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Say I want to buy "The Catholic Reformation: A Very Short Introduction", published by Oxford University Press. What are my options if I want a DRM-free copy, le

by diggan 1y ago

Say I want to buy "The Catholic Reformation: A Very Short Introduction", published by Oxford University Press. What are my options if I want a DRM-free copy, legally? Amazon no longer lets me download the books themselves so I can strip the DRM locally, so that's no longer an option. Apparently Oxford University Press also don't offer DRM-free reading. So what really can I do here if I want to buy it in digital form? I guess it's easy to say "Don't buy X from Y", but if it's the only option, what can one individual really do about it, besides just not purchasing it at all or pirating it?

ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
Not ideal, but you could either scrape the browser pages to reproduce the pages without DRM, or even get hold of a physical copy (e.g. from a library) and scan the pages yourself. If you manage to produce a good enough version, don't forget to make a torrent available. (There's a bunch of physical copies available on eBay)
sdh9 1y ago
It's still "easy" to strip DRM from Amazon books but you need an actual Kindle to do so. If it's something that you would like to do, it might be worth investing in a cheap used Kindle even if you never plan to use it to read.
- diggan 1y ago
  I thought they removed that, even with a hardware Kindle? I managed to download all my ebooks via a python script before that, as I've purchased 100s of books via Kindle throughout the years, but seems they've disabled the approach I took at least: > As of 26th February 2025, Amazon has removed the ability to download backups of your Kindle books. Unfortunately, this means that this tool is no longer functional - https://github.com/treetrum/amazon-kindle-bulk-downloader https://github.com/treetrum/amazon-kindle-bulk-downloader After removing that feature I kind of feel like it'll just be too much of a hassle, so stopped buying books via Kindle. But haven't found any better alternative either to be honest.
  - sdh9 1y ago
    That's for downloading files from the website. You can still use Calibre to remove & decrypt the files via USB from a Kindle.
crtasm 1y ago
Buy it from Kobo then strip the DRM.

by diggan 1y ago

ndsipa_pomu 1y ago

Not ideal, but you could either scrape the browser pages to reproduce the pages without DRM, or even get hold of a physical copy (e.g. from a library) and scan the pages yourself. If you manage to produce a good enough version, don't forget to make a torrent available. (There's a bunch of physical copies available on eBay)

sdh9 1y ago

It's still "easy" to strip DRM from Amazon books but you need an actual Kindle to do so. If it's something that you would like to do, it might be worth investing in a cheap used Kindle even if you never plan to use it to read.

diggan 1y ago
I thought they removed that, even with a hardware Kindle? I managed to download all my ebooks via a python script before that, as I've purchased 100s of books via Kindle throughout the years, but seems they've disabled the approach I took at least: > As of 26th February 2025, Amazon has removed the ability to download backups of your Kindle books. Unfortunately, this means that this tool is no longer functional - https://github.com/treetrum/amazon-kindle-bulk-downloader https://github.com/treetrum/amazon-kindle-bulk-downloader After removing that feature I kind of feel like it'll just be too much of a hassle, so stopped buying books via Kindle. But haven't found any better alternative either to be honest.
- sdh9 1y ago
  That's for downloading files from the website. You can still use Calibre to remove & decrypt the files via USB from a Kindle.

crtasm 1y ago

Buy it from Kobo then strip the DRM.