One of the largest pains from Amazon’s Kindle store is that every book you download has some form of digital rights management (DRM). Well, that’s going way. In some cases. If the publisher wants it to.

The change was officially announced by the online retailer back in December last year, but now conversions of books to DRM-free ePub and PDF formats are out in the real world. These versions are easily transferred to another device — even if it’s outside of the Kindle ecosystem.

Protecting the Amazon

Amazon’s switchover was set to come into effect on 20 January, so the first of the company’s DRM-free titles should be up on the company’s site. We’ve done a quick check and, so far, major publishers seem to be ignoring the update. There are a few titles that show the new download option, even on our list of books.

To see which of your purchased items have had their DRM nerfed, head to the Amazon website, select Content and Devices under the Account and Lists dropdown, and choose the Books icon. Each item you’ve purchased on the platform will be listed, with several options on the right-hand side.

The bottom of these, titled More Actions, will have an option to ‘Download an ePub/PDF’ if there’s a DRM-free version available. Selecting this, in a web browser at least, opens the title so you can download it locally. However…

Our check shows that, so far, most of the available titles are those whose copyright period has expired. So H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Charles Lamb, and others have free versions. If someone’s still making money from it — The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle didn’t have the option, weirdly, while his Tales of Mystery and Terror did — it seems they’ve largely ignored the option to remove DRM.

Still, it’s early days. If publishers find the lack of DRM contributing to Amazon Kindle sales and downloads, they’ll jump on board. If not, at least their retail corporate overlords made a token effort.