After Amazon spent the past two years diligently locking down its customers’ ability to remove its DRM from our purchased e-books (from removing the ability to download your purchases to your computer, to locking its e-books down with a new uncrackable DRM), the company is suddenly going to offer ePubs and PDFs as DRM-free downloads for e-book purchases made after January 20th. For those paying attention, this new direction pretty much flies in the face of Amazon’s previous actions, which made it harder for everyone to remove DRM from their purchases.
Now, I don’t know about you, but this makes me wonder whether Amazon’s anti-consumer push over the last few years has backfired on the company. Perhaps people stopped buying their e-books from Amazon, or maybe the publishers got sick of Amazon’s lock-in. Whatever the reason for the upcoming change is, it would seem we will soon enough be able to download DRM-free ePubs and PDFs directly from Amazon for any e-books that support the feature, finally opening the Kindle store to e-readers beyond the Kindle.
Starting January 20th, ePubs will be available to download for some of your e-book purchases
Screenshot of Amazon’s Digital Rights Management page
A sharp eye over at the Mobileread forums discovered that Amazon has updated its Digital Rights Management section on its Kindle Direct Publishing help page (image above). There is now new language detailing that publishers will be able to control their DRM settings and make changes anytime they want. If a publisher chooses not to apply DRM to its e-books, it can provide DRM-free ePub and PDF files.
These changes to the DRM system won’t apply to e-books published before December 9th, 2025, so publishers will have to enable the feature for older titles manually. Once that status is updated, it may take up to 72 hours for a title to start offering ePub and PDF downloads to customers.
Publishers still have to opt into DRM-free
Of course, it will be totally up to the publisher whether it wants to offer DRM-free e-books on the Kindle store. This is a choice publishers have always had, and, as we’ve seen historically, few of the big publishers support the feature. Still, the ability to download DRM-free ePubs and PDFs will be a boon for those who enjoy reading (purchasing) indie titles that are less likely to support Amazon’s anti-consumer DRM.
At the end of the day, DRM-free titles soon offering ePub and PDF downloads is a very welcome change, even though it won’t apply to the entire Kindle storefront. Ideally, Amazon will make it easy to tell which e-books offer ePub/PDF downloads and which contain DRM, and if it does, I can certainly see myself returning to the Kindle store after a multi-year absence.
