Looking for DRM-free book recommendations

Weightlessbooks is a great DRM free source. With a heavy focus on science fiction and fantasy. Plenty of short story magazines such as Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Analog and Asimov's also sell DRM free ebooks.

Anything published by Tor Books or related imprints is DRM-free. Note that some platforms like Amazon don't respect it and add their own anyway, though; Google Play is what I use because it's a big enough platform to have most books you'd want while still allowing you to directly download the file if the publisher allows it, but worth looking into whether the platform(s) you already use support it or not.

More specifically this includes several popular fantasy series like Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time (more traditional epic fantasy), Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere universe (it varies but generally under the epic fantasy umbrella), Tamsyn Muir's The Locked Tomb (....it's complicated), and Travis Baldree's Legends & Lattes (cozy fantasy). I believe they also do sci-fi—I know they published Ender's Game (very well-known military sci-fi)—but I didn't start paying attention to this until relatively recently, so I'm not too familiar with their exact catalog.

Edit: added brief genre descriptions to the examples + added one more to the list for variety

Libro.fm is the biggest source I know of.

You buy the MP3 and/or Wav file and it's all yours forever.

I feel silly mentioning it because I assume anyone who knows of the more niche offerings would definitely know of Libro. But just in case.

I would argue that it's ethical to 1) grab a pirated ebook for any book you have in paper copy, so long as you remove that ebook when you sell or give away the paper copy and 2) Get a DRM free copy of any ebook you have purchased on another platform.

1 is ethical because if you wanted to spend the time, you could produce your own ebook copy from the physical copy anyway, and all involved were paid for that physical copy. 2 is ethical because the author was already paid for the copy you bought, and you are taking your property and making it more convenient to consume.

As an aside, neither of those would apply to human read audio books though, since those have a significant effort of being artistically interpreted by the reader, who would not be compensated if you pirated the audio book after owning the book.

I'm going to post the sources I've found, even if they are duplicates.

First-and-foremost (and my personal recommendation): the best way to get DRM-free books is to get them physically. I know it's obvious but this is the best starting line. Get second-hand books from Goodwill, or bookshops, get them from friends, or borrow from the library.

Now if you want to retain your physical books in a digital library (not to pirate of course, but just to have a spare copy just in case.), I'd get a book scanner. They are only a couple hundred dollars, and many modern cellphones have a text scanning feature in their photos. If you scan a book, and each one of your friends scans a book, that will be easily ten books (which you shouldn't ever copy between all of you, as neat as that would be, it would be piracy. And I wouldn't ever encourage piracy in an open forum). Otherwise, if you're looking for online ready-to-go sources, here: (Many of these came from Reddit, Facebook, or discord messages but I don't typically save those sources for sharing. Additionally, I'm notsure how many of these sources are still active. It's been a long time since I've used most of them.

http://www.classicbookshelf.com/

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/search.html

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/

http://www.classicreader.com/

http://www.readprint.com/

http://www.planetebook.com/

http://meta.montclair.edu/spectator/

http://www.bibliomania.com/

http://www.literature.org/

http://www.fiction.us/

http://www.classic-literature.co.uk/

http://www.bartleby.com/fiction/

http://textbookrevolution.org/index.php/Main_Page

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page

http://www.knowthis.com/topic-areas/media-and-publications/free-online-textbooks.htm

http://www.welovelmc.com/books.htm

http://spot.colorado.edu/%7Edubin/bookmarks/b/1240.html

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/resources/supplemental/index.htm

http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/minisite/

http://www.businessbookmall.com/Free%20Business%20Books.htm

http://www.lightandmatter.com/

http://emedicine.medscape.com/

http://www.fullbooks.com/

http://homepages.nyu.edu/%7Ejmg336/html/mathematics.html

http://www.math.gatech.edu/%7Ecain/textbooks/onlinebooks.html

http://www.techbooksforfree.com/science.shtml

http://www.freescience.info/index.php

http://www.freetechbooks.com/

http://www.lookybook.com/

http://www.bored.com/ebooks/

http://www.ideology.us/

http://www.dlshq.org/download/download.htm

http://www.ne.jp/asahi/moriyuki/abukuma/weber/society/socio_relig/socio_relig_frame.html

http://e-library.net/Religion.htm

http://www.readbookonline.net/

http://www.fiction.us/plays.htm

http://www.publicbookshelf.com/

http://www.ibdof.com/

http://www.free-online-novels.com/

http://www.foxglove.co.uk/free_online_novels.html

http://www.baen.com/library/

http://www.roadtoromance.ca/freestories.htm

http://www.getfreeebooks.com/

http://www.johntcullen.com/

http://www.hourwolf.com/sfbooks/

http://www.starry.com/novel/free-online-novels/freenoveldirectory.htm

http://cf.hum.uva.nl/dsp/ljc/

http://un2sg4.unige.ch/athena/html/francaut.html

http://www.liberliber.it/biblioteca/index.htm%22

http://biblior.net/volume.html

http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/

http://www.sarantakos.com/keimena.html

http://cervantes.tamu.edu/V2/index.html

http://www.forumromanum.org/literature/index.html

http://runeberg.org/

http://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/

http://www.ucc.ie/celt/

http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/index.php

http://librivox.org/newcatalog/

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/

http://www.accessgenealogy.com/library/

http://www.onlinebooks4free.com/menu/history_usgeneral.html

http://www.books-on-line.com/bol/TopTen.cfm?DCode=9

http://www.questia.com/publicdomainindex

http://www.books-on-line.com/bol/default.cfm

http://chestofbooks.com/

http://www.free-ebooks.net/

http://2020ok.com/

http://art.quickfound.net/

http://www.mysterynet.com/short-mystery-stories/

http://www.topmystery.com/online_books.htm

http://www.books-on-line.com/bol/TopTen.cfm?DCode=M

http://www.online-literature.com/

http://www.fiction.us/poems.htm

http://www.poemhunter.com/

http://www.poetry-online.org/

http://books.google.com/books?q=+subject:%22+Poetry+%22&as_brr=3&rview=1&source=gbs_hplp_fict

http://www.quotesandpoem.com/poems/poets

http://www.completeclassics.com/

http://www.pinkpoem.com/

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/banned-books.html

http://worldebooklibrary.com/

http://www.dailylit.com/

http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/

http://www.starry.com/novel/authors.htm

http://manybooks.net/

http://www.authorama.com/

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/prize.html

https://www.bartleby.com/lit-hub/fiction/

https://en.m.wikiversity.org/wiki/Open_Educational_Resources/Sources

https://en.m.wikiversity.org/wiki/Open_Educational_Resources

https://collection.bccampus.ca/

Good guides here:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/guide-downloading-free-textbooks-pdf-2024-mark-roemmich-q6uhe

https://fmhy.net/readingpiracyguide

Pre-post edit: I found the proper Reddit post to give the poster credit. Although my post shares ~96% of the same links in the same order, I'll leave them as is, so no one has to navigate to that site.

https://www.reddit.com/r/FreeEBOOKS/comments/2jwmfo/huge_list_of_free_ebook_resources/?rdt=40747

Fanfiction - https://archiveofourown.org/ (also known as AO3) doesn't have DRM.

Check out the books section here.

I used to use Downpour for drm-free audiobooks, mostly as a supplement to what I can get from the library.

There is also Anna's Archive which functions as a search engine for number of free library systems. The rate limits for the free access are a little tedious, but fine if you're getting specific titles and not just bulk downloading.

If one purchases a DRMed copy and then downloads a DRM-free one to actually use, it's still technically illegal, but not, IMO, immoral.

I don't have any recommendations that haven't already been mentioned, but wanted to express thanks for the Planescape novelizations link. This will make my spouse very happy - he had a blast DM'ing from the original games, and the game universe was peak Goth (until Tamsyn Muir, that is).

Hugh Howey, the author of the Wool series (recently turned into a TV series called Silo) sells his books (or most of them) directly via his own website DRM free. He is a fantastic sci-fi author and I highly recommend all of his works.

For anyone that's into anime or related media J-Novel Club has DRM-free epub downloads for the novels and manga they publish.

glom

New word discovered. Thanks!

(The rest of this comment is about shadow libraries. I know you said you aren't looking for pirated books, so feel free to just not read the rest of this if you really aren't interested. I waited until this topic was a week old so that hopefully me bringing this stuff up wouldn't get in the way of other recommendations.)

For "traditional" titles I plan on still buying them on Kobo and then just stripping the DRM and transferring them over

Look, you're not going to find more comprehensive libraries of DRM-free books than Anna's Archive or Z-Library.

My advice would be to do what I do:

Download books from a shadow library first. Read them. If you like them, then buy them somewhere.

By doing things in that order, you won't have to worry about whether the place you buy the book from offers DRM-free files, because you'll already have one from the shadow library. It also means you won't need to spend extra time fixing DRM-encumbered files.

Sure, maybe this process exists in a moral gray area. If you disagree with the existence of shadow libraries then is it really okay to utilize them? Those kinds of questions.

(For what it's worth, I don't have any quandaries about them. I think their existence is an unequivocally good thing.)

Whatever your opinion on the morality of shadow libraries though, it's hard to argue that they aren't the most practical approach to acquiring ebooks without DRM or other encumbrances.

Michael J. Sullivan will often send you a DRM Free ebook version of his book if you email him the receipt of your purchase. It can even be the audiobook, just sent an audible receipt and got a free epub. He writes fantasy novels.

ebooks.com has a DRM-free section: https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/drm-free

DRM decisions are set by the publisher (or very occasionally, by the author if they have enough pull), so titles won't be there if they're not DRM-free elsewhere, but it's a nice place to buy books without any fuss.

Brandon Sanderson also insists of everything of his is sold DRM-free, so you can get them from anywhere.