65 Kindle-format books and other items tagged drmfree or equivalent at Amazon: How to find safe-to-own titles

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By David Rothman

Want to buy Kindle e-books and other items that you can own for real? Think Amazon shouldn’t be able to use DRM to take away your legal Kindle purchases? Dislike DRM’s other hassles?

Then visit the Amazon page showing goods tagged with drmfree and some equivalents. To be safe, it’s best to use drmfree, the standard tag, on items you may be buying or selling on Amazon—just so they deserve it.

Background on the campaign

For latecomers, TeleRead last week began a drmfree tagging campaign, quickly endorsed by Boing Boing and home-paged by our friends at MobileRead. So far, 65 products show up on the drmfree page. We were pleased that another Amazon customer, an R. Reeves, had already quietly started a page featuring safe-to-own goods. Now for a full-scale campaign, with a standard, easy-to-remember tag!

In other of appearance, here are past TeleRead posts related to the drmfree campaign:

• Steve Windwalker’s original post calling for the campaign.
• drmfree tag campaign starts on Amazon: Help identify safer-to-own books and other items! “…how to spot the DRMfree books? AZW is a Kindle file extension. Rename AZW files with a MOBI extension on your desktop machine and see if they open.”
• drmfree tag campaign on Amazon picks up steam. More tips, such as how to create Kindle books untainted by DRM.

To penalize books with DRM, just use the tag drm. If someone sneaks DRM back on a book featuring the drmfree tag, use drmback or something like drmback-13-april-09, and alert people in the book’s comment area. Make it very bad PR for publishers to pull stunts like this. Help TeleRead spot the offenders. And don’t forget, add your own DRMfree books and encourage your publisher to do the same!

Intent of the campaign

The drmfree campaign is against DRM, not Amazon per se. Laudably, Amazon runs a DRMfree MP3 store. We’d be thrilled if Amazon started the same for books from consenting publishers and worked toward the day when “protection” vanished from the book world. We’re fiercely anti-piracy. It’s just that DRM penalizes legal owners and actually encourages piracy. Furthermore, this loser of a technology is easy to bypass, as shown by the scanning of the printed Harry Potter books.

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