Let’s face it: Amazon has a chokehold on the e-reader market.
Exactly how tight that hold is seems to vary depending on the year and market research firm, but I’ve seen reputable claims that Amazon’s Kindles now make up 70-80% of the total global e-reader market.
Whatever the truth may be, I can tell you from my years covering them for Tom’s Guide that Kindles are the most popular e-reader on the market. If you check out our guide to the best e-readers you’ll notice most of them are Kindles, and for good reason: Amazon has poured untold amounts of money into subsidizing and refining the design of these cheap e-ink tablets, while simultaneously expanding its Kindle e-book store.
The result, at least for Kindle users, is easy and reliable access to an Amazon storefront packed with ebooks from all your favorite authors. Which is great…until you make the mistake of straying beyond Amazon’s borders and daring to buy an e-reader from another company.
When that happens you will get the unpleasant reminder that Amazon’s Kindle e-books all have DRM (Digital Rights Management) protection on them that prevents you from easily reading them on anything other than a Kindle.
That can be a real hassle for a book lover who wants to buy anything besides a Kindle, but it doesn’t have to be a deal-breaker — you just have to know where to look.
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Alex hi, appreciate your in-depth Remarkable Pro review. One additional question: What kind of e-books are you able to read? Of course there is no Kindle support.
If I am looking for an e-book reader, is the selection just too small?
This has been an issue for a long time, but I was reminded of it recently after a kind reader wrote in thanking me for our ReMarkable Paper Pro review and asking what e-books I was able to read on it.
It’s a good question, and I realized that we ought to point readers towards a few great sources of e-books you can read on more than just Kindles.
So I’ve rounded up my favorite sources of e-books (free and paid) below to give you some options outside Amazon’s walled garden.
The vast majority of e-books available for purchase on these services are available as DRM-free ePub files, which are supported by e-readers from Barnes & Noble, ReMarkable and many more.
eBooks
While not all the e-books sold on eBooks.com are DRM-free, the company maintains a curated list of DRM-free e-books you can buy and read on your laptop or e-reader.
The list is quite varied, too, with everything from Python programming guides to Nebula Award-winning fiction like Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors.
It’s a great list, and personally I’m overjoyed to see works like Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Word for World is Forest available as a DRM-free e-book from eBooks.
Smashwords
Smashwords is an online marketplace for self-published ebooks that’s committed to offering DRM-free books.
So while you may have a hard time finding the latest Dean Koontz novel on there, what you will find is hundreds of thousands of books from a wide variety of authors.
Many are incredibly affordable, too, including a whole slew of free e-books you can download and load onto just about any e-reader you want.
StoryBundle
StoryBundle is a great way to grab gobs of DRM-free e-books at a decent price.
If you’re familiar with the Humble Bundle or similar “pay-what-you-want” bundle programs, you have a headstart on understanding StoryBundle’s business model.
Here’s how it works: Curated sets of e-books from independent authors are regularly sold in bundles, typically with themes like “Monsters and Cryptids” or “Cattitude”, and each bundle is only available for a limited time.
You can pay what you want for the books in these bundles, and you can even set the revenue split between StoryBundle and the authors.
So what’s to stop you from paying $1 for a bunch of great e-books? Nothing! However, there’s typically one or more “bonus” books that are only unlocked if you pay more than a certain amount — a bonus threshold that’s sometimes a set amount (say, $20) and sometimes a dynamic number that changes in response to the average price people are paying for that bundle.
Rakuten Kobo
Japanese tech giant Rakuten sells a fairly popular line of Kobo e-readers, and they company also maintains an online e-book marketplace to supply them with reading material.
Like eBooks, not all Rakuten Kobo offerings are DRM-free, but the vendor is kind enough to maintain a list of DRM-free e-books you can purchase that will work on just about any e-reader which can accept ePub or PDF files.
Publishers
In addition to all the sites mentioned here, some publishers will skip the middleman and sell you DRM-free e-books directly.
Baen Books is a great example because it’s one of the few publishers which maintains its own regularly-updated e-book storefront and remains vocally opposed to DRM in e-books. Baen also offers a library of e-books you can download and read for free, as well as a podcast, regular give-aways and more.
So look up the website(s) of your favorite authors and publishers to see if they might be willing to sell you a DRM-free copy of your next favorite e-book direct.
These are just a few of my most recommended places to buy DRM-free e-books, not a comprehensive list. So if you have any favorites you’d like to share, please do drop them in the comments below.
Because while Amazon’s Kindle storefront offers a wealth of reading material for Kindle owners, it’s nice to remember that you still have the freedom to step outside that walled garden and read books on whatever device you please.
