The latest format is to my knowledge currently unbroken - even with suitable plugins. So only way around is to get an old kindle which doesn’t support the new encryption and thus falls back on the old encryption
At the end of the day, as long as the decryption is protected by a key that is held somewhere on the Kindle device, hackers will find a way of exposing that key.
I'm really not comfortable that my license of reading could be revoked. Or if the company somehow died, or if the kindle program is terminated, or if the relationships with the publisher deteriorate, my content will vanish.
I gained this anxiety when Netflix pulled away "House M.D.", which I binged watched until just before Season 8. Life became busy and I had to stop. When I came back, eagerly wanting to watch the last season, it was already gone from the catalogue.
TV shows, I can forego; book collections I cannot.
When one day I no longer reside in a small apartment, I'll probably go back to buying physical copies.
To be clear Netflix didn't pull House, NBC Universal pulled it from Netflix and sold it to Amazon Prime. It's likely it will get pulled from Amazon Prime and end up on Peacock.
Being able to read on my phone or a featherlight e-reader is absolutely fantastic. Before that, easily more than half of my vacation luggage was books. I don't need to lug around a tome everywhere just so I can read on the subway. That's worth a lot to me.
One of my dream is to have a old-school style study, with no computer, some giant book shelves and a music stand.
Considering everyone got their money, it's unethical to have any DRM on the book at that point.
Edit: personally, I don't like to be told how I should compute so I reserve the right to do what I want with bits (state of my sillicon) I have. Regarding IP of the content: I make sure not to distribute things I'm not licensed to distribute.
Your's is a fair statement of our state of affairs. All these content distributors rely on increasingly complex models of distributions that rely on people's lack of willingness (or ability) to comprehend what they are buying.
> Upon your download or access of Kindle Content and payment of any applicable fees (including applicable taxes), the Content Provider grants you a non-exclusive right to view, use, and display such Kindle Content an unlimited number of times (for Subscription Content, only as long as you remain an active member of the underlying membership or subscription program), solely through a Kindle Application or as otherwise permitted as part of the Service, solely on the number of Supported Devices specified in the Kindle Store, and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider.
It's clickwrapped, of course. No doubt the argument would be that, whether you read this or not, you agreed to it as a legally binding contract when you "bought" a Kindle book.
I'd like to see it really tested in court, but I don't expect to. For that to happen would probably take a very high incidence of people's accounts and/or access to paid content being revoked for no reason, and as far as I know that doesn't happen anywhere near often enough to make it an issue under public consideration - not that it's other than wrong either way, but I would be surprised to see Amazon legal permit a tactical blunder that would risk the company being hauled into court and forced to behave as if they thought their customers deserved fair consideration.
And you should have that. As for the rest of us out here, we should have the option to back our books up.
If you want to go the dedrm way It has been answered a little further down the thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24272631
Edit: link to the dedrm post.