I found and tested every place you can get DRM-free ebooks on the internet. That’s a whole host of free libraries and online stores where you can buy or download ebooks, legally, without any DRM whatsoever.
I’ve tested as many as I could find, and I’m going to share with you the ones I think are worth your time.
Watch the video version of this article:
I’ve broken them up into three categories. The first are online repositories or libraries where you can get DRM-free ebooks, legally, for free. The second are online stores, where you can buy your DRM-free ebooks. The third are publishers, yes, publishers who don’t add DRM to their ebooks. I’ll share which of these you can buy books from directly or via online stores.
What is DRM?
DRM stands for Digital Rights Management.
It’s essentially a digital lock publishers put on digital files like ebooks to control what you can do with them. It’s the reason you can’t easily move a book you bought on Kindle over to another ereader.
DRM-free means the book is yours. You can read it on any device, back it up, convert the format, whatever you want.
The stores/repositories I didn’t include
Before I get into the 11 libraries, online stores, and publishers I have chosen, I first want to say a word to the options I’ve chosen not to include in this list.
If an online repository or library used AI, as far as I could tell, I did not include it. There were some that reformatted books with AI covers, which, honestly, I think is a crime.
There were also a few websites that looked promising but were essentially unusable due to website errors, which is a shame.
Lastly, I’ve not included any that specialise in self-published books. There were quite a few of those, so I feel like they need their own video.
11 places to get DRM-free ebooks
Places to get DRM-free ebooks for free
So let’s get started with our first category. DRM-free repositories or libraries. These are websites where you can download your DRM-free books for free.
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is largely considered the world’s oldest and first digital library. It’s filled with a huge number of ebooks most of which are public domain books where the U.S. copyright has expired.
For this reason, you’ll find a lot of older books and classics like Moby Dick, Frankenstein, and Jane Eyre. Every ebook on Project Gutenberg is free and available in a variety of formats.
I downloaded The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde as an EPUB3 file. I read this back in my pre-university days, so I’d love to do a re-read.
Downloading a book from Project Gutenberg is so easy, and if you’re just looking to get into the words without any fuss, then you can’t really go wrong. I spent some time flicking through the book on my Kindle and I could see no errors, it looks great!
Standard Ebooks
Standard Ebooks, much like Project Gutenberg, hosts older public-domain ebooks, but in this case, they are advertised as new editions that have been reformatted and improved to make them suitable for your ereader.
Essentially, they take books from places like Project Gutenberg and give them a careful upgrade. They improve things like the typography, fix typos, improve metadata, and graphics.
This is all volunteer-led, by the way, just like Project Gutenberg.
I downloaded The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde from here as well, just so we can do a side-by-side comparison. In this case, I’ve gone for the azw3 format, at their recommendation, again, because I have a Kindle.
In general, I’d say the Standard Ebooks edition of Dorian Grey is just that little bit more special feeling. The cover is nice, the note at the start looks snazzy, and the general formatting and layout feels just slightly better.
Not by much, but enough to make you consider checking Standard Ebooks out when opting for free ebooks.
Places to buy DRM-free ebooks
So that’s all the free libraries, but what if you want to buy ebooks, perhaps even some new ones? Yes, that’s right, you can get new releases DRM-free too, you just have to look for a few specific things.
ebooks.com
If you’re looking for much newer releases, as in, actual new releases for your ebooks, then ebooks.com is a great option.
The best part about ebooks.com is that they make it super easy to find DRM-free ebooks. All you have to do is click the link at the top of the site, and you’re good. Also, make sure to tick the EPUB ebook format button in the sidebar, we don’t really want PDF files.
You can also filter this way while looking through the different book genres, which is pretty snazzy.
ebooks.com has a pretty good selection, and this is because, as you’ll see later in this article, there are some publishers that don’t add DRM onto their releases.
I decided to get the greenhollow duology. I’ve read both of these as an audiobook, but I would love to have them as an ebook also.
Out of all the ebooks I downloaded for this article, I’m probably most disappointed by The Greenhollow Duology. Mostly because it didn’t pull in a cover, and the formatting could be a little better, too.
There’s a chance I could have made some changes to the file in Calibre, but I wanted to treat all the ebooks the same way for this experiment.
This doesn’t mean all ebooks from ebooks.com are like this, of course, and it’s not like adding covers is really a big deal, so keep that in mind.
The Kobo online store
Much like ebooks.com, Kobo’s online store does have DRM-free ebooks. Finding these ebooks is a little difficult, so I would suggest googling ‘DRM-free Kobo books’, and the link that pops up should be the right option.
For the UK, it looks like this.
But honestly, this page could be better, and it doesn’t actually show all the DRM-free ebooks on offer. The best way to find DRM-free ebooks on a store like this is to know which publishers to look for.
In this case, I went for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Some more re-read material right there.
Buying from Kobo is pretty easy, and because you create an account with them, they store your books within your account so you can download them at any time, which is pretty useful.
This was one of the two ebooks on this list that, upon opening, took me straight to the first chapter, skipping any of the contents or forwards, which I thought was quite strange.
Again, this could have happened during the conversion in Calibre, that’s something I’ll need to look into.
Other than that, it’s a pretty good-looking ebook, and downloading it from Kobo was pretty easy.
bookshop.org
I’m a fan of bookshop.org because they give a portion of the money to local indie bookshops that you pick. So buying ebooks from here is a great option.
Most of their ebooks are only available to read in their app or on a web browser, but if you buy a DRM-free ebook from them, you can read it anywhere.
I’m going to be honest, these are very, very hard to find. I spent a good 30 minutes trying to work out the best way to find DRM-free ebooks, and my best solution is this.
Search for the genre of books you’re looking for in the search bar. Then click ‘format’ and select DRM-free. This will then give you a decent list of ebooks you can buy.
Unfortunately, you will have to sift through a lot of AI covers by doing this, like, a lot. And you know what, because of this, I just didn’t fancy buying anything from bookshop.org. Usually, I’m a fan, but for ebooks, this could be improved.
Google Play
You can buy DRM-free books from the Google Play store, should you want to. There is no way that I could find to search for this, so you kind of need to know a specific book you want, that you know is DRM-free, and then search for that.
You can double-check that the book is DRM-free on the book’s page, which is useful. You can also see this kind of information on the Apple Books store.
In this case, I grabbed my favourite book, Gideon the Ninth, to test the Google Play Store.
Buying and downloading an ebook from the Google Play Store is surprisingly easy, and Gideon the Ninth translates really well as an ebook. The artwork looks crisp, and it reads really well. What more can I say?
Kickstarter
There are a good number of authors opting to release their books via this method, and many offer DRM-free ebooks as part of their ‘Rewards’. These are worth keeping in mind because, as we know, everyone from traditionally published authors to self-published authors is trying out this distribution method.
DRM-free publishers
Next, let’s look at those lovely good guys, the publishers who don’t add DRM to their books. Some of these you can buy from directly, others you can use as a reference when buying from online ebook stores.
Tor
You may have noticed while looking through some of our previous options that there was one publisher who came up time and time again when looking for DRM-free books, and that’s Tor.
Tor has been a DRM-free publisher since 2012, and I love them for it.
As the publisher of my favourite book, Gideon the Ninth, I honestly think I need to be buying more from them.
To buy Tor books, you can search for them on ebooks.com or pretty much any other online store where you buy ebooks, and you will see something like ‘this book is DRM-free at the request of the publisher’ on the book’s page.
Baen books
Baen is a publisher known for producing science fiction and fantasy books.
The type of books they sell are things like space operas, hard science fiction, and adventure fantasy. So if you like that kind of thing, they’ve got plenty of options.
I decided to opt for There Will Be Dragons from their free library. Downloading There Will be Dragons was really easy, I didn’t have to create an account to get it, the same can’t be said for one you have to pay for though.
This book is by far the one with the most metadata and detail within Calibre. Even in comparison to Standard Ebooks, they really go above and beyond. The ebook itself looks great too, I’m impressed.
Angry Robot
These books can be purchased directly from their website, which is pretty cool.
There are some really cool-looking books on their website that I might have to come back to, but I’m opting for some more re-read material with Evocation by S.T. Gibson.
Buying an ebook from Angry Robot required a few extra steps compared to the other options on this list. In order to get my ebook file, I needed to wait for an email to come through, and then I could download it. Which isn’t at all a big deal; it’s just a different setup, and it looks like, without this, you can’t download from your user account.
The ebook itself looks good, but much like Hitchhiker’s Guide, it jumped me immediately to chapter one after opening it for the first time. Again, this could be a conversion issue.
Haymarket Books
The next publisher is a little different. Haymarket Books is a radical, independent, nonprofit book publisher based in Chicago.
There are so many interesting books on the Haymarket website, and finding ebooks is very easy. Some books are only available in certain countries, but once you add a book to your cart, it should update with the relevant books you can buy.
For Haymarket, I opted for Mermaid Theory, which is a book of poems.
Haymarket was pretty easy to buy from, but you do need to create an account to buy from them. Guest checkout isn’t really an option. This is because while your book is DRM-free, they do give you your very own license on the book.
It takes a small amount of time for them to generate the ebook file for you, and this is because they add your name and email address to the book file itself. When you open it up, both of these things are on quite a number of the pages, particularly at the start of the book.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this done before. It was surprising to see.
The formatting of this book is quite strange, but I’m presuming it’s meant to be as a poetic stylistic choice, rather than any kind of mistake.
So that wraps up my experience with all of these websites. Let me know in the comments what you thought of these.
Leave a Reply