Amazon to allow downloads of DRM free books - Page 8

jonathan2022 · 01-20-2026, 05:50 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jhowell

I purchased for $0 one of the books that lists as "download available" in your screen shot, A Novel Way to Die. It does not show that option for me, nor do any of my other purchases. Amazon appears to be rolling this out gradually.

I no longer see the old "Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited" listed in the product details for any of the books that I know showed it previously. I suspect that Amazon in the the process of replacing it with something new related to download availability. (At least I hope so.)

It may be still be rolling out. I only got this option on pc. No option on mobile

JSWolf · 01-20-2026, 06:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jonathan2022

I may be still be rolling out. I only got this option on pc. No option on mobile

I am on my laptop and I didn't see the option.

PiperKev · 01-20-2026, 07:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jhowell

I purchased for $0 one of the books that lists as "download available" in your screen shot, A Novel Way to Die. It does not show that option for me, nor do any of my other purchases. Amazon appears to be rolling this out gradually.

I no longer see the old "Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited" listed in the product details for any of the books that I know showed it previously. I suspect that Amazon in the the process of replacing it with something new related to download availability. (At least I hope so.)

I ordered it, too, as an experiment and, same as you, I have no download options available yet. Maybe eventually!

graycyn · 01-21-2026, 12:00 AM

Well. I don't know if ALL the epubs will be like the one I just downloaded, but if they are, it isn't pretty and Amazon's new downloads aren't doing the EPUB world any favors.

First, the download file is .ZIP, not .EPUB

Actual filename isn't what anyone would call human-friendly:
ebook-content.DTP_0000033744938_ce8b2284_CR!YGVV85XPAH0S 1E2JZ379V3ZWEXDS.zip

I renamed the extension to .EPUB and it opened right up in Adobe Digital Editions. Has a massive paragraph indent, I don't know if that will be the case for every book or just this one. EDIT 3: The indent was 3.0em!

Opened up in Sigil next. Minimal metadata, title, language, publisher, date modified. That's it, NO AUTHOR! I guess that's not strictly required by spec, but it makes me cringe.

And it's a div soup mess. NOT nice under the hood!

Sigil is calling it an EPUB 3.0, and it does contain a nav.xhtml. But semantic HTML5, it ain't.

It has, I kid you not, 35 style sheets!

EPUBCheck only flagged one error. I went to see if there were unused styles (I mean 35 style sheets for cryin' out loud!) and that popped up an error about how Sigil couldn't do that as the XML was not well-formed. I don't know what's wrong, I don't want to know. It hurt to look at it.

<div> for headings, <div> for paragraphs. YUCK!

This is what the code looks like for the title page:

Code:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"/><title>Exposed in Edinburgh (The House Sitters Cozy Mysteries Book 1)</title><link href="../css/css-0-1.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/></head><body><div class="class-0-4" id="id-0-3">Exposed in Edinburgh</div><div class="class-0-5" id="id-0-4">The House Sitters Cozy Mysteries</div><div class="class-0-6" id="id-0-5">Book One</div><div class="class-0-7" id="id-0-6">SCARLETT MOSS</div><div class="class-0-8" id="id-0-7"><img alt="Logo, company name  Description automatically generated" class="class-0-9" id="id-0-8" src="../image/image-0-1.jpg"/></div></body></html>

Make of that what you will.

EDIT 1: I would not wish to pay good money for an epub like this. I suppose I'll have to look around more in my content library, see if there are others, and if they are similar, but not tonight.

EDIT 2: One further thing, I did put it in Calibre, did the error check and Calibre didn't flag anything. So, for the purpose of simply reading the book, it should work well enough. So there's that.

graycyn · 01-21-2026, 12:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I am on my laptop and I didn't see the option.

Be thankful.

Once you get your hands on one of these "epubs", it may be like seeing Medusa.

lkmiller · 01-21-2026, 12:39 AM

How does it look in an ereader app or device?

No epub option for me that I can see. I don't have any pubbed after Dec 9 and didn't see that any of the ones I know should be DRM-free have been switched on. But I didn't look too far yet. Anyway to filter for that?

Sirtel · 01-21-2026, 12:44 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by lkmiller

How does it look in an ereader app or device?

No epub option for me that I can see. I don't have any pubbed after Dec 9 and didn't see that any of the ones I know should be DRM-free have been switched on. But I didn't look too far yet. Anyway to filter for that?

You could "buy" the free ebook that's known to have an epub download, as mentioned earlier in this thread, and then monitor that.

el_vandragon · 01-21-2026, 01:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jhowell

I no longer see the old "Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited" listed in the product details for any of the books that I know showed it previously. I suspect that Amazon in the the process of replacing it with something new related to download availability. (At least I hope so.)

Odd I can still see it on the book I checked, but I also don't see the EPUB or PDF download option for anything yet (including that one free book from earlier in the thread)

Still showing "Simultaneous device usage: Unlimited" here for example: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0FH198HF7

graycyn · 01-21-2026, 01:25 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by lkmiller

How does it look in an ereader app or device?

No epub option for me that I can see. I don't have any pubbed after Dec 9 and didn't see that any of the ones I know should be DRM-free have been switched on. But I didn't look too far yet. Anyway to filter for that?

I haven't checked Exposed in Edinburgh on a device, but based on the fact that it opened right up in Adobe Digital Editions I would think it would work well enough in apps and devices. The extra-large indents also appeared in the sample on the product page, so that is likely a publisher's choice.

I didn't see any filter for DRM free titles in my content library. I just scrolled on through until I spotted something that said: "Download available in additional formats." Didn't take long. I gave a shot at searching that phrase in my content library, but nope, did not return any results. Hopefully Amazon has plans to let us know which titles actually are DRM-free.

I took a look around the product page, and could not find any indication that this was a DRM-free title. Perhaps that's still to come.

The product page claims using a screen-reader is supported, but that may be only if one is using the Kindle app to read with. I certainly saw no sign of any HTML5 tags in the brief look I took under the hood.

DNSB · 01-21-2026, 01:31 AM

When I added A Novel Way to Die to my content at Amazon.ca this morning, there were no other options. Now I see Download available in additional formats and I tried the epub download.

And yes, the ePub structure is pretty ugly. Every xthml file has it's own stylesheet with individual style names, the styles are extremely repetitive though for me, the indented paragraph is only indented 1.5em.

I killed 5 minutes doing so cleanup in Sigil including merging all the stylesheets into one stylesheet and using calibre's editor to merge similar styles. Simplified the heck out of things. The only items epubcheck was not happy with was the two epub:type="" items in the nav document.

OTOH, on my KLC, the original version renders okay though the dropcaps are nasty since I use a relatively large font size for reading.

jonathan2022 · 01-21-2026, 01:31 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by el_vandragon

Odd I can still see it on the book I checked, but I also don't see the EPUB or PDF download option for anything yet (including that one free book from earlier in the thread)

Still showing "Simultaneous device usage: Unlimited" here for example: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0FH198HF7

The above book was published before Dec 9th. So Author has to manually set it as drm free. Books after said date will automatically have that option. Please note the drm status of a book can change from drmed to drm free any time

Sirtel · 01-21-2026, 01:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by el_vandragon

Still showing "Simultaneous device usage: Unlimited" here for example: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0FH198HF7

I don't see it with any book, including this one.

jhowell · 01-21-2026, 09:09 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by el_vandragon

Still showing "Simultaneous device usage: Unlimited" here for example: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0FH198HF7

That book does not show the simultaneous item in the product description for me. Another indication that things are being rolled out to different users/locations over time.

jhowell · 01-21-2026, 09:15 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by graycyn

Well. I don't know if ALL the epubs will be like the one I just downloaded, but if they are, it isn't pretty and Amazon's new downloads aren't doing the EPUB world any favors.

From your description of the EPUB it sounds like my previous assumption of what Amazon is doing to produce these EPUBs was correct:

Quote:

Originally Posted by jhowell

Actually, Amazon's Kindle Create application has the ability to generate EPUBs from their proprietary KPF format for reflowable books. That conversion output is probably what Amazon will allow customers to download. (Personally I feel the my KFX Input plugin produces a much better EPUB than Amazon's software does, but I am of course biased.)

Yapyap · 01-21-2026, 09:37 AM

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.

01-21-2026, 12:00 AM	#109
graycyn Wizard Posts: 1,638 Karma: 11728332 Join Date: Aug 2010 Location: NE Oregon Device: Kobo Sage, Pocketbook Era, Kindle Oasis 2, Nook Glowlight 4+	Well. I don't know if ALL the epubs will be like the one I just downloaded, but if they are, it isn't pretty and Amazon's new downloads aren't doing the EPUB world any favors. First, the download file is .ZIP, not .EPUB Actual filename isn't what anyone would call human-friendly: ebook-content.DTP_0000033744938_ce8b2284_CR!YGVV85XPAH0S 1E2JZ379V3ZWEXDS.zip I renamed the extension to .EPUB and it opened right up in Adobe Digital Editions. Has a massive paragraph indent, I don't know if that will be the case for every book or just this one. EDIT 3: The indent was 3.0em! Opened up in Sigil next. Minimal metadata, title, language, publisher, date modified. That's it, NO AUTHOR! I guess that's not strictly required by spec, but it makes me cringe. And it's a div soup mess. NOT nice under the hood! Sigil is calling it an EPUB 3.0, and it does contain a nav.xhtml. But semantic HTML5, it ain't. It has, I kid you not, 35 style sheets! EPUBCheck only flagged one error. I went to see if there were unused styles (I mean 35 style sheets for cryin' out loud!) and that popped up an error about how Sigil couldn't do that as the XML was not well-formed. I don't know what's wrong, I don't want to know. It hurt to look at it. <div> for headings, <div> for paragraphs. YUCK! This is what the code looks like for the title page: Code: <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"/><title>Exposed in Edinburgh (The House Sitters Cozy Mysteries Book 1)</title><link href="../css/css-0-1.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/></head><body><div class="class-0-4" id="id-0-3">Exposed in Edinburgh</div><div class="class-0-5" id="id-0-4">The House Sitters Cozy Mysteries</div><div class="class-0-6" id="id-0-5">Book One</div><div class="class-0-7" id="id-0-6">SCARLETT MOSS</div><div class="class-0-8" id="id-0-7"><img alt="Logo, company name Description automatically generated" class="class-0-9" id="id-0-8" src="../image/image-0-1.jpg"/></div></body></html> Make of that what you will. EDIT 1: I would not wish to pay good money for an epub like this. I suppose I'll have to look around more in my content library, see if there are others, and if they are similar, but not tonight. EDIT 2: One further thing, I did put it in Calibre, did the error check and Calibre didn't flag anything. So, for the purpose of simply reading the book, it should work well enough. So there's that. Last edited by graycyn; 01-21-2026 at 12:23 AM. Reason: Added a comment.

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01-21-2026, 12:39 AM	#111
lkmiller Laura Posts: 1,601 Karma: 23597272 Join Date: Nov 2009 Device: Kobo Sage, Kobo Elipsa, Nook Glowlight 4 Plus, Kindle Oasis 2	How does it look in an ereader app or device? No epub option for me that I can see. I don't have any pubbed after Dec 9 and didn't see that any of the ones I know should be DRM-free have been switched on. But I didn't look too far yet. Anyway to filter for that?

01-21-2026, 01:31 AM	#115
DNSB Bibliophagist Posts: 49,826 Karma: 176799834 Join Date: Jul 2010 Location: Vancouver Device: Kobo Sage, Libra Colour, Lenovo M8 FHD, Paperwhite 4, Tolino epos	When I added A Novel Way to Die to my content at Amazon.ca this morning, there were no other options. Now I see Download available in additional formats and I tried the epub download. And yes, the ePub structure is pretty ugly. Every xthml file has it's own stylesheet with individual style names, the styles are extremely repetitive though for me, the indented paragraph is only indented 1.5em. I killed 5 minutes doing so cleanup in Sigil including merging all the stylesheets into one stylesheet and using calibre's editor to merge similar styles. Simplified the heck out of things. The only items epubcheck was not happy with was the two epub:type="" items in the nav document. OTOH, on my KLC, the original version renders okay though the dropcaps are nasty since I use a relatively large font size for reading.

01-21-2026, 09:37 AM	#120
Yapyap Guru Posts: 872 Karma: 4769333 Join Date: Nov 2011 Location: Estonia Device: Kindle Oasis 2, Boox Go 7 Colour Gen II	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.