drmAs numerous blogs are reporting, today is International Day Against DRM and many of our favourite DRM-free publishers are offering deals and specials. Here are two good ones:

1) O’Reilly Press

This publisher of technical books is 50% off with with the coupon code ‘DRM2015’ and 60% off is you spend over $100.

2) No Starch Press

My favourite Lego publisher is offering 50% off all eBooks with the coupon code ‘RIGHT2READ.’

Where else can you shop to celebrate the joy of DRM-free books? Smashwords is the DRM-free indie mecca, and Delphi Classics is a classics re-publisher with many good titles.

Happy Day Against DRM!

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"I’m a journalist, a teacher and an e-book fiend. I work as a French teacher at a K-3 private school. I use drama, music, puppets, props and all manner of tech in my job, and I love it. I enjoy moving between all the classes and having a relationship with each child in the school. Kids are hilarious, and I enjoy watching them grow and learn. My current device of choice for reading is my Amazon Kindle Touch, but I have owned or used devices by Sony, Kobo, Aluratek and others. I also read on my tablet devices using the Kindle app, and I enjoy synching between them, so that I’m always up to date no matter where I am or what I have with me."

7 COMMENTS

  1. @dave: No Starch Press, which is distributed by O’Reilly in the US, had an issue with their books having DRM on Amazon even though they were supposed to be DRM-free. That was a couple months ago and I believe it got sorted out. Let O’Reilly know about the Delphi collections issue (I think they may distribute those for Packt?) and I’m sure they’ll get it fixed asap and help you get replacements.

  2. I’m not going to say DRM is a good thing in its self – but I have yet to be convienced it’s the bugbear of digital media either. The ebooks and audiobooks I buy mostly have DRM of somekind, so far as I can tell. Truth be told, I don’t bother to check. I download to my Kindle or iPhone, then read or listen. I suppose there may come a day when I want want to switch to an incompatible device or the EULA becomes unacceptable and I’ll be up a famous creek or turning to cracking software. But today I’m not going to worry. When Microsoft Reader went belly up, I dutifilly removed the DRM and saved the books to an external drive that now in a closest. Whohoohoo! Maybe I’ll reread one day.

    The alternatives to DRM aren’t good enough, IMHO. TOR publishes an occasional science fiction title, there is the Public Domain for the classics, even Smashwords might have a few reissues of older titles, but I’d be SOL find enough diverse titles to keep me going.

    A few years ago I browsed a message board for ebook related topics. One user had a tag line: “DRM is evil!” Maybe he was trying for a touch of irony. Or a bad case of 1st world problems. DRM isn’t evil. It isn’t wicked, naughty, or bad either. At worst it’s an unneeded inconvience.

    I’ve been reading ebooks for more than ten years. Yes, ebooks would probably be better without DRM, but nobody has truly made a case why it’s an important issue to fight against.

  3. Greg, I can’t disagree with you but for me it’s a nuisance and I just find it easier to not buy DRM’ed books. I run Linux because I find it more stable and there are more programs to do the things I want to do available on it than on Windows or Apple, and Adobe ADE just doesn’t play nicely with Linux. Plus, I love Conrad and Melville and all the other great authors of the 18th and 19th centuries, and don’t care so much for the newer books, so I don’t lose much by ignoring current authors. And third, of the new books that I have read recently, the best one was one I got off Smashwords. I like sailing books and people give me printed ones now and again, so I have seen some of the recent best-sellers. But none of them is better than Chasing the Dragon, one I picked up at Smashwords, so I am not convinced that the best books end up on Amazon with DRM. Now if I ran out of good things to read, I might find a way to co-exist with Adobe ADE…

    I agree that DRM is not something worth fighting over. But to me, it’s something worth turning my back on. Every author has the right to put DRM on his book – but every reader has the right to not read it. Fortunately, many authors have a big enough audience to be able to ignore me.

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