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Comment by ksynwa | Hacker News Reader

The amount of DRM and locking down Amazon bolts onto its ereaders and ebook formats feels insane to me. I can understand the profit motive but god damn.

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> The amount of DRM and locking down Amazon bolts onto its ereaders and ebook formats feels insane to me. I can understand the profit motive but god damn.

I don't. I would be much happier buying ebooks without DRM and I would buy substantially more of them if they were DRM-free.

Kobo tells you when books have DRM and when they don't (at the bottom of the store page for each book). I'd recommend supporting them over Amazon any day.

Besides that, a lot of publishers who sell their own books do so without DRM by default. As does almost every book bundle hosted by Humble Bundle.

I am with you but we are a small minority. I literally don't know anyone IRL who cares about DRM. I doubt people like us factor into their decision making at all.

No, but I know people wondering why this can't play this video in 4k or why their offline downloaded videos stopped working and they get a pop-up telling them that they need to go online to re-validate them.

Yes, not many people know what DRM is but many of the effects are noticed when it ruins their experience.

I agree, however they probably assume it's their fault or something to do with this arcane black box they use but don't quite understand how it works.

For me, I bought a single DRM book against my better judgement because it was the only available way to get it quickly at the time. Predictably, I eventually lost access to it and never bought another one since.

I have never considered DRM on my Kindle, been using one for 15 years. I can buy any book on Amazon which is any book id be trying to read on this small format, and read it immediately for usually a maximum of $10. Never had want for more!

Until, one day, Amazon recalls a book you have purchased or simply folds up the Kindle service entirely (unlikely, I know, but certainly possible).

It benefits Amazon obviously, but otherwise it's a massive shame to ebooks as a whole. I was really excited about ebooks when they started, but DRM has completely stagnated the format so much that I've almost completely given up on ebooks now, and read hard copies instead unless I really want to read something and it isn't otherwise available.

What about the format is stagnant? I haven't read a physical book in roughly a decade, and haven't remotely found ebooks lacking.

And to be clear, I understand and agree with the moral objections to DRM. I think we have lost something more than just the loss of ownership and control. But while you're actually reading an ebook, none of that ever actually affects the experience.

I would love to see some more interactive fiction (like Twine) possible. Aside that though, I think formatting to me, seems constantly poor. I think you'd have a really hard time rendering something like Hope Mirles' Paris (you might need to google it!) in ebook form well.

The main formats are plenty powerful with the formatting they support. The bigger issue is that ebooks need to render on a pretty big variety of devices, and users can override typefaces and font size. So short of using a PDF to override those choices, there's not a ton that an improved format could accomplish.

Also, ebooks do support links (I see them most commonly used for linking to chapters from the table of contents, or linking to appendix notes), so you could make interactive fiction if you wanted.

I never even got into ebooks in the first place, precisely because of the DRM and "your so-called purchases can still get yoinked" problems.

You definitely had better foresight than me then! I wrote off a lot of the "your purchases might get yoinked" talk at the time as "it would never happen in reality", but have had this happen to ebooks I've bought.

It makes more sense if you think about it as something that they need to do in order to make sure that their marketplace attracts a wide range of publishing companies, some of which have very different perspectives on digital piracy, than as a way for them to retain a small percentage of revenue that DRM could theoretically protect.

You have to pay them $20 to not get served ads on the lockscreen on your device that already costs at least $100 and probably makes healthy margin like most electronic hardware. Straight up extortion fee.

Loading F-Droid onto a modern Kindle Fire is quite simple.

You can also install FFUpdater (either via F-Droid or directly) for a huge range of browsers.

What do you see as locked down?

They're referencing the e-reader line of Kindles running a custom locked down OS (Kindle Paperwhite/Basic/Scribe/Colorsoft)

Yeah, the fact that you need an exploit just to get full access to your own property is pretty ridiculous.

I never buy ebooks from amazon because they come with drm (did once, it was annoying as hell to get it removed with downloading random python scripts and having to start a windows vm, never again). It obviously can't be to stop people copying, because all the books are available for free anyway, maybe publishers stupidly ask for it, but the most likely reason is that amazon wants you to read from their devices so they can show you ads for what you haven't bought yet.

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