Amazon to allow downloads of DRM free books

[jlinear]

Originally Posted by jhowell

My guess is that they have seen a noticeable drop in sales. Their attempts at forcing lock-in may have resulted in former customers obtaining their books elsewhere.

This has certainly been the case for me. Amazon has become a place to search for book deals that I now buy from Kobo whenever possible.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by jlinear

This has certainly been the case for me. Amazon has become a place to search for book deals that I now buy from Kobo whenever possible.

I've also bought much less from them in recent years than I used to. Might now start buying more DRM-free Kindle books.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Also usually how the ebooks are uploaded. So if DRM free then Amazon only needs to offer the upload.

That would be great but it seems unlikely to me.

Remember, this is Amazon. They allow books to be upload in a variety of formats, including DOCX. That is likely popular with self-publishers. And they allow editing of the uploaded content within their software before actually publishing it. Those features make it likely that they will just convert from their internal format to EPUB for downloading.

As a test I took a simple EPUB, converted it to Amazon's Kindle Publishing Format (KPF) using the Kindle Previewer and then back to EPUB using Kindle Create. Here are the results.

Original:

<h1>Chapter 1</h1>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.</p>
<p>The End</p>

After conversion:

<div class="class-0-1" id="aid_2">Chapter 1</div>
<div class="class-0-2" id="id-0-1">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.</div>
<div class="class-0-3" id="id-0-2">The End</div>

With CSS:

.class-0-1 {
font-size : 2.0rem ;
font-weight : bold ;
line-height : 1.2em ;
}

.class-0-2 {
font-size : 1.0rem ;
line-height : 1.2em ;
margin-top : 1.3400000399999998em ;
}

.class-0-3 {
font-size : 1.0rem ;
line-height : 1.2em ;
margin-bottom : 0.99999996em ;
margin-top : 0.99999996em ;
}

Perhaps the downloads they provide will be better than that, but I doubt it.

[Quoth]

Ghastly.

Docx upload vs epub has been abysmal for years. Calibre makes better epubs.

[vishcompany]

Originally Posted by jhowell

...
My guess is that they have seen a noticeable drop in sales. Their attempts at forcing lock-in may have resulted in former customers obtaining their books elsewhere.

I for one have left Amazon completely after the latest shenanigans. I now buy my books through Thalia, all epub, all of them have been DRM free (watermarked, though, but that's OK with me). These are not classics from the public domain but recent titles.

I deleted the Kindle app from my phone, installed Librera FD, tweaked the settings, so the text pleases my eyes and I am a happy reader ever since. No looking back, absolutely no regrets.

[MegDreamsofBooks]

This is surprisingly good news. I've moved the majority of my ebook purchases elsewhere, or just read KindleUnlimited for the authors that are Amazon-exclusive. But there are a few Amazon-exclusive authors whose books I still like to "purchase" (aka, buy a license to read the book) and hopefully they will enable the DRM-free download option.

[jhowell]

Now that the publisher’s choice regarding DRM will actually make a difference it gives buyers an opportunity to show endorsement or displeasure of that choice in their rating of books which in turn will influence sales. That will hopefully push more publishers to go DRM free than would otherwise be the case.

[odamizu]

Originally Posted by jhowell

... As a test I took a simple EPUB, converted it to Amazon's Kindle Publishing Format (KPF) using the Kindle Previewer and then back to EPUB using Kindle Create. Here are the results ...

... Perhaps the downloads they provide will be better than that, but I doubt it.

Yikes! I was rather thrilled to hear Amazon was going provide epub downloads ... until I saw what the code is likely to look like

If this is truly the result, then Amazon epubs are of little interest to me.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by odamizu

Yikes! I was rather thrilled to hear Amazon was going provide epub downloads ... until I saw what the code is likely to look like

If this is truly the result, then Amazon epubs are of little interest to me.

Perhaps they will do better than that, but I doubt it. They have little incentive to provide high quality downloads for reading on other platforms.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by vishcompany

I now buy my books through Thalia, all epub, all of them have been DRM free (watermarked, though, but that's OK with me). These are not classics from the public domain but recent titles.

When you say recent titles, do you have any examples? I just find it hard to believe that any of the big publishing houses would be willing to sell their ebooks without DRM on ANY legitimate ebookstore. If they sell a particular book anywhere with DRM, it has been my experience that they are going to sell it everywhere with DRM.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

When you say recent titles, do you have any examples? I just find it hard to believe that any of the big publishing houses would be willing to sell their ebooks without DRM on ANY legitimate ebookstore. If they sell a particular book anywhere with DRM, it has been my experience that they are going to sell it everywhere with DRM.

Maybe they're translations, not the originals in English. Thalia is a German retailer.

[DiapDealer]

That could be. Different countries = different publishing deals.

[rantanplan]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I just find it hard to believe that any of the big publishing houses would be willing to sell their ebooks without DRM on ANY legitimate ebookstore.

Famously, TOR Publishing and their imprints does not require DRM for their published books. They even stated in 2012, one year after they had implemented this policy, that it didn't have any impact on their sales numbers.

[Sirtel]

Here they sell all ebooks in Estonian as watermarked epubs without DRM, including translations. While any originals in English are sold with Adobe DRM, if the publisher wants to have DRM.

If the original is in English, I still prefer that to the Estonian translation, because Estonian ebooks are more expensive and the Adobe DRM is easy to remove.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by rantanplan

Famously, TOR Publishing and their imprints does not require DRM for their published books. They even stated in 2012, one year after they had implemented this policy, that it didn't have any impact on their sales numbers.

I knew that about Tor. That's why I added the part about "if they sell their ebooks with DRM anywhere, it has been my experience that they sell those books with DRM everywhere." I also don't really consider Tor to be one of the "big publishing houses."