• Kindle ebooks are now available DRM-free
• This means you can read them on other ereaders
• But publishers and authors need to opt in first

Kindle ebooks have a lot going for them – there’s a vast selection of them on the Amazon Kindle store, and you can read them on some of the best ereaders, but they also have a major issue in the form of DRM (digital rights management).

This means that Kindle books can only be read on Kindle devices or the Kindle app. So if you have other brands of ereader that you’d like to read on, or devices that lack the Kindle app, you’re out of luck. But that might be about to change.

Amazon has now rolled out a DRM-free option for ebooks, allowing authors and publishers to choose whether they want to apply this DRM or not. For any books that don’t have DRM, you’ll find the option to download an EPUB or PDF version under the ‘More Actions’ dropdown in the ‘Digital Content’ section of your Amazon account.

These formats are far more widely supported, allowing you to read your books on almost any device that supports ebooks or documents. So this is great to see, and could mean you’re less locked in to a single ecosystem.

A good feature that publishers might not use

But there’s a catch. Well, actually there are two catches, but the biggest one is that this being voluntary, we might not see many publishers choose to remove DRM – since doing so also makes it easier for people to pirate the books.

Indeed, as Goodereader notes, no major publishers yet seem to offer DRM-free Kindle books. That might change – after all the feature has only just launched, but it also might not. So you’re probably more likely to see this option from small publishers and self-published works.

The other catch is that there doesn’t currently seem to be a way to tell whether a book is available without DRM until you’ve purchased it, so you can’t really make purchasing decisions based on this feature. That seems like it would be an easy fix for Amazon, though it may not be something that company wants to do.

In other words then, this DRM-free option very much seems like a ‘wait and see’ feature – it has game-changing potential, but unless or until it’s widely embraced its usefulness will be limited.

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James is a freelance phones, tablets and wearables writer and sub-editor at TechRadar. He has a love for everything ‘smart’, from watches to lights, and can often be found arguing with AI assistants or drowning in the latest apps. James also contributes to 3G.co.uk, 4G.co.uk and 5G.co.uk and has written for T3, Digital Camera World, Clarity Media and others, with work on the web, in print and on TV.