The DRM-Free Starter Library
Twenty-eight genuinely good books you can own outright, where to find thousands more, and how to get them into any reader you like. A short EPUB and PDF, free, from the people who make Velo.
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Your library is ready
Both formats hold the same content. EPUB reflows to your screen and opens in Apple Books, Kobo, Calibre or Velo. PDF is fixed-layout and prints cleanly.
A copy is on its way to your inbox as well.
What's inside
- The shelf. Twenty-eight public-domain books, each with a one-line reason to read it and a direct link to a properly typeset free edition: Meditations, Middlemarch, Frankenstein, The Great Gatsby, Dubliners, Crime and Punishment, The Souls of Black Folk, and more, grouped by mood rather than by century.
- Where the next three hundred come from. The free archives, the stores that sell DRM-free, and the publishers who ship without DRM by default, so you never have to check per title.
- How to tell before you buy. Five rules that separate "you own a file" from "you licensed access to an app".
- Getting a book into your reader. iPhone, iPad, Mac, Kobo, Calibre. Any reader, not just ours.
Why we made it
Velo reads the EPUBs and PDFs you own. The most common question we get is some version of "fine, but where do I get books that aren't locked to Kindle?" The long answer is our guide to finding DRM-free ebooks. The short answer is this shelf: a place to start that is good enough to keep.
Everything in it works in whatever reader you already use. If you want to read the shelf in an app built around books you own, with RSVP for the dense ones, Velo is free on the App Store and includes a public-domain library of its own. Either way, the books are yours.