#drm-free

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Cory Doctorow Humble Bundle

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then San Francisco (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!

It's been 21 years and 29 days since Tor Books published my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. In the years since, Tor has published every one of my novels, sending me around the USA and Canada to talk about them. Now, they've teamed up with Humble Bundle to sell 18 of my ebooks on a name-your-price basis, with part of the proceeds going to benefit EFF:

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/cory-doctorow-novel-collection-tor-books-books

I've been associated with EFF even longer than I've been published by Tor! My first novel came out while I was working EFF's first-ever booth at CES. I split my time between the booth and my motel room, where I paid $0.25/call to dial up to Earthlink's local number and manage the launch-day publicity. Over the years, I've benefited immensely from Tor's editorial and publicity departments, working with brilliant publishing people like Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Patty Garcia, Dot Lin, Laura Etzkorn, Elena Stokes, Sarah Reidy, Lucille Rettino, and of course, Tor founder Tom Doherty.

But I like to think that it was a two-way street. Tor and I have come a long way together on ebooks: most visibly, they allowed me to publish several novels under Creative Commons licenses (my first book was the first ever CC book, coming out just weeks after the licenses themselves launched). As my editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden said at the time, "Ebooks have the worst hours-in-meeting-to-dollars-in-revenue ratio of anything in my publishing career. Why not?"

https://craphound.com/down/download/

Just as important – but less visible – was Tor's willingness to let me insist that all my books be published without DRM, meaning that anything you buy on say, Amazon, can be moved to any reader program if you decide to start getting your ebooks elsewhere. This worked so well that in 2012, Tor became the first major publisher in the world to ban DRM on all its ebooks, flying me, John Scalzi and Charlie Stross to New York City to announce it this at a big, splashy event at Book Expo America:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130512022634/https://tor.com/blogs/2012/06/tor-books-announces-e-book-store-doctorow-scalzi-a-stross-talk-drm-free

Tor's unique status as the sole major DRM-free publisher in the world was well timed! That same year, I curated the very first Humble Ebook Bundle, which was very top-heavy with Tor titles, and raised more than $1,000,000 for the writers, publishers and charities associated with it:

https://web.archive.org/web/20121017215636/http://www.humblebundle.com/

That opened the floodgates to a series of Humble Bundles, tempting other major publishers to dabble with DRM-free, including Simon and Schuster:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-I5QyAfglU

And Harpercollins:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHMLfeCrCrE

Now, 12 years after that inaugural Humble Ebook Bundle, I find myself honored by being the subject of a bundle of my own (it helps that I've written a hell of a lot of books in the intervening years). Included in the bundle are (nearly) all of my Tor novels and novellas: The Lost Cause; "The Canadian Miracle" (a Lost Cause story); Red Team Blues; Radicalized; Walkaway; "Party Discipline" (a Walkaway story); Pirate Cinema; Rapture of the Nerds (with Charlie Stross); For The Win; Makers; Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town; Eastern Standard Tribe, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Little Brother, Homeland, Attack Surface, and "Lawful Interception" (a Little Brother story).

(The sole exclusion is The Bezzle, which came out two weeks ago and is already a USA Today national bestseller!)

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

Also included in the bundle is Poesy the Monster Slayer, my 2020 picture book for the littlies:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627/poesythemonsterslayer

All these books are delivered as DRM-free epub files. The Bundle runs for the next three weeks, and the minimum buy-in is $18 – that's just $1/book (full retail value is $187). Of course, you can name a higher price, and, as with all Humble Bundles, you can adjust the final split to share out the money between me, EFF, and the Humble folks.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/03/humbly-bundled/#eff-too

[savingcontent]

STAR WARS classics enter the GOG Preservation Program just in time for May the 4th with discounts

Continue reading STAR WARS classics enter the GOG Preservation Program just in time for May the 4th with discounts

[hanakogames]

Save 50% on pretty-much-everything for Black Friday 2023

[bornangelauthor]

eBooks Now on my website!

DRM-Free and from the author so there's no paying the Corporations and you can have your books anywhere you want to read them!

If you like DRM-Free Ebooks, I now have Ebooks listed on my website store. These books are Fast passed, character driven, Paranormal/Urban Fantasy with Paranormal Romance, Crime thriller, and a twist of Mythology with a heaping ton of Paranormal creatures though the focus is Angels both created and born. Also featuring Fated Mates, Serial killers, Vigilante Justice, and more!

Comp titles for the Born Angel Universe:

If you like The Dresden Files, The Anita Blake Vampire Hunter Novels, The Sookie Stackhouse Series, ACOTAR, Vampire Diaries, Vampire Academy, Succubus Blues, the Mercy Thompson Series, Immortal Instruments, Dark Hunters, and Good Omens. You're sure to LOVE these series.

[krissiefox]

DRM-Free version of Doom 2016 (or Doom 4 as I called it) just dropped! You can get the game and soundtrack together for 8 bucks til 05/02/2025 16:00 EEST!

[pappito]

smashwords? azt hiszem ők dedikáltan DRM mentesek, mint a Baen, a rakutenen tudsz direkt drm free-re keresni

hogy ezek működnek-e Mo-ról azt nem tudom, azt a vpn-ed tudja

Download your Kindle books ASAP - before Amazon kills this feature next week | ZDNET

There have been some examples of where Amazon has reached into our Kindle devices and removed books. In fact, back in 2009, Big Brother Bezos deleted 1984 and Animal Farm from Kindles everywhere. Just last year, Puffin Books edited many of Roald Dahl's books, including Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, to be more socially conscious by removing words like "fat" and "ugly." Those edits were pushed into digital copies of the books already in customers' possession.

[catgirlforeskin]

I’m like one of those egg-cracker girls but for tabletop. Nothing is more satisfying than convincing a GM to stop running 5e for their group and start a different rpg, and hearing about how their mewling worms of players complain but ultimately go along with it because lord knows none of them have the spine to find a new group or GM themselves.

Remember that when your DnD players give you all the work, they also give you all the power. Each will whimper and beg like a dog when you crack the whip and tell them they’re learning Mausritter this week, you need only wield it

[cakesmelons]

You remember the harem timeline where dream fucking dies? No? Too bad 'cause I gotta rush- **sonic speeds to school

[unpretty]

serial reader is a neat app idea but i'd like it better if i could pop my own epubs in there

[hapigairu]

I don't really care about DA, but everytime I see content about the newest entry, this is what my brain imagines:

[asleepinawell]

since I'm out here making public service announcements today, here's another one

you may have seen the post going around about how amazon has pulled the ability to download ebooks for usb transfer from their site. this is yet another way they're trying to ensure you don't own digital goods you pay for and that they can remove your access at any time, either because of licensing issues or just good old fashioned censorship

before diving into what you can do about this, I will state that I do NOT support piracy of books. authors are not rich corporations and losing sales will hurt them. don't put books up on download sites and don't get them from there (your local library can usually provide ebook access if you can't afford to buy them). what I DO support though is owning the things you buy and keeping an offline copy of them that you can access without amazon apps and that amazon can't just delete off your account

fortunately, even after this change, there's a way to get yourself a permanent copy. see the top comment of the post below (the og post is outdated and the comment has the latest which still works correctly)

make sure you read ALL the directions and uninstall stuff, delete stuff, get the right versions, turn off wifi initially, etc. also, if you already had kindle reader on your pc, I would HIGHLY recommend that you deregister it on amazon's site (under devices and content) before trying this or you may find that some books won't work correctly

also please do not store these exclusively in the cloud, like on gdrive or whatever. keep copies on a local computer or server, back it up on a drive or cd if you still have a burner. do not rely on corporations to allow you access to your own files

always own the things you buy

[savingcontent]

On its 25th Anniversary of the original release, Breath of Fire IV is back and available for PC via GOG

Continue reading On its 25th Anniversary of the original release, Breath of Fire IV is back and available for PC via GOG

[adulthumanproblem]

So I played Karma: The Dark World yesterday (until I had to stop because I was getting a bit motion sick, sadly there's still some motion blur even with it turned off)

And yeah, if you like Layers of Fear and Observer, you'll love it. It's really good, weird, surreal, glitchy, feels like a mix of the two. And it's based on 1984

And for some reason, at some point the British sounding protag swears in German lmao. And not even the word everyone knows, but "Verdammt!". I don't know why.

[melonymint753]

[krissiefox]

A bunch of LEGO games just got DRM free versions! Hopefully we'll see more in the future but this is already a nice start. The lack of any harry potter crap also brings me joy, though I also still hope for a homophoba-free version of LEGO Batman 2 one day as well.

[netscapenavigator-official]

I know this is an improper use of this meme format, but

I’m honestly tired of Tumblr Dot Com users trying to promote CDs, DVDs, and BDs are the best way to “own your media” in 2024. They’re not. They never were. They never will be. (You stupid sluts.)

With the exception of M-Discs. M-Disc BDs, and the even rarer format (M-Disc DVDs), are adequate for archiving. In fact, it’s what they’re designed to do. But good luck finding some that won’t blow the bank. And they’ll most likely be 128 GB or less, so you’re still better off just running two cheap Walmart HDDs in parallel.