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YSK: You don't own your Kindle e-books.(www.nbcnews.com)

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Boozilla@lemmy.worldM
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youshouldknow@lemmy.world
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This is not an anti-Kindle rant. I have purchased (rented?) several Kindle titles myself.

However, YSK that you are only licensing access to the book from Amazon, you don’t own it like a physical book.

There have been cases where Amazon deletes a title from all devices. (Ironically, one version of “1984” was one such title).

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html

There have also been cases where a customer violated Amazon’s terms of service and lost access to all of their Kindle e-books. Amazon has all the power in this relationship. They can and do change the rules on us lowly peasants from time to time.

Here are the terms of use:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201014950

Note, there are indeed ways to download your books and import them into something like Calibre (and remove the DRM from the books). If you do some web searches (and/or search YouTube) you can probably figure it out.

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GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org
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Another problem with DRM’d platforms is that you don’t really know how long this will be easy or even viable. I recall these tools breaking in the past as Amazon changed their encryption, and it took time for them to be updated.

For anyone with a large library on Kindle, Audible, or any other DRM-infested platform, I recommend stripping that DRM sooner rather than later. You might think “I can always do it later” but there’s no guarantee that will be true.

Also, shoutout to ebooks.com for having a dedicated DRM-free section and a simple checkbox to filter search results to only show DRM-free items. Not sure where to go for DRM-free audiobooks though. Anyone got suggestions? Personally I will simply not buy books with DRM, regardless of how easy it might be to crack it. If I’m going to have to break the law anyway (thanks, DMCA!), I might as well pirate it and find some other way to toss the author a few bucks.

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localme@lemm.ee
9 points

I use downpour.com for drm-free audiobooks. They let you straight up download the mb4 files haha it’s awesome.

It’s such a win-win b/c I get to buy audiobooks drm-free and I get to avoid supporting audible which has terrible business practices such as locking authors in exclusive deals.

Also thanks for the ebooks.com recommendation! I was reading this thread specifically to see if anyone knew of a good place online to buy drm-free ebooks :)

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boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
8 points

You can get Audiobooks from Spotify using the app Soundbound. You need to insert a list of plugins, then it works.

Apart from that, youtube? Or sailing the high seas?

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