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.
Finally got around to backing up my over 200 audiobooks in a DRM-free format after this post reminded me it was on my to-do list. Libation is pretty damn good.
Also to add that amazon has been caught encouraging users to “refund” e-books and purchase a different one, without telling users that these refunds are clawed back from the Authors.
Then to double fuck the Authors they didnt give authors detailed statements - only payments of the monthly total, so any “refunds” were deducted from the total sales from that month and author paid the difference. This was only noticed when an author with an accounting/finance background noticed a negative payment statement one month and looked into this and found amazon routinely charging back authors, sometimes for multiple copies of ‘refunds’ that didnt actually get refunded, straight up stealing from the Authors.
I do, I get them directly from IRC
How lol, Books are the only thing where I find it hard to … well, get a legal copy from cough
IRCHighway channel #ebooks, don’t use a web client, I won’t give you links but this should be enough to send you on your way
I looked in to the whole DRM removal thing. From what I could tell, everything was majorly out of date, required a really old version of Calibre, and didn’t work with newer books.
Edit: So, this is out of date info. There’s a fork and it works with a fairly recent version of the PC app. Basically no fuss.
The DeDrm plugin and the most recent Calibre worked for me just yesterday on a brand new book. Something that’s easy to miss is that you need to put in the serial number of your kindle device and make sure you download the e-book for that same device. Otherwise the plugin won’t be able to decrypt it.
Yep, looked it up again today and some proper information has been posted publicly in the interim since I last tried. I was able to strip the drm from a handful of my books today using it and an older version of the Kindle PC app.
This is why I only read books from the library
My wife is big on library, and I need to, but I grew up just pirating stuff, so here we are. But she has a book club, and she’ll place a request for the book, and in the event it’s not yet available, she maintains the request but I get it for her. And for me personally, when I like a book or a series, I go and snag them later. I just prefer reading in Kindle anymore.
