Books enter the public domain. Project Gutenberg and others produce DRM-free versions. Many academics and people who wish to share their knowledge also publish works DRM-free, sometimes under permissive (copyleft), licenses.

The fact you see DRM as the norm and non-DRM as “a unicorn” that “doesn’t exist”, is mildly sad. You should explore all of the above a lot more, and much more besides.

You'd be surprised. Tor and Solaris both offer DRM free books on Amazon. Also anything self published tends to be DRM free.

I saw the writing on the wall and downloaded my books from Amazon a few months before their announcement. Out of around 1000 books I had 300ish that were DRM free.

All books published by Tor are DRM-free.

It's not exactly nothing, but it's a pretty small change . Some publishers sell DRM-free on other platforms, and to be honest I was under the impression Amazon used to allow this in the past as well.

Of course if they really believed in the concept they would publish their own works DRM-free, but that would conflict with the business model of the publishing arm.

All of Cory Doctorow's books are DRM-free. Actually, he insisted on it as a contractual rider with his publisher, so he isn't available on any platform that doesn't have a DRM-free option. I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon re-allowing downloads for DRM-free is specifically because Doctorow's publisher is angry at them.

In practice, the biggest store that doesn't have a DRM-free option is Audible... which has a near-monopoly on audiobooks. So Cory Doctorow has to do crowdfunding campaigns for all his audiobooks. Of course, that doesn't stop his books from getting illegally reposted to Audible anyway, and Amazon doesn't care about enforcing rights they can't have. Which led to him actually publishing this gem on Audible: https://www.amazon.com/Why-None-Books-Available-Audible/dp/B...