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Comment by TuringNYC | Hacker News Reader

I realize we're talking about music and google here, but i'm curious how people feel about Audible and Kindle? I made a fairly large bet on Audble+Kindle because we ran out of space in our home for books (as well as the portability.) Our entire library is now on Kindle with elaborate notes -- how big a risk do you think this is?

(to compare risks, btw, in the past my past home got majorly flooded (Hurricane Sandy) and we also lost all our books+music cassettes in 1992 during the Nor'Easter...so it isnt like any option is w/o risks though of course there are levels of risk and levels of damage)

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At least with Kindle books, you can run them through DeDRM and back up the DRM-free files. With Audible audiobooks, I’m not aware of a method other than to play them back and record the audio in real time.

Good point, though with the YouTube-dl DMCA takedown recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911), I wouldnt be surprised if DeDRM type utilities also get taken down soon.

OpenAudible works to remove the DRM on Audible books. Worst case, grab the CD versions from your library and rip them yourself.

It’s a shame about the notes on Kindle, I don’t think those are something you can back up / transfer. Really makes me wish that the open source alternatives had the same level of polish and feature set.

Kindle and even PC downloadable games fall into the same category. You stand to lose your license to access if the service shuts down but at least you have binaries or files that could be reversed. It’s becoming harder though, considering how much effort RDR2 took to crack.

I (mostly) only buy DRM free books,and I'm happily reading them on my ancient Sony reader which has neither a touchscreen nor wifi. Baen has a fantastic collection of DRM free content you can buy directly from them. All the Tor books are available from your favorite bookseller without DRM.

I use a Kindle, but always buy books from sources that also offer epub and PDF in addition to Kindle formats, unless the only digital alternative is on Amazon as some editors are very keen on Kindle DRM.

For my eyes e-ink devices are the best to read on, just like paper.

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