In honor of May 4th, the Day Against DRM, all O’Reilly, No Starch, and Rocky Nook e-books are 50% off today only. (And, needless to say, they’re multiformat and DRM-free.) Enter the coupon code DRMFREE at the checkout to take advantage of this opportunity. No matter your feelings about DRM, that’s quite a good price for what O’Reilly has to offer. If they have any e-books you’ve been thinking about getting, this would be a good time....

In what must be some of the least surprising news ever, one day after Tor’s US imprint, Tor/Forge, announced it was going DRM-free by July, Tor UK has just made the same announcement. It’s pretty clear they were planning this all along; I expect the reason they staggered them was to try to get two separate news bumps from it. At any rate, this should at least satisfy the folks asking about it in the comments thread on Charlie Stross’s blog post yesterday....

Well, that didn’t take very long. The first major publishing imprint has announced it is going to go entirely DRM-free. Tor/Forge has just posted a press announcement to Tor.com that its entire list of e-books will be available DRM-free, both through the current vendors and through retailers that can only sell DRM-free e-books, by July 2012. “Our authors and readers have been asking for this for a long time,” said president and publisher Tom Doherty. “They’re a technically sophisticated bunch, and DRM is a constant annoyance to them. It prevents them from using legitimately-purchased e-books in...

I know I mention Diane Duane’s e-book store sales a lot, but I figure that she’s one of very few excellent examples I know of authors who run their own DRM-free multi-format e-book stores and offer frequent discounts to boot. She’s a shining example of how to do things right, and I think that kind of example needs all the exposure it can get. And speaking of frequent discounts, Duane is currently offering a 60% discount on everything in her e-book store through 23:59 Hawaiian time, Tuesday March 27th. Use the coupon code FLASHSALE during the checkout process. Among...

From Publishing Perspectives.  Here's a snippet: BARCELONA: In a recent memo to publishers on GigaOM, award-winning journalist Matthew Ingram asked a painful question: Remind Us Why You Exist Again? Catalan publisher Ernest Folch has been preparing an answer, although it is partial and in ongoing review… Folch has served as Editorial Director of Ediciones B — a privately held, medium-size trade publisher of best-selling popular fiction and non-fiction — since February 2011. He launched their digital imprint, B de Books, last November, making them the first commercial and profit-driven publisher to offer DRM-free e-books. Prices started at 0.99 euros, a bold step in a market where...

When you go DRM-free, sometimes you can be successful in ways you couldn’t have dreamed. A week ago I mentioned comedian Louis C.K.’s experiment in posting a comedy special DRM-free for $5 download or streaming. He’d made just over 110,000 sales in 4 days. Well, his sales rate has slowed a little, but he’s still surpassed $1 million in total sales in just twelve days, and has a PayPal screenshot to prove it. (Personally, I’d be really reluctant to leave a million dollars in their hands for any longer than I had to.) He’s going to use $250,000...

One more person has discovered, like Baen, that if you release your content inexpensively and without DRM, you can beat piracy at its own game. Comedian Louis CK recently tried an experiment in which he made a full-length comedy special available for sale from his website, to stream or download with no DRM, for $5. He asked that people be considerate and not pirate it, so that he could afford to offer more material in the same way. Now Louis has posted some results to his website. (Though as a web designer he makes a better comedian; I had...

Diane Duane has revised and relaunched another of her backlist as an e-book. This one, Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses, takes CSI-style forensic drama (though it was first published in 2002, the same year as the original CSI launched) and puts it into an SF/fantasy setting. It’s one of the few Duane books I haven’t gotten around to reading yet—but now I have a good excuse! Duane writes that she took the opportunity to fix a few issues she’d noticed in the book over the last ten years, including restoring some material that had previously been cut and rewriting the...

Wired has an extensive report on J.K. Rowling’s rumor-surrounded “Pottermore” website, which is due to launch in October (just in time for Halloween). The big part of the story of interest to TeleRead readers is that Pottermore will be the exclusive outlet for the Harry Potter e-books, and the e-books will be DRM-free (albeit digitally watermarked with the identity of the purchaser), meaning (as least as far as Wired claims) that they will not be locked into any one device or platform. The first e-book will be available at launch, in multiple languages, with others to follow in...

Sharon Lee and Steve Miller’s Liaden series, now homed with Baen and producing new books, has experienced a number of fits and starts over the years, the first one being after the series’ original publisher decided it wasn’t interested in a fourth book. Upon joining the Internet and discovering a Liaden fandom had developed there, Lee and Miller began to issue a yearly chapbook publication as a gift to those fans. The chapbooks cost around $10 each, and contained one or two new Liaden stories or novellas. The first 16 of these chapbooks, along with one or two...

From Defective by Design: In 2008, the DRM Elimination Crew stood on the steps of the Boston Public Library (BPL) and demanded that they Kick DRM Out (1, 2). The DRM technology got into the BPL through a contract with the company OverDrive, who uses DRM (on most titles) to control how and when people can read ebooks. This setup essentially moves control of the library's digital collection into the hands of the publishers and intermediary companies like OverDrive that do the dirty work of implementing DRM. Back then we found that librarians were somewhat disgruntled with this setup, but, unfortunately, few...

Calibre has just started a new site for drm-free ebooks.  Here's what they say: calibre introduces Open Books, a site for easy browsing of DRM-free e-books (e-books without DRM) that are not in the public domain. calibre has a cornucopia of features including library management, e-book conversion, syncing with devices, news download, e-book viewing etc, but to make the most of these features with your e-books you need to ensure your e-books do not carry DRM. Open Books is a compilation non DRM e-books from various sources linked to enable readers to browse and download them. Open Books...