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Comment by fullstop | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, this is my feeling on the matter. I definitely buy books from the Kindle store as it is convenient and the author(s) get paid. If Amazon decides to mess around with my licenses or take books away, I will just take to the high seas to replace them.

In the mean time, though, I do feel like I'm doing the "right thing".

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You're not doing the right thing if you're helping to enforce DRM. This removes power from both authors and readers to Amazon's benefit. If you want to do the right thing, buy a physical book and then pirate the ebook.

I don't want a physical object, though. With the way I'm doing it the author receives payment and I get to read their book without having to find space on a bookshelf or carry a bunch of bulky books with me while I travel.

Clearly there are already ways to remove the DRM, and the lifespan of a Kindle is decades so they will not easily be able to add new DRM to the old hardware.

In my opinion, it's roughly analogous to Steam but it moves at a glacial pace.

They're slowly closing DRM loopholes and getting rid of old hardware. Older versions of Kindle for PC that allow you to remove DRM won't let you download books published after Jan. 3rd 2023, they won't let you use the download and transfer feature to download Kindle Unlimited books any more either. They've given 1st gen Kindle owners/users new hardware, offered discounts to 2nd Gen owners, etc.

I'm genuinely curious as to why Amazon Kindle DRM seems to be so difficult. Whenever I look at the current state of affairs to try and backup my book collection, I find a lot of howtos on how to do it, all of them broken, with people discussing when such-and-such update broke it etc. And on the other hand, deDRMing and backing up stuff from Amazon Video is trivial with e.g. StreamFab. You'd expect it to be the other way around.

Amazon doesn't have control of all of the devices which support Amazon Video.

The revenue gained from those devices is likely greater than the revenue lost from people pirating content who would actually pay for it.

They don't have control of all the devices that support Kindle books either. Right now you can read them in a web browser, Android, iOS, Mac and Windows.

They control the software for those platforms, and it can be updated.

There are blu-ray players which support Amazon video and they can not be updated by Amazon.

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