Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
TL;DR Amazon will begin providing EPUB and PDF downloads for DRM-free e-books it sells.
Publishers still have the ability to choose to use Amazon’s DRM and not offer such downloads.
While EPUB and PDF files are easy to load on third-party e-readers, they’re also a potential source of piracy.
As consumers, none of us have any reason to like digital rights management (DRM). At best, we don’t notice it, but when we do, it’s because DRM is getting in the way of us accessing our content on the devices we want to. Right now, Amazon is sharing some potentially impactful changes to the way it applies DRM to its e-book sales, and anybody with a non-Kindle e-reader is definitely going to want to pay close attention.
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Amazon gives publishers a choice about whether to lock down e-book purchases with DRM — if you see a book listed with “Simultaneous device usage: Unlimited” in its product details, that means it’s DRM-free. But even then, Amazon hasn’t made accessing any e-books purchased through its Kindle ecosystem particularly easy for people with third-party e-reader hardware, forcing us to rely on hacks and covert files manually.
Today, though, Amazon shares that starting next month, newly published DRM-free e-books will be directly available in EPUB and PDF format, ideal for loading onto your favorite e-reader.
But as TechCrunch points out, some authors already appear to be reacting to this news with concern. While it may have been possible to sideload Amazon purchases onto other devices before, it took a bit of legwork. When getting a DRM-free, easily sharable copy of your purchase becomes as simple as clicking a link on Amazon, could that encourage more readers to dip their toe in the sea of piracy, sharing those PDFs with their friends?
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