Kindle Is Making It Harder to Switch to Rival eReader Brands.
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Seems like everything in ebooks is currently moving to the "you don't own anything and be happy" approach.
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And PocketBook. Don't see them locking down anytime soon.
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E-paper devices with Android are usually way underpowered for the platform, easier to just use the phone for such things.
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They are allowed to do that? It's your ebooks, not their ebooks.
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Shhh he's a pirate, he has no concept of how much media costs.
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Or go for the Kobo, which is similarly priced as the Kindle. The Kobo Clara Colour is £150
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According to them you only have a license to those ebooks.
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And Amazon owns them? I would be furious as a publisher.
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It eludes me how people pay to 'buy' something that they cannot download in the first place. If I don't have it as a file on my computer, I don't own it. You wouldn't pay to 'buy' a physical item if that meant only being able to look at it at the store, without the ability to take it home and do whatever you want with it.
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And Calibre, a third party software for managing ebooks, has a plugin to crack Kindle files.
Unfortunately currently broken for the latest version of Kindle for PC, which switched to a different encryption scheme. It also uses KFX file format that nobody likes, which fortunately can be converted to EPUB with another plugin, but de-DRMing doesn't seem to work right now.
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Nice. Mines an older Clara I bought about 5 years ago. I personally don't have the use for a color screen, but for $10 I guess why not!
I installed KO Reader as soon as I got it and never looked back, it supports standard epubs. Not as pretty as the standard Nickel (?) OS but more customisable.
I love having an e-reader. I read so much more because of it. Much more convenient, not having to worry about heavy books, holding open pages, no need to worry about proper lighting for reading. Light and small enough to bring everywhere. I will buy another immediately once this one dies.
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I agree. However, some dishonest services allow to download, but downloaded file is DRM. It is even worse.
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If buying is not owning…
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C'mon United States, do the anti-trust thing! You used to be so good at it!
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Did they? There have been a few cases, sure, but in general they've not been good in this regard.
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Same. Most news sites treating this change as a "Kindle issue" is borderline disinformation. This is an "Amazon issue". Kindle the device isn't changing and there is no reason to switch if you already own one (just please don't buy a new one).
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Ok, the latter might actually be worth it. I’ll have to look into that.
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Uneducated 2 cents. afaik the publishers have some kind of “part ownership”, where they can pull it out from the store whenever. The “anti-piracy” feature you get with DRMs is why many publishers actually like them tho. The part ownership thing is just icing on the cake. So no, a good chunk of publishers won’t be furious at all. DRM gives what publishers want and more, at the expense of the consumers in a way that most wouldn’t realize.
And if anything, I think it makes more sense to think that these publishers are also just granting Amazon some kind of “license” to sell their e-books.
Amazon would absolutely be destroying their relationship with a publisher though, if they decide to block the selling or access of a book to large group of people who are would-be buyers. But, at the end of the day, publishers want to know how much they’re making from putting their e-books on Amazon, and as long as that revenue is enough to satisfy their needs, they don’t need to care too much about the odd customer who had their book revoked, and they would generally be pretty shielded from any sort of disputes as long as Amazon is making those revoking calls.
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I have a first generation kindle that I bought 16 years ago. They used to be awesome, and Amazon shaped the way ecommerce worked. The lesson here is not to be fully dependent on one supplier, not to boycott everything just because it's big.
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Most services are forced to carry DRM only versions of Ebooks. But there are ways of legally removing the DRM - it's a faff but doable. I buy epubs and don't use Kindle (haven't for a long time) as it's much harder to remove the DRM and actually own your books.
But way I look at it - if I bought the Kindle version of a book, I can just download a DRM free version by sailing the seas. Fuck Amazon.
