Hacker News Reader

Comment by zzbn00 | Hacker News Reader

I agree. And the cost of ebooks is often very reasonable, Amazon are selling lots (more than one can read in a lifetime) of superb stuff in the $1-$4 range. (Makes things really difficult for the modern authors though).

Also a paper book you'd carry every day with you for a year will look in much worse state than a Kindle.

Reading e-books is an affordable past time...

View on HN

To be pedantic, Amazon sells you a license to read the book but you don’t actually own the book like you would a real book. They can remove the book anytime and there is nothing you can do about it. They’ve already done it in the past, the book just vanished.

If you are really worried about this, you can pirate the book from the usual sites and side load it onto your kindle.

You can strip DRM in one click using Calibre. That way you can support the author and also own the book forever.

Yep. I don't mind paying authors and published for ebooks, but I draw the line at Amazon controlling my library. It seems like one solution might be to buy the ebook via whatever platform the author says is best for them, and then acquire a copy you control via other means.

The terms of service in UK seem better in this regard than USA.

Which/why did they remove the book?

The famous example is the removal of George Orwell's 1984. Note that Bezos called it all kinds of things, but did not revert the change according to the article [0]

[0] https://www.npr.org/2009/07/24/106989048/amazons-1984-deleti...

Here: https://gizmodo.com/amazon-secretly-removes-1984-from-the-ki...

The irony that it was Orwell’s 1984 that was secretly removed from purchasers’ kindles seem to have been totally lost on Amazon.

I didn't know about that, would have been right that Amazon pays damages to the copyright holder. But they did at least refund the price paid, so the readers were no worse off than at start.

Generally not a big fan of Amazon-world, but if you don't mind reading older books kindle is good value I think. My 30pence copy of Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" was very good value, and has not yet mysteriously disappeared from my Kindles!

Some books prices are ok.

Infuriates me when the paperback is $4-5 cheaper than the ebook, henchman’s exactly uncommon.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com