Amazon's killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books
theverge.com
theverge.com
I bring this up to mention how incredibly easy it is to sideload books into a Kindle (an old one at least; can't speak to the new ones).
If that comes together I assume it'll use the standard adobe system and people can free their copies?
Lol of course it is, you just convinced yourself that stealing was a better option.
Get on with Amazon support and tell them that you’ve been a loyal customer for a decade and have a Kindle that no longer authenticates but want to continue buying books from them.
If they don’t offer you a free Kindle, tell them you want one for free. I’ve done this a few times successfully when a Kindle broke outside of the warranty period.
The save-the-environment ship has sailed. It’s not even a point worth engaging with. You really think that if every kindle ever made would magically last forever that the environment still wouldn’t be fucked beyond belief?
We can all of us individually, and all of us collectively, do better.
You are quite literally the problem.
I don’t eat meat, I live in a small apartment, I don’t drive, I don’t fly, I don’t have kids. I buy crap I don’t need though.
I’ll put myself up against nearly anyone else in the developed world as far as carbon footprint goes.
We, as consumers, have a right to be mad about this stuff... this is why we have the Consumer Protection Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission.
Yea this is dumb advice. Are you a stock holder?
Yes you are. This is how it worked for nearly all of history. Its the entire point of the right to repair movement, to prevent companies from this scummy model of demanding a subscription for everything and trying to stop people from owning anything. Buying a Kindle over and over again benefits no one but Amazon and their stock holders. Its even more disgusting that the OP's Kindle broke because Amazon broke it on purpose.
I don’t see you saying this about how we used to die if we got an infection.
Times change.
> Buying a Kindle over and over again benefits no one but Amazon and their stock holders.
It benefits me! The kindle I bought last year is many times more enjoyable to use than the one I bought a decade ago.
I know you're trolling, but in what way? Ebooks were always light, the only meaningful innovations have been sort of having color, getting bigger, and a stylus. Those are legitimate reasons to upgrades, everything else is software that could be updated.
>Times change.
People being in abusive relationships and thinking its good for them have existed forever. See how I didn't bring up something completely irrelevant to the conversation to make a point.
No, I am not trolling.
It is faster to turn pages, it has more storage, the screen is better, it has a light. If you want to include the scribe, it has a much bigger screen and I can write/draw on it.
It’s like your computer or phone. Would you really be thrilled to be using the 2015 version of those things today?
For the longest time the rumor was that backward compatibility was mandated (through certificate gymnastics) by Jeff because Mackenzie had a 1st gen Kindle that she adored. I reckon nobody any longer gives a shit about that.
The people censoring books with “inappropriate language” have no understanding of precedent, history, or art. 1/100th as talented as the authors whose work they “update”. Their life’s greatest accomplishment is making something actually impressive slightly worse.
Coincidentally I was already looking at a Kobo Libra Color or a Supernote Nomad, this just sealed that decision.
Oh you just wanted to change the deal and turn a book sale into a prepaid rent you can cancel or modify to maximise profits? Get fucked Amazon! Such short sighted greed will drive readers to put in the effort and actively search out pirated content instead of paying exorbitant unearned margins to you. That's how you sustain a pirate community you damn fools.
The hardware is good. I have a Libra Colour, which works great. Good screen, waterproof, nice hardware buttons to page-scroll one-handed, a good bezel to hold onto. No complaints from me about it.
I haven't read and completed so many books since I was a kid with unlimited free time. The color is perfectly fine for books that are mostly text with the occasional image. Sadly I just feel like I'd be missing out if I started putting color manga, books with a focus on photography, etc. Those still go to my iPad pro but I find it a lot less convenient to read on there.
https://www.reddit.com/r/kobo/comments/169djct/kobo_bookstor...
Nothing malicious. I just can't read books arbitrarily in a 21 day period.
In order to download and transfer Kindle books from the Library, I have to first add them to "My Content" on Amazon, then from the Amazon interface click "Download & Transfer via USB". That's the only way to access the AZW3 files that get moved over to the Kindle.
Either I'm missing something more obvious or the system I've seen libraries use for digital books over the past 10 years is more uncommon than I realized.
In order to download and transfer Kindle books from the Library, I have to first add them to "My Content" on Amazon, then from the Amazon interface click "Download & Transfer via USB". That's the only way to access the AZW3 files that get moved over to the Kindle.
Epub can be downloaded directly from the library, but these have to be converted into a Kindle compatible format. I'm also unsure if every digital book copy has Epub as a format, since there are some digital copies that don't have Kindle format.
This has been true of all public digital libraries I've used in the past 10 years (Houston, Arlington, Fort Worth)
Now I regret how much control Amazon has over a substantial number of books I paid for, though.
I don't know if that matters to them, or if it even registers tbh, but I think I'm like most people in that regard: I'm not going to struggle to send feedback to a megacorp, I'm just gone.
Very small vote with my wallet, but something.
If you enjoyed the book buy a hard copy for a friend, relative, book club, etc from a local book store. Amazon doesn't need your money anymore.
Where can I buy ebooks (epub) that give me access to download the file so that I can copy it to my other devices and keep it on my own backups and organize it in my digital library the way I want to? I want a good selection of anime / manga / sci-fi, and a little bit of the typical best seller stuff.
Read it on my kindle after removing the DRM and sent it via amazon.com/sendtokindle
Like you, I insist on having the ability to archive and backup my media, and the second I learned that Amazon was removing that ability I was done with them.
Also just to echo what others have said, I'm of the belief that once you pay for a book/game/etc... as long as you're the only one using it, the rest is free game. Pirate away after you buy a copy and I don't think there's an ethical problem there.
Humble Bundles (if you get lucky and find a good one) are also usually just DRM-free files in a zip archive. I've seen more sci-fi bundles lately (e.g., they had bundles of the complete works of John Scalzi, V.E. Schwab, and Ursula K LeGuin last year), and I think they usually have some anime bundle on offer.
Kobo is also a pretty complete bookstore, and they tend to match a lot of the "1.99 ebook today only!" sales that Amazon runs. I do most of my reading on one of their devices becaus you can sync PDFs/ePubs (via a USB cable or Dropbox) and log in directly to Pocket (for web pages) and OverDrive (for library books).
I saw Bookshop.org also sells ebooks, but their marketing copy ("read right in your web browser, or download our iPhone or Android apps for the full reading experience") makes it sound like they built a closed platform and don't sell files.
Also true of smut! Chuck Tingle recently signed with Tor, but I believe all of his earlier books (including classics like Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt) are Kindle-only. Same for niche favorites like C.M. Nascosta
I'm happy to spend more money on that than using Amazon or any other big corp. They are heavily subsidized and in the long rung destroy people community and the world in general.
Personally I'm glad to pay for a book later if author provides alternate method for payment. But to pay for the book just to flip trough it and decide it's not for me is not worth it.
That isn’t fair, and also not how economic transactions work. If everyone did this, we would not have the majority of enjoyable things.
when I was younger I pirated all my OS X software because I couldn't afford it. That machine broke some years back (2021-ish) and I was on Windows for a while, but after I got a job I bought a Mac again and dropped probably over $500 on copies of all the software that I had once pirated.
I don't know how you think commerce works, but without piracy, a lot of this software I wouldn't even know exists, and certainly wouldn't have gotten my money, because I wouldn't have known at all which of it was worth buying to me. Sorry though for hurting all those authors by (eventually) giving them money.
I throw money around a lot more now though, I tend to just buy something and try it and only ask for a refund if it's really useless (like was a macOS app called Vivid that ruined video playback; Lunar works much better).
I personally don't think there's anything wrong with not compensating for a good that you can't use. Then you're not using the good without compensation because you're just not using the good. Books are a funny concept because people consider reading it to be using the good.
If I read a book and there's absolutely nothing I can gleam from it and I just hate it, why should I pay for it? Is it the experience of having those words thrown at me that I'm paying for? If yes, did you know some movie theater tickets are refundable if you didn't like the movie after watching it? I think mostly in Canada. Look it up, it's a real thing. Are those theaters implementing commerce incorrectly?
I'm all for also buying books, but my local library has all the books too, so it is sort of how the commerce of books works (at least where I live).
Also if people are still buying ebooks or kindles from Amazon after the whole 1984 fiasco I doubt they're going to care about downloads.
"Nobody makes money from books" - https://malwarwick-98471.medium.com/nobody-makes-money-from-...
Exceptions and wildly successful authors are just the exceptions that confirm the status quo.
Digital piracy has been around for decades, naturally. The primary thing that computers do is copy data (you download a book, that's a copy on your hard drive. You read it, you've now copied it to RAM and to your graphical display. You sync it to another device, that's another several copies, etc). It will never be stopped
I’d rather just pay to read books from Amazon right on my Kindle than go through the rigamarole of pirating all my epubs and PDFs.
In 16 years of Kindle ownership I’ve never once been like dang I wish I had an offline backup of that.
Consider someone who goes to the library, reads books, and then only buys them if they like them.
There is no meaningful moral difference between this and so called "piracy" + buying later.
Please, buy books and support authors. But also, don't pooh-pooh the entire point of the existence of libraries.
Please check out a book from a library instead of pirating it; it's much better for the author and your community!
but I also completely get why people don't
It's just SUCH AN ARTIFICIALLY STUPID process, basically actively engineering the technology to work worse than "by default." As in, it's literally more difficult to do this lending thing than to just dump the books on the device and have them all there forever with their essentially infinite storage space.
True, but you could say the same of music streaming platforms, but we're still experimenting with ways to make that work. In both cases, the platform is trying to replicate via policy what was previously an inherent limitation of physical media, and different offerings have made competing choices about what limitations are critical to the business model and which can be let go of.
I personally see a lot more promise in the model where libraries use a policy to enforce a loan period but pay per-checkout royalties instead of trying to recreate wear and tear like Libby/OverDrive does. It makes it more feasible for small libraries to have an "infinite catalog" of ebooks, and authors seem to like it better: https://bsky.app/profile/premeemohamed.com/post/3liafq4gsoc2...
1. Not remotely ok but we understand that contracts expire somehow and "purchase" is not a legal term any more.
2. Wait, what? When would this be useful to the corporation? Is Jeff gearing up for more censorship like he does at WaPo?
He already tried in the past:
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18am...