Any words like "Buy", "Purchase", "Own", etc should be absolutely banned. They should be forced to to use verbs like "Rent". Saying you're purchasing a license is better than saying you're purchasing the book, but if it's not a perpetual license, they should be required to specify the duration (or, if indefinite but revocable, it should be so stated).
Things like:
- "Rent for 1 week"
- "$2.99 to borrow for a month"
- "Rent for as long as we decide to allow"
I also think if the marketing materials explicitly disagree with the terms within a clickwrap license agreement, the marketing materials should be binding.
…which is funny when large companies do it, because major software vendors expect they’ll only ever negotiate a non-perpetual, non-transferable license but in exchange they get major product updates for free so long as they pay-up (e.g. Microsoft’s “Software Assurance”) - whereas some companies find buying up liquidation-sales of ye olde boxed licenses is cheaper than SA (e.g. https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/06/valuelicensing_micros... ).
If a license meets those three elements, and there’s some actual mechanism for being able to self-backup the software/media/etc, then I would be happy to allow them to use the word purchase or buy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Amazon
Read under the section “Anti-competitive practices”
They’ve done it multiple times. They have the mechanism to delete them. They also have the mechanisms to push content to kindles.
While I don’t have examples of them redacting, they can clearly do so. A government order would be a great example of this.
ePub is the standard format. I’ve made sure to convert everything I’ve bought back to ePub without DRM.
I read a lot in Japanese. One nice benefit of this approach is that all the dictionaries and other language learning tooling is just ready to be used.
"Locked to Amazon unless you jailbreak" is overselling it imo. You've always been able to (very easily) sideload DRM-free ebooks and read them on your kindle.
Since "reading ebooks" is ostensibly why you'd buy a Kindle in the first place, I'm not sure what more you need.
"Easily" does not apply to grandpa and huge swathes of the human race.
"Type 'kindle' in the search."
"Alright, hold on... do I want kindle.com? I'm on Amazon, now where do I go?"
A slightly more experienced fastball realizes grandpa has opened his never-updated Internet Explorer on his old Windows box.
Maybe your family is tech-savvy, but there's many who aren't.
If it makes financial sense in the future to pull shenanigans with book access or content, they will do so unreservedly and with haste.
They have done this already in small amounts, no reason to think they won't do it on a larger scale if it becomes worth their while.
Steam is an interesting example, technically some of the games are DRM free (as in you don't need steam to run them) but most of them rely on steam in some form for continued usage.
The main difference here is that steam has better PR and a history of not fucking everyone over for an extra % on profit margins.
Will that remain the case, probably not, especially after Gabe Newell dies, but they certainly have the general trust of people who use the platform.
Not to say they haven't had their share of fuck-ups over the years but none of them seemed to have "I'm a billionaire so i can do whatever the fuck i want" energy to them.
That's just personal opinion though.
Now he's making sure customers are more locked-in into the Kindle ecosystem.
So the fear is that they'll start doing BS like showing ads and/or restricting features like family sharing.
That's very different from buying digital music (which I buy from Apple DRM free) and digital books, which should not change after I buy them, don't need compatibility updates, and really ought to work as long as I have the files, even if someone goes out of business and I can't redownload them.
Books really have much more in common with music than they do with software, and it's unfortunate that digital books and ebook readers escaped the "I bought hundreds of dollars of music and I should be able to play it on whatever MP3 player I want" arguments that freed us from music DRM lock-in.