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How do I check if a book has drm before I buy it?

I'm not sure if this is possible or not, but I would like to know if there is restrictive drm before I purchase a book. Does anyone know if there is a way to find out?


All the guides I can find to check whether an ibook has drm only seem to apply to books you've already purchased.

iBook

Posted on Apr 12, 2014 7:42 AM

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Posted on Apr 12, 2014 5:20 PM

I don't think there is any way to do that. Normally all paid books have DRM, except for those from certain publishers like O'Reilly. You could try asking the publisher.


Note that muti-touch books in the .ibooks format can only be read on an ipad or a Mac running OS 10.9 regardless of whether they have DRM or not, because of the special format.

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Apr 12, 2014 5:20 PM in response to SuperFaceMan

I don't think there is any way to do that. Normally all paid books have DRM, except for those from certain publishers like O'Reilly. You could try asking the publisher.


Note that muti-touch books in the .ibooks format can only be read on an ipad or a Mac running OS 10.9 regardless of whether they have DRM or not, because of the special format.

Apr 13, 2014 8:35 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

Thanks.


I contacted apple support, and their response was something along the lines of 'the items purchased on the iBooks Store are set to DRM protection".


It seems like for now, they prefer everyone to just assume that all books sold though iBooks are drm-laden.


I'm really not a fan of these broken by design formats. I think I'll try to stick to real books for the time being.

Apr 13, 2014 9:09 AM in response to SuperFaceMan

SuperFaceMan wrote:


'the items purchased on the iBooks Store are set to DRM protection".


This is erroneous. DRM must be requested by the author/publisher, it is their option, not Apple's. It's true that Apple will never mention on an iTunes purchase page that a book has no DRM, but it is a well known fact that all books, for example, published by O'Reilly do not have it, and there are other publishers that do the same.


http://shop.oreilly.com/category/ebooks.do


It could well be that Apple Support is just clueless in this case (a pretty common state, unfortunately).

How do I check if a book has drm before I buy it?

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