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Whenever someone invokes the "terms of service" I just get annoyed. I live in the US where we have absolutely no consumer rights and every company can put anything they want in the ToS or EULA, and if it violates the law they aren't punished (such as illegal warranty restrictions). Most EULAs even have a clause that says something like "if any part of this contract is illegal, ignore it and the rest is still enforced". If companies can put anything they want into it and aren't punished for breaking the law, it's 100% up to consumers to ignore the ToS and ignore the EULA as much as possible.

And if you're really paying for a limited license to use their property, they should have to call it that. Amazon calls it a "store" where you "buy" the books. They'd make a lot less sales if the "buy now with 1 click" button said "purchase a limited license to access this book for some period of time".

I agree with your points here, but this seems like a two-wrongs-make-a-right type of argument. Basically, companies (like Amazon) don't have to honor their agreements, so neither do I.

I agree that's a fair standard, but it does feel a little ... suboptimal to say "I can and will lie because I expect that they are lying."

It actually does not sound like that argument - that sounds like an argument you are making up.

The argument is, "I have no meaningful choice in the terms that I agree to, hence my agreement to those terms cannot be freely given. But I do have choice in whether to follow those terms and a means by which to operate outside of them. So I will ignore the terms that I find unnecessarily restrictive (subject to assessment of risk) and that may be the only actual influence I can exert in the situation."

> because I expect that they are lying

because I /KNOW/ that they are lying

Can you cite an example of one of the lies that you know about?

If not, then you can't KNOW they are lying any more than all the religious people who claim they KNOW that their church is true (which they all can't be, since they have contradictory beliefs).

Unless you've read The terms for the thing you are agreeing to, and have identified contradictions (lies) for which you have hard evidence to the contrary, you don't KNOW. This must be done for every company that you agree to, not just a single one. If we know that person a killed someone because we have it on camera and proved it in court, that obviously does not mean that an unrelated person b is also guilty of murder.

Short of that, you don't KNOW, you just expect.

Apologies, I didn't intend to lecture on this, it just touched a nerve I have with the overuse of the word know, and the negative effect that has had on science. Also maddening to be debating religion and have the person claim to know something that they clearly don't, such as that God exists and/or that he loves us, etc. The correct word they need is "believe"

The devil doesn't need an advocate. You think he's running low on lawyers?

But I agree with you about buying from Amazon. I haven't bought an ebook from them in at least many years, perhaps not ever that I remember. I've never owned a Kindle and I'm not sure I could even load one of their books on my Kobo (or the Nook I owned way back when). I buy most of my books from Kobo's store, but also check out a lot from my library via Libby. I recently bought a bundle of Cory Doctorow's books from Tor (through Humble Bundle), and I downloaded plenty from Standard Ebooks.

If there's a book I'd like to read that's only available from Amazon, I haven't stumbled across it yet.

Civil disobedience can be valuable. TOS are often FOS

There's a reason it's important ethics and humanities are mandatory parts of education. Without them people end up blindly following whatever rules the powers that be have set.

> Google Play Books are basically the same as Kobo, but they don't state up-front if a book has DRM or not.

they absolutely do. https://i.imgur.com/VA3G54Z.png

Very nice, I'm beginning to have a very high opinion of Google Play Books. The fact that I can upload my own epubs and use their product with them like first-class content is really damn cool. I didn't know about this aspect, but this makes a major difference to me. Thank you!

You can do that with Kindle as well...?

I've been boycotting Kindle for quite a few years now, so I genuinely don't know what that experience is like now. At least the last time I used it though, there was a pretty clear difference between my epubs and Kindle-provided content in the way the UI treated it and the user experience when consuming it. Are they fairly equivalent experiences now?

> Are they fairly equivalent experiences now?

Yeah. It’s been improving slowly for a while but it did seem to pick up just before they announced the scribe. Uploading your own documents to be able to mark them up is a key differentiation and it would have been panned if that wasn’t synced

I use the Android phone app for Kindle. Sending an ePub to it using the Windows "Send to Kindle" program[0] is really easy, and I don't notice any different user experience in the phone app when I pull up my library.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/sendtokindle/pc

Self-published author here—I agree with these points and I hate DRM myself.

I write DRM free books and I publish them on Amazon for the Kindle. Since they ask authors, I presume they share the DRM status too, although maybe not as prominently.

I recently decided to buy another Kindle. I prefer paper books but I’m running low on space. When I looked at my library I realized the Kindle app has faithfully kept a list of all the Kindle books I’ve read over the years. I was surprised to find a pretty good collection of books in my library. So, it feels relatively evergreen at this point.

Most recently I purchased a Kindle tablet with a stylus to save myself from the collection of paper notebooks I’m starting to collect. You can read more about how I take handwritten notes on the Kindle in the post below.

https://notes.joeldare.com/notes-on-the-amazon-fire-max-11

I would certainly consider other options but Amazon is making it convenient for me and they make a decent product at a pretty good price. Maybe one day I’ll give the other players a try but for now I’m okay with the limitations of Amazon’s ecosystem.

Amazon will put DRM on a "DRM-free" book if it's using their new format KFX.

Yeah I know somebody who has been buying kindle books for years planning to remove the DRM at some point, but it's never a great time. It finally was a good time for it and he discovered that he no longer can (even though his proof-of-concept test years ago worked fine). I would be beyond irritated if I had to isolate my Kindle from the internet and hope a vulerability is found that I'm capable of using, just for the chance to liberate books I purchased.

This makes sense, but what happens when the new Kindle sucks and you want to switch to the new super cool $startup e-reader? Can't take any of your books with you, so you have to hope that Amazon write an app for your new platform and that that app doesn't suck. So you're essentially trading long-term/future capabilities for a better short-term user experience. That might be worth it, after all it's hard to predict what will happen in the future. But I don't want to worry that someday I might not like the new Kindle and mine breaks, and I want to switch platforms and lose access to my whole library.

Are you able to save/export your own notes to PDF or something? (genuinely asking) I would be maniacal if I lost my handwritten notes to that! (I love my Remarkable tablet for it's ability to easily upload notes as PDFs to Google Drive).

I don't know how you feel about privacy, but behind that reading history data that you can see is details about exactly which pages you read, when you read them, where you read them, how long you were on the page, anything you happened to touch there, and more. Have you read any books that you would be embarrassed to admit to publicly? I have never had to worry that my paper book was spying on me, nor the epub version of the book.

>Can I ask you to consider buying your ebooks from a better vendor? Kobo is a good choice; they state whether or not a given book is DRM-free or not

Amazon also does state when a book is DRM-free, but you might have missed it as it's not clear.

Kindle Books that are DRM free will show "Simultaneous device usage : Unlimited" in the "Product details" section.

Books with DRM will either not list this if they have the default DRM device limit of 6, or will list a specific number if the book has a specific limit set by the publisher (usually expensive textbooks).

Example of DRM-free book:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B088P9Q6BB#detailBullets_feature_d...

Example of book with DRM (default limit of 6 devices):

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B7NPRY8#detailBullets_feature_d...

Example of book with DRM (publisher-set limit of 3 devices):

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00UGE1DGA#detailBullets_feature_d...

> In effect, you're lying to Amazon in order to use their property in a way they specifically don't want you to.

Well they aren't their property in the first place. Amazon is just the middleman who facilitate the exchange of goods/services.