Here's somewhere to get you started, a list of almost 300 DRM-free ebook, digital comic, magazine and RPG bookshops. All legit, some author-run, others by the publishers, some more are completely independent shops that sell ebooks:

Libreture(.)com(/)bookshops

There's an independent ebookshop that sells Special Edition ebooks from independent authors and small publishers at ScarletFerret(.)com

And you can find more info about enjoying DRM-free ebooks from TheEpubizer(.)com


Enjoy, and happy reading,

K.

Amazon used to provide some of their ebooks as DRM-Free in accordance with Author/Publisher requests. Now with their KFX file format, I think all Kindle ebooks are DRM by default ... though don't quote me on that, it is only what I have heard.

Kobo, who I also buy from, do provide many of their ebooks as DRM-Free, usually listed on the ebook web page. Most ebooks from Kobo in my experience, have DRM, but they have a lot that is DRM-Free.

A great store or site for DRM-Free is Smashwords. I think they are all DRM-Free, but don't quote me on that. Smashwords usually provide lots of different ebook file formats, not just the Kindle (MOBI, AZW3, KFX) and Kobo (EPUB) or Google Books (EPUB). You get PDF, TXT, RTF, LIT, PDB, etc.

But to answer your larger question, if an ebook is DRM at a store like KOBO, then it is usually DRM everywhere. This is especially the case with very popular books like The Lord Of The Rings or current bestseller lists. Some publishers like TOR buck that trend, and so do some authors. But on average, you can expect most publisher backed ebooks to have DRM.

All that said, some authors do provide the occasional DRM-Free ebook at Smashwords, while it is DRM at Amazon and Kobo. Sometimes they are free offerings too, so no doubt seen as promotional.

EDIT
Of course there are some sites that provide all their ebooks DRM-Free, but they are usually older free ebooks. The Gutenberg Project (and affiliates) is one huge site that does such. Generally they provide ebooks from around 1940 or older, though they do have some modern exceptions.

One great exception is Cory Doctorow, who provides many of his ebooks DRM-Free. He also tours the world promoting and lecturing about DRM-Free. I've only read one of his books so far, the great SciFi novel - Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom.

If you like Warhammer/Games Workshop novels, Black Library is a good DRM-free site. I've been buying ebooks there for years.

Further to my last reply.

You don't have to tolerate ebook DRM if you don't want to.

With the great ebook cataloging program, calibre, you can use a plugin that removes the DRM. If you want to find out more, go to the Mobile Read forum. That works for Kindle and Kobo ebooks, and maybe others.

Thanks for the tip

The ones I know that sell DRM free ebooks:

- StoryBundle usually sells bundles of tabletop games in the ebook format, from what I see, and iirc, they say in their FAQ that all the titles they sell are DRM free.

- Humble Bundle's ebooks page shows all their current ebook bundles, be it actual books or comics/manga, and they usually mention in the bundle's page if the ebooks are DRM free and which formats are available.

- Bundle of Holding has book bundles, usually 1 or 2 at once, and if I remember right, all of them are DRM free.

- Itch.io has quite a few ebooks, but you need to do some digging, and almost everything on Itch.io is 100% DRM free.

- Fanatical also sells DRM free ebooks bundles, but they're usually more technical. Also the formats of the ebooks included are listed under their information in their bundles.

- IndieGala also sells DRM free ebooks and ebook bundles, but be warned they're usually NSFW. Also if you're not sure if an ebook is DRM free there, feel free to ask them. They're pretty responsive on social medias, from my experience.

- Groupees nowadays appears to sell only DRM free bundles, and among them are bundles that include either digital books or comics. Also if you're in doubt, feel free to ask in their public chat if the ebooks are DRM free. Account required for asking there, but they usually reply, from my experience.

What's worst about this is Amazon forces authors into the DRM space with their domination of the market. Some authors I enjoy have some books that they (or their publisher) have released exclusively as Amazon books... or, worse, one has announced his future books will be ONLY available as part of the "Amazon book buffet" (my wording, no idea of theirs) subscription program due to the way the financials work out for him.

More successful authors have more control to get their things out there. Brian McClellan's [possibly my favorite author of lite] most recent stuff is all available DRM-free. (He has one older Amazon-exclusive book sadly still under contracts.) The bigoted author of the Harry Potter series wielded her power to make sure her series' books were DRM-free through her own platform. [I don't know if that's changed or not.]

I agree with what others have said: I go physical. Especially since I can give it away when I'm done with it. I prefer that reading experience, too. Sometimes I wait a long time to get paperback rather than hard cover (because reading paperback is even nicer), but I'm OK with that.

When I *can* get something as a DRM-free ebook, I will. But otherwise, I'll wait for a paperback.

I've also stripped DRM from some Amazon purchases, but you have to use super sketchy intermediate software, and they're constantly forcing you to update their reader to close holes. So I don't consider that a route anymore; there's too much safety risk.

Forgot to mention, but some comics on DLsite (very NSFW) are DRM free, but I'm not sure which are and which aren't.
I think the ones that say "specialized viewer" in the file format in the store page are DRM'd, while the ones that say usual formats, like "JPEG" or "PDF" are DRM free, but I'd need to confirm, and that may take a while.

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By the way, you can compile any group of images into a CBZ ebook.
All you need to do is rename them as 0001, 0002, 0003 and so on (don't remember if they need to be in PNG or JPG formats, or something else), select all images, add them to a .zip file (the .zip files can't have subfolders, btw) and rename the file format from .zip to .cbz.
Ebook conversion tools can then convert it into more usual formats, such as PDF and ePUB.

Edit: added a screen capture showing an example of an ebook I bought in a bundle a while back. One of the formats available is CBZ, and that's how it looks as soon as I open it with a browser for compressed files.

If that's your experience then you are doing something wrong. You can actually prevent Amazon's forced and secret updating, with a simple step. The Mobile Read forum is a great place to learn how to do it right.

I don't find calibre and the plugin super sketchy at all. The plugin doesn't always keep up-to-date with the latest version of Kindle For PC, but it is easy enough to install an earlier version, and prevent it updating. I've been using both for years on an almost daily basis.

That said, Amazon have become more painful in the last year or so, and their last secret forced update of Kindle For PC, along with their cover image file idiocy has turned me away from them and onto using Kobo, though I still use Amazon a lot due to them often being cheaper. If around the same price for an ebook, I always buy Kobo now.

To be fair though, I have created programs to assist me with Amazon, Kobo and Calibre. So I have simplified things a lot for myself.

While I still read a lot of paperback and hardcover novels (huge backlog), my preference now is for ebooks as a superior reading experience. It took me a while and I have a lot of physical books, and love to look at them, smell them and feel them, but an ebook with a good E-Ink reader has become the better experience for me.

I don't want to get into an argument with you, but that bigoted nonsense about J.K. Rowling is absolute rubbish. Like so much these days, it belongs in the realm of fake news. She has one or two other things to answer for, but not that.

In my experience, you'll have more luck finding drm-free offerings in more "niche" markets (ex: IT books with manning, informit & pragmatic or rpg rulebooks).

However, mainstream books are most often locked in DRM, so it is best to pay for physical books (if like me you refuse to financially support sham ownership models, though I could potentially be tempted by an "honest about what it is" mass-rental model like Netflix does for movies and tv shows).

I guess from there (once you purchased a physical copy and thus supported the author), you could either find an "illegal" pdf copy online (often, while looking for legit drm-free ebook sale endpoints, I stumble upon quite a few questionable free pdf downloads) or if you got a bit of time and really like the book, scan it yourself.

O'Reilly Media used to be good about this, but a few years ago they did a complete 180 and went 100% DRMed, subscription model only. You can't buy individual ebooks at all anymore. It's actually pretty disgusting how they did that. They used to be a great source of tech learning. I'm not actually sure they even make dead-tree format anymore.

Yeah, that's quite a shame. I believe they pretty much abandoned their publishing business.

Not sure what kind of warning they gave, but I'm happy I had my collection backed up (the advantage of having bought drm-free).

I don't really go on their website anymore. For me, they have been supplanted by other alternatives at this point.

Reminds me of the pdf converter that makes pre-rendered images. Said books increase like 5x in size, but like D&D books they instantly load vs having to be generated on the fly (and i remember it taking like 2 minutes to generate some pages)

Back in 2009 i got an epaper/ebook reader and was experimenting, on different sizes and formats and rendering options. Ended up my favorite was rtf (Rich Text Format), at least for normal reading, PDF on that thing didn't render well and was useless. Since it was also 16color black/white it did okay for reading comic books on, but wasn't the best suited for.

As for good location for books, depends. If you're fine with fan fiction or sites that are public sources of stories, you could just download book-sized collections and read them without worry. If you want comics, i know FreeFall has a downloadable colleciton of like 300 of it's comics at a time in a single zip, and you can go through fairly quickly.

There's also some sites that you can get technical books and/or gaming books to download for free.

But if we're talking normal fiction, hmmm... I'm reminded when in Korea and NC there was virtual libraries where you could check out digital books and read them. (Mind you, you couldn't download them, it just locked the book simulating you borrowing a book). Best to find a collection of something you like and download in bullk. But why would you want to do that? I mean other than say the Amazon kindle event where they retroactively deleted everyone's copy of Animal Farm and 1984 off their kindles....

I mostly go with pdf because its supported by defaults on most platform (on Android for example, supporting a non-default format involves going through their app store and I personally find that to be a bit of a jungle... I find that too many of these apps are shady).

But yes, from what I heard about pdf (I was fortunate enough never to have to really work with the format so far), I don't have a hard time believing that epub is the better designed format of the two.

That's an interesting option.

I personally never went with that for 2 reasons:
- Experimenting with removing the drm on drmed format would have required that I purchase at least one drmed copy
- While I don't have illusions that it will make a difference (I'm going against the grain of most people's sensibilities here), I have such a high degree of animosity toward the practice of selling things as single-purchase goods and locking them that I don't want to give them a cent of my money to support that endeavour. If I could do so legally, I would actually pay significant money to make them lose money when a distributor adopt that practice

That's totally insane. It actually costs them more money to distribute a physical book than a ebook.