There is a very large number of freely-available books through Library Genesis and other sites, approaching 5 million. Some are newer, but I find this most useful for turning up old and hard-to-find books, generally published between 1925 and 2000.
More recent books are frequently available in ripped digital formats. Earlier can be found through the Internet Archive, WikiSource, and Project Gutenberg. A large number of the scanned-in books are actually very likely out of copyright due to failures to renew registration, but the fact cannot readily be determined.
There's a project that's taken machine-readable US Copyright Office records to find such works. The Internet Archive don't yet make use of this though per an email discussion a week or so back, that's in the works, though no announcement or dates have yet been made.
What's tremendously frustrating to me is the HathiTrust archive, which has access to scanned copies of library works, but won't make these generally available to either the general public or anything outside a small set of research libraries (your local public library, or even community college or small liberal arts school doesn't qualify). Again, frequently works that are out of copyright (known-public-domain works cannot be viewed or downloaded), hoarded for no reason.
It wasn't the last time I tried it, but I'd be happy to hear if this has changed.
I don't own a Kindle, which some people are saying is required for the Calibre method, which might have been the issue I had in the past.
I do a lot of dump-to-markdown then re-tag to preferred formats, largely using Pandoc. That's more intensive, but highly effective.
Sure. Use Calibre's "DeDRM Tools" plugin, decrypting the book with your personal key, and you'll be able to convert it to any format.
Which is to say, this is a cat-and-mouse game. There is a way to defeat Amazon's encryption for now, but there may come a day when we can't, and when Amazon cuts off support for all devices and applications that do not run their latest encryption.
I'm kinda surprised that they continue to even support MOBI, given that it's not originally their format and much easier to extract the EPUB out of than their homespun solution.
This tool allows removing the DRM from Audible books. [2]
[1]: https://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/2019/03/30/dedrm-tools-6...
You're gonna be ad-blasted, have inconsistent video quality, and be given a million popups.
Also, the availability is not nearly what you think it is.
https://www.google.com/search?q=battlestar+galactica+2003+s0...
If you're seeing ads and popups, you should get an ad-blocker and update it. No one should be seeing these in 2019. The quality I noted, but I also noted that you can torrent higher-quality video easily.
> Also, the availability is not nearly what you think it is.
> https://www.google.com/search?q=battlestar+galactica+2003+s0....
I clicked your link. Second page of results, first result, was a link to DailyMotion where the full 54-minute episode was available to stream in quality as good as it was in 2003.
I suspect the fact that this shows up on the second page of search results instead of the first is a success of DMCA threats against Google, not a success of DRM. But I'm sure if you added some combination of keywords like "torrent", "stream" or "free" you could get an illegal copy to show up as the first result.
I'm not encouraging anyone to do this. I encourage everyone to pay for content with money, preferably in the most direct way you can so the creators actually get the money. I'm just saying that DRM only affects people who want to do things the "proper" way. People who don't want to pay for content can easily bypass DRM with a Google search.
30 seconds and I can be quite sure there are no ads, malware, popups, and impeccable video quality.
They're all still being seeded with enough bandwidth to max my 100+ Mbps cable connection, too.
1. If you think it's harder for users to copy or use content outside of approved usage, choose your favorite TV show, and type the name of the show with the text "s01e01" into Google. You'll find links to stream it in low quality or torrent a high quality MP4.
2. Meanwhile, try downloading a book from Amazon and transforming it into epub so you can read it on a different reader. If you manage to figure out how to do that, please let me know.
It's not at all clear that the minor difficulty of 1 prevents so much lost profits that it outweighs the profits lost from 2. So it's absolutely not clear that DRM has resulted in extracting more money from users.