[bausson]

From an user perspective, those walled garden for ebooks are a real problem. Since I like to have a paper copy of my books, I have a working solution, not perfect though: * If there is a paper version, buy the paper version. * If there is a DRM-free ebook, download it somewhere or buy it (depending on the price and added work, like a new cover, ...) * If the is only DRM version, download a DRM-free version for free once it's available. * If there is no paper version: * If there is a DRM-free edition, buy it * If there is only a DRM version, no good solution there, either a pass or a download somewhere.

My reader is a Kindle, so not perfect there, but I manage by keeping it in airplane mode at all time, to avoid stupid updates (like the 1984 fiasco), and by adding book only through Calibre instead of amazon's library manager.

[cstross]

If there's only a DRM edition, [cough] crack the DRM. Doing this for Kindle ebooks is easy enough that I half-suspect there's a deliberate policy of winking at it on AMZN's part.

I'm not going to tempt fate by providing pointers here but if you ask in the comments on my blog I will be less restrained.

[dublinben]

I'd rather not pay to support retailers like Amazon that sell DRM-crippled books, just to (illegally) circumvent it. I'll demonstrate that I don't support this by only buying DRM-free books.

[bausson]

If it come to that, I suspect Duckduckgo will be kind enough to point me in the right direction.

Since ebooks are zip with a well-defined file hierarchy, I may even be able to hack the unnecessary bits to achieve freedom on my own.

Nice to see that some authors share that point of view.