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Comment by gorwell | Hacker News Reader

This is why I've stopped buying books on kindle. It gives Amazon the power to censor your book library, and it would not surprise me at all if we see them exercise that power soon.

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They already have, when they remotely deleted copies of 1984, IIRC whose copyright had expired in one country, but not in another.

I assume OP was implying censorship because of political views

I remember reading about that when it happened. Of all the books to do it to, it had to be that one.

They really couldn't have picked a better book to do that with.

Fahrenheit 451?

Especially given the name of the device...

Ah yes, good one. That would have been an even better choice.

I personally find a rip of the book online to drop onto my reMarkable then purchase it through some ebook marketplace. Now I have a DRM-free copy and the author gets their cut.

That's certainly noble, but it doesn't send the message that you're unhappy with DRM. You're ultimately engaging in piracy and at the same time not voting with your wallet.

I don't see any alternative, but just wanted to make that point.

Steal the content and Venmo the creator?

The publishers won't be too happy with creators who are seen to be accepting money bypassing their cut.

But the content creator will be happy with me. And the publishers can get fuct. As nature intended.

Too many authors are exclusively on Amazon. Where am I supposed to buy their book :(

https://github.com/apprenticeharper/DeDRM_tools works pretty well once setup. Allegedly...

The people imposing DRM don't care whether anybody is unhappy about it. To them, the only unhappy people are frustrated thieves.

Eh, not really trying to make a point personally. Just want to read books on my reMarkable or whatever I want, really.

Yeah, it wasn't a dig. Just highlighting how these companies have you over a barrel.

Whenever I buy an ebook I go through the painful process of downloading it to my laptop either directly from the store (e.g. Kobo) or via Calibre [0] if I bought it from Amazon which I try to avoid, removing DRM via some tool I found somewhere and uploading it to the ebook again via Calibre. It's annoying an probably illegal but no one can take my ebooks away that way.

[0] https://calibre-ebook.com/

Me too. Just to be sure I've also put my Kindle on Airplane mode as soon as I got it. It has been working like this for years.

Wait, you can convert Amazon’s format to something DRM free?

It's text, even the best DRM would be foiled by OCR. It's definitely illegal in the US though.

True, but flipping through the book to copy all pages is too much effort to copy the file to my remarkable instead.

I'm pretty sure the kindle DRM is broken easier than that, DeDRM came up on my quick search, but flipping through the book to copy all the pages is an easily scriptable task.

You can remove the DRM, no need to do any OCR shenanigans. But yes, it's of course illegal but I've paid for the book so I don't really care.

They have pulled books before I believe. However there are many good drm free ebooks. I still use a Kindle because I like the device but I keep it in airplane mode nearly all the time and copies of drm free books on my pc. Edit: I manage my library with calibre and the device plugged in. You never have to take it off airplane and it gets better battery life.

Amazon banned me (for something completely unrelated to Kindle books), and I lost access to everything on Kindle as a result. It's a good thing I hadn't spent much money there, and obviously I'm not buying any ebooks going forward.

Buy ebooks from Baen directly, or from Tor on your service of choice. These publishers release books DRM free, so you actually own the file. Any other ebooks you “buy”, you’re renting.

Alternatively if it's not available DRM free I'll just buy it and support the author from wherever and then pirate a DRM free copy and archive it.

I actually really don’t care about kindle because it’s only useful for certain formats I tend not to keep anyway and is a lot more convenient and cheaper than hunting down physical copies of stuff.

I originally had over 200 books, all read, gathering dust so I gave them away. They took up space and attention and were a pain in the ass when I had to move house.

As for the convenience, I do a lot of hiking and it’s not much fun dragging two books from the expanse series with you versus a kindle in a ziplock bag.

I have physical copies and PDFs for technical books and reference material though. And a lot of text files.

I discovered the other day that 80% of the music I've ever bought from them is just gone now

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