I started down this road with a few books about two years ago, and I have so many now on my list to read that I hardly ever get to reading a modern book.
I read a lot from Standard Ebooks. But one thing to keep in mind with them- they do edit the books to make changes for readability. Not necessarily a big deal, but something to know.
There are several films which became popular staples on television after copyright expired, wasn't renewed, or was improperly registered in the first place (prior to automatic copyright assignment enacted in 1976). It's a Wonderful Life is the canonical example, though there is a long list of other public domain films in the US: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_in_the_public_do...>.
A Wonderful Life fell back into copyright, at least partially, when the musical score was bought by Republic Pictures in 1993.
Ted Turner started the Turner Broadcasting System by buying up small local stations with loose licencing arrangement allowing them unlimited reruns of old films and television shows. Shifting to cable distribution for his "superstation" eventually grew into CNN.
I strongly suspect that the popularity of Shakespeare, which grew rapidly through the 19th century, had to do with the demand for popular entertainment combined with the prohibitive cost of contemporary works for many performing companies.
The rise of radio and need to fill airtime likely lead to the popularity of classical music, out of copyright and hence readily available for broadcast, at a time when broadcast rights were at best poorly defined and restricted, if at all. (The concept first appeared in law in 1928, wasn't standardised until 1961, and wasn't globally adopted under the Berne Convention until the 1970s/1980s, or later.)
So after seeing this project on the front page of hackernews. I decided to add my EPUB reader on a submission as well[0]: https://epub.mirror.forum
and although I already previously had the idea of showing books from gutenberg but your idea made me find more importance in it and I ended up doing so in two different implementations: https://guten.mirror.forum and https://gutencf.mirror.forum, so I thank you for that!
[Offtopic: I am/was also surprised to see that there is a lack of API or platforms if suppose I created this app and I wanted to give users genuine ways to pay. Aside from the walled gardens of Kindle or specific apps, I am unable to give my users a way to just search books, pay for them and download it (atleast to my understanding at the moment) which is a sad thing :-( ]
I hope people are able to give love to my submission at [0] / the link down below. Cheers and take care and have a nice day if a real human is being out there reading this :-D
My own novel, The Immortal Remains, is DRM-free on Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Google, and other platforms (maybe Apple as well, I'm not sure). Other authors, such as Cory Doctorow, sell their books DRM-free as well.
At least some Tor.com ebooks are available DRM-free through Amazon. Honor Of The Queen, 2nd in the Honor Harrington Series, specifically says it's sold without DRM on Amazon.
I wish someone would build something like hiring.cafe but for DRM free digital content. One search query => uniform search results with direct link to purchase page on relevant marketplace. Basically just scrape and index every DRM free content marketplace and put it behind a single search interface.
It feels like this list, if it focuses on individual authors is - if successful - overwhelming in scope. There are, what, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of authors ? If 1%, for argument's sake, this list would have thousands of links.
Nonetheless, I'll promote an author of both non- and fiction ebooks I've bought from, Michael W Lucas [0].
https://www.bloomsbury.com has drm free stuff, and after https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42811332 i respect them even more.
Also might be worth scanning old mentions of such https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I started down this road with a few books about two years ago, and I have so many now on my list to read that I hardly ever get to reading a modern book.
I read a lot from Standard Ebooks. But one thing to keep in mind with them- they do edit the books to make changes for readability. Not necessarily a big deal, but something to know.
There are several films which became popular staples on television after copyright expired, wasn't renewed, or was improperly registered in the first place (prior to automatic copyright assignment enacted in 1976). It's a Wonderful Life is the canonical example, though there is a long list of other public domain films in the US: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_in_the_public_do...>.
A Wonderful Life fell back into copyright, at least partially, when the musical score was bought by Republic Pictures in 1993.
<https://library.law.uconn.edu/2022/12/08/its-a-wonderful-lif...>
Ted Turner started the Turner Broadcasting System by buying up small local stations with loose licencing arrangement allowing them unlimited reruns of old films and television shows. Shifting to cable distribution for his "superstation" eventually grew into CNN.
(Mentioned in an HN comment about a month ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48038175>.)
I strongly suspect that the popularity of Shakespeare, which grew rapidly through the 19th century, had to do with the demand for popular entertainment combined with the prohibitive cost of contemporary works for many performing companies.
The rise of radio and need to fill airtime likely lead to the popularity of classical music, out of copyright and hence readily available for broadcast, at a time when broadcast rights were at best poorly defined and restricted, if at all. (The concept first appeared in law in 1928, wasn't standardised until 1961, and wasn't globally adopted under the Berne Convention until the 1970s/1980s, or later.)
<https://thelaw.institute/copyright-and-related-rights/evolut...>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention#Adoption_and_...>
https://standardebooks.org/about/what-makes-standard-ebooks-...
and although I already previously had the idea of showing books from gutenberg but your idea made me find more importance in it and I ended up doing so in two different implementations: https://guten.mirror.forum and https://gutencf.mirror.forum, so I thank you for that!
[Offtopic: I am/was also surprised to see that there is a lack of API or platforms if suppose I created this app and I wanted to give users genuine ways to pay. Aside from the walled gardens of Kindle or specific apps, I am unable to give my users a way to just search books, pay for them and download it (atleast to my understanding at the moment) which is a sad thing :-( ]
I hope people are able to give love to my submission at [0] / the link down below. Cheers and take care and have a nice day if a real human is being out there reading this :-D
Hope you like or enjoy it and find it useful!
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48710584
https://shop.craphound.com/
<https://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/>
You can see his other titles on Craphound: <https://craphound.com/>.
I can't tell on https://www.amazon.com/Immortal-Remains-Lee-Hauser-ebook/dp/... that it's DRM-free. Amazon loses money in the small this way, but probably considers it more important to train people to not care.
> On Amazon, look for books that offer EPUB and PDF downloads.
Isn't this like saying "to find a needle in a haystack, just look for anything that's metallic"? Technically correct, but not really helping...
https://pragprog.com/
Having commercial publishers that will sell you high quality books without DRM is brilliant and I'll always support that.
Nonetheless, I'll promote an author of both non- and fiction ebooks I've bought from, Michael W Lucas [0].
[0] https://www.tiltedwindmillpress.com/