Amazon’s killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books
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While I don't disagree, I still think using a Kindle device is stupid.
No reason that they can't just go 'oh we didn't sell those books, we should clean up all that unauthorized content' at some point in the future.
Buy something that's not made by Amazon, even if it costs a bit more or has worse features, because well, they're not to be trusted.
(Or custom non-connected firmware if that's a thing for Kindles. Never really looked so no idea if that's a thing.)
I have both. My kindle's old and I just keep it permanently on airplane mode and sideload it.
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If only there were some way to get books to read in a format where a billionaire's trillion dollar company can't gatekeep them.
Some sort of physical product, perhaps one made out of trees?
I recommend actually listening to some authors.
The "gatekeeping" back in the days before ebooks was infinitely worse than it is now. These days? Basically anyone who can fill out a webform can publish a kindle book. And other stores aren't much harder. And those ebooks can be sold indefinitely.
Contrast that with needing to find a publisher who is willing to allocate some of their limited production time to you. And then hope that Borders et al are willing to put you on the shelf. And then realize that you are never getting another penny for that book because the first MMPB run ran out and you aren't getting a second because you didn't sell enough to justify it.
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you will own nothing & like it
/s, maybe
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The optimist in me says they're doing this to avoid piracy.
The pessimist in me says they're doing this so they can purge books because of the Trump administration.
Either way, I can't say I'm a fan.
The optimist in me says they’re doing this to avoid piracy.
Won’t pirates just buy their source copies on a different platform, so now Amazon loses the original sale as well?
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It's the old bait and switch, they had to have this feature to build initial trust in ebooks.
... a 17 year bait and switch (or however long Kindles have been around for)?
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The optimist in me says they’re doing this to avoid piracy.
Won’t pirates just buy their source copies on a different platform, so now Amazon loses the original sale as well?
The "original sale" in that case is not even pennies. So... not sure why amazon would care?
Also: Many smaller authors basically depend on kindle because of the ease of use of the web portal and incentives to do larger discounts for their audiences. One of my favorite guilty pleasures has talked about exactly this (although he IS investigating alternatives).
And, much like with video games: The Sandersons of the world will be pirated. MAYBE a Dalglish will be too. But nobody cares enough to go after a Samphire or Shel.
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I know I switched ages ago but I've never managed to port my existing library of ebooks off the kindle
Do you want help?
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I noticed this feature wasn’t available for my Colorsoft and asked support about it. They assured me it would be added later. This is exactly what I expected to happen.
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If only there were some way to get books to read in a format where a billionaire's trillion dollar company can't gatekeep them.
Some sort of physical product, perhaps one made out of trees?
Amazon will come into your house to take your digital copies of books you paid for (e.g. when they did that with 1984). No reason to think they wouldn't take physical books after they've violated your digital sovereignty - it is only a question of if that were to ever become a viable option for them.
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I'm glad I started converting all my amazon books long ago. When I finally got a Kobo last month, there were no issues since the work was done.
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... a 17 year bait and switch (or however long Kindles have been around for)?
Amazon spent 20 years being unprofitable on purpose. You think they don't have long term strategies?
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Amazon spent 20 years being unprofitable on purpose. You think they don't have long term strategies?
Profitability as reported by companies, especially tech companies, is complex. Also understand that most of that 20 years (assuming that is an accurate statement) was the era of venture capitalism and infinite funding.
But yes. Amazon did spend decades inventing and taking over e-commerce.
But that is not what you described. You described a "bait and switch" which implies that they designed the old keyboard kindles with built in wikipedia support as some long con to get around the eventual invention of a de-drm plugin for the eventually invented Calibre library manager.
The reality is that this is just a case of locking down walled gardens to take advantage of market share. Everyone is doing it. It isn't some deep conspiracy and is more just the logical end result of a walled garden with large market share.
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Do you want help?
It's been a while since I tried it but from memory I had managed to extract the device keys from my kindle for DeDRM and then it wouldn't decrypt the files with them
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Reminder that piracy is a service issue.
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That is no different than Kobo. Thus far, Rakuten have been pretty good about not caring more than the bare minimum. But there is nothing stopping them from doing the same bullshit with firmware updates to the kobos and drm updates to the store and apps.
I am finally migrating from kindle to kobo (tried kindle to boox last year and it was bad...) but I am under no illusions that I am just hoping one company is better than another. I mean, the other is Amazon so it is a pretty safe bet. But still.
Just dont update and keep it off the internet I guess
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That is no different than Kobo. Thus far, Rakuten have been pretty good about not caring more than the bare minimum. But there is nothing stopping them from doing the same bullshit with firmware updates to the kobos and drm updates to the store and apps.
I am finally migrating from kindle to kobo (tried kindle to boox last year and it was bad...) but I am under no illusions that I am just hoping one company is better than another. I mean, the other is Amazon so it is a pretty safe bet. But still.
Well there's a key difference, Kobo allows epub. I don't think they could legally remove it from devices already on the market?
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It's been a while since I tried it but from memory I had managed to extract the device keys from my kindle for DeDRM and then it wouldn't decrypt the files with them
I did it a little while ago. Was very easy. Download books with kindle app, load them into Calibre and use a one click plugin to strip the DRM. I think this was the step-by-step I used.
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Absurd. Glad I have a Kobo.
I switched to Kobo a few years and couldn't be happier. I hated supporting Amazon.
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Well there's a key difference, Kobo allows epub. I don't think they could legally remove it from devices already on the market?
And Kindle supports mobi files? It is just that those tend to get preprocessed into azw or the other one files. Much like Kobo tends to work best if you preprocess those epubs into kepubs.
The issue is that Amazon has repeatedly changed their mobi variants to fight against de-drm tools as well as increasingly locking down their apps and even devices to make it harder to get data off (and now on) to them.
There is absolutely nothing stopping Rakuten from doing the exact same with Kobo. And people should be aware of that rather than just stanning their favorite company.
