nine came as .pdf and the other twelve as .zip that I needed to rename to .epub.

Now that I have this feature I can confirm that the EPUBs look like those produced by Amazon's Kindle Create tool. One style sheet per chapter, lots of <div>'s and <span>'s, each with its own class, but no semantic markup such as <p> or <h>.

All of the books that downloaded for me as PDF are reflowable on Kindle. I don't see any particular pattern other than they are mostly larger and more complex books. Perhaps if the conversion to EPUB fails they fallback to delivering PDF instead.

[Yapyap]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

My main point was that I don’t think they’re doing any of this to try and lure epub device owners to the Amazon store for new purchases. They’re doing it because they’ve been ignoring (some) people’s wishes to sell drm-free ebooks for a long time now (because of KFX’s baked-in encryption). I think Amazon would probably be just as happy if no one ever downloaded these epubs. They just want to be able to point to them and say, “there’s your drm-free version.”

That’s probably more likely, yeah.

If that’s the reason, I’d still assume they’d need to indicate it somehow before purchase though. But perhaps that’s still being worked on.

[DiapDealer]

I agree. There's going to need to be some sort of up-front indication that the ebook is available in a truly DRM-free form.

[FourOhFour]

I wonder if the zip vs epub thing is a browser issue, 'cause using Safari I'm getting epubs (and a pdf for some reason).

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by FourOhFour

I wonder if the zip vs epub thing is a browser issue, 'cause using Safari I'm getting epubs (and a pdf for some reason).

Possibly. I get zip using Chrome under Windows 11.

[el_vandragon]

I get epub on Firefox on Windows 11. Also of my 10 books that are available as DRM-free downloads (so far) I think all of them are also in Kindle Unlimited (which is why I was forced to buy them from the kindle store in the first place)