Any good sites for e-book bundles besides Humble Bundle?
Hello,
I want to pick your brains for recommendations for good, cheap e-book bundles. I buy a lot of my e-books the old fashioned way, one at a time, but Humble Bundle book bundles has scored me a ton of great reading for cheap, including the entire Wheel of Time series, the entirety of Discworld, lots of Comic and Manga bundles, and such, usually for $18 a bundle which is a crazy discount. I'm very happy with them and will continue to refresh their bundles regularly, but my desire to hoard books is great and I'd love to know if there's any similar sites out there regularly offering those kinds of sales.
My only strict requirement is said books have to be either DRM-Free or (the very trivially-cracked) Adobe DRM. I'm also looking specifically to purchase books, I know libraries etc are really cool (and also easy to crack) but I get a lot of enjoyment from owning the books I own (and don't feel good about cracking library copies, I don't judge anyone else for doing so but I'm privileged to have the ability to easily afford my books and figure I should do my part, even if my part is heavily discounted ha).
As an aside, for anyone who doesn't already know, humble bundle normally has at least half a dozen book bundles at any given time, and there's some crazy value on occasion (see above), would highly recommend if you're into ebooks!
There are no better places to get ebooks than Anna's Archive or Z-Library. Read what you want, then if you want to, pay for a copy afterwards.
Seriously, there's no reason to jump through all these weird and cringe hoops like digital lending or DRM cracking just to be able to own a digital copy of a book. Just download the book from a shadow library and then, if you want:
There's no reason to pay for an ebook before you read it. There's especially no reason to waste your time dealing with poor commercial services when shadow libraries are faster, easier, and free.
See my other two comments on the topic for more:
I wish every artist had something like this on their site. A simple 'I stole your shit, here's ten bucks' option.
Because people don't actually ever fork over guilt money. My wife used to have that option on her website and no one ever used it/there are usually still fees involved.
If you want to hand over guilt money, you can always track down the artist on social media and figure out a way to transfer them money.
i’ve done it for bands before, but yeah, might not be a massive boon at first. it would be neat if it caught on. one major issue is that most people probably don’t want their real name attached to a payment like that, even though it’s harmless.
the level of fame along with ease of piracy for their content is important, too. i think you can still do free transfers with paypal, but it’s been a moment since i set that stuff up for anyone.
I agree that guilt money is rare at best.
I feel like Sanderson is a good rolemodel for merch though. Stickers, bookmarks, patches, hats, wall art, whatever. I totally understand that there's upfront cost to that, in design work/time if nothing else. There are a lot of platforms for 'smaller' artists to sell swag. I assume they take a decent cut but that's still something. Youtubers in particular seem to have really clocked in that guilt/subscription money is only so attractive, stickers though.
It's also why bands sell merch. The smaller ones especially make almost nothing on ticket sales or streaming or record deals.
I mostly agree with you, but from my experience a lot of the books on Anna's are...not the best version. For example you will read a few pages and start to notice a lot of spelling mistakes, or maybe some strange formatting. Almost like they are leaked review copies or something. Then you have to go back and try a different copy, and you don't ever know if it's a good one until you get into it. I'd certainly be willing to pay a few dollars to guarantee I'm getting a "good" copy of a book, but not from bezos.
I wouldn't be surprised if those are just the same typos from the official ebooks, I've purchased plenty on kobo store that had numerous errors. I think they are mainly caused when physical books are scanned to turn them into ebooks, the scanning can have issues and often not a lot of care is put into fixing them
No, these are bad. Like, riddled with errors. And I've always been able to eventually find a good file, so it's not the official ebook.
If I'm not quite sure I'll like the book I often pirate it, and then pay for the next book I get from the author. Esp audiobooks I find very hard to judge if that particular book is going to work for me, without actually listening to it (if they do funny voices I'm out. Or some texts are just too nice/complicated to listen to).
Obvious out of the way thing first, check if the book you are interested in is available on Libby or Hoopla through your local library if it’s available to you there.
Ebooks, what comes to mind is Storybundle or Fanatical depending on your particular niche.
DRM free comics I know a little better. Google Play Books and GlobalComix sells DRM free copies of Saga and other Image titles. I have a code for a free week of their GlobalComix Gold subscription if that’s something you’re interested in, but you should just be able to buy a PDF off their website for your own use as well.
+1 for StoryBundle and Fanatical. The quality of their selections isn’t as good as Humble Bundle, but they still have the occasional solid bundle (IMO).
Digiphile is one to watch. They’re a new bundle site made up of former Humble Bundle devs. They’ve only had one book bundle so far, but I’m hoping for more from them.
Also, it’s not limited to bundles, but the most comprehensive list of DRM-free offerings I’ve found is here.
Thank you! I didn't realize Fanatical also did book bundles, I'll definitely keep an eye on them. And thanks for the golden roll tip, I'd never heard of that site but glad to have a place to get Saga again! Now I just have to come to terms with the fact that volumes are $16 each, they know what they got ha
You could always download them from a shadow archive, such as Anna's (link is always updated on Wikipedia, and vetted/trusted) and if you want to give back, buy the non-DRM copies from another shop at the same time.
Try Baen Books, they have both free and paid bundles from different authors in the SF genre.
Another random tangent, but does anyone know how to get Saga comic series DRM-free? The only storefront I can find is Google books, but the downloadable DRM-free copies have some pretty severe formatting issues that require hacky calibre editing. I got vol 1-10 in a humble bundle and those copies were perfect, so I know they exist in the world, but idk where!