Kindle books without DRM?
By Joshua Tallent of eBookArchitects.com
I’m very pleased to be able to write for TeleRead. I’ll be focusing my posts on the Amazon Kindle, including some technical tips and tricks. For a good overview of who I am and what I do, read Kat Meyer’s TeleRead Q&A with me—or take a look at my Web site.
In his interview yesterday on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, mentioned in passing that publishers get to decide whether they want to have DRM on their books. This is a repeat of what he said to Kirk Biglione last year, but it seems that no one has actually seen DRM-free Kindle books in the wild.
The ability to put a book up for sale on the Kindle store DRM-free is definitely not available to the large number of individual authors and small publishers using the Digital Text Platform (DTP). Many of them would be very interested in that opportunity—possibly even more than the majority of big publishers who have direct contact with Amazon. What’s also interesting about this is Amazon’s statement in the DTP Terms and Conditions:
10. Technology. You acknowledge that we will be entitled to utilize DRM technology in connection with the distribution of Digital Books but are not obligated to do so. Accordingly, there may be no technology or other limitation imposed by us on copying or transfer of any Digital Book we distribute.
I have to wonder if Jeff’s public message is out of touch with how things really are behind the scenes at Amazon. The Kindle does not appear to be "DRM agnostic," as he claimed to Biglione, but if you can really publish books without DRM then Amazon should be applauded. As it is, I think that policy needs to be more prominent and it needs to be passed down to the DTP.
Transcript of the relevant discussion:
JS: How do you keep people from pirating—from downloading books to other books and passing them around? Like, how do you protect the authors’ authorship?
JB: Well, publishers get to decide, do they want to put, uh, you know to encrypt the books and put DRM on or not—
JS: Who?
JB: DR–It stands for Digital Rights Management. It’s a technology—
JS: Oh yeah….
JF: So the publishers get to decide whether they want to do that to different books and some do and some don’t.
February 24th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
The “extra large print” ebooks from the Virginia M. Woolf Foundation are DRM-free on the Kindle. These are the only ones I have come across, but since there is no indication on Amazon’s web site the only way to tell is to try to open them.
Another road-block to DRM-free Kindle ebooks is that many come from mobipocket.com, which is an Amazon company that always includes DRM in its ebooks.
It definitely isn’t up to the publishers. For example, O’Reilly sells its ebooks DRM-free but the Kindle store versions have DRM.
February 24th, 2009 at 6:55 pm
That paragraph in the Terms and Conditions is a mind-blower, all right. But it’s the sort of thing we have to expect when dealing with a monopoly, or a company that has monopoly on its mind.
‘We don’t care. We’re Amazon. We don’t have to.”
February 24th, 2009 at 7:51 pm
Certainly Cory Doctorow lambasted Amazon up one side and down the other at the O’Reilly TOC conference a couple of weeks ago for insisting that books have DRM on them. However, he may have been talking mainly about Amazon’s Audible.com audiobook subsidiary.
February 24th, 2009 at 7:58 pm
I published my book via Kindle and am unaware of any ability to keep it DRM-free. That was not in the instructions of how to make a Kindle book. I’d love to learn more- are there any how-tos?
February 24th, 2009 at 9:26 pm
I’ve dropped my Kindle a few times already (not on purpose of course) and it seems to be working without a hitch; so they’re durable at least
February 24th, 2009 at 9:49 pm
You can get books in non-Kindle format on your Kindle, but you have to send them to Amazon to be re-formatted. Thereby rendering your formerly un-DRMed books DRMed, as I understand it. Seriously annoying; but I have to hope that Amazon will see the light in due time.
February 24th, 2009 at 10:40 pm
@ Alan — What leads you to believe that the books from the Virginia Woolf Foundation are DRM free? I actually create those books for them, and I had not heard that that was the case.
@ Chris — Doctorow was talking specifically about Audible’s policies, but the general feeling at TOC was that Amazon is bad because they DRM their books, too.
@ Mur — That’s the main reason I wrote this post. I think a large number of the users of the DTP would love to release their books with no DRM. There is no information from Amazon yet about how to do that.
February 24th, 2009 at 11:26 pm
I bought two Extra Large Print Kindle ebooks, “Pride and Prejudice” and “A Canticle For Leibowitz”, and both are DRM-free. The only simple way to tell is to rename then from .azw to .mobi and open them using a MOBI Reader.
I would be interested in learning how the Foundation managed to get DRM-free ebooks on the Kindle, because it seems to be very difficult to do.
February 25th, 2009 at 11:15 am
I purchased a Kindle book published by Amazon’s own BookSurge, and to my surprise it is DRM-free. I know this because it opened right up in Mobipocket’s desktop reader for Windows.