this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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You Should Know

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YSK - for all the things that can make your life easier!

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This is not an anti-Kindle rant. I have purchased (rented?) several Kindle titles myself.

However, YSK that you are only licensing access to the book from Amazon, you don't own it like a physical book.

There have been cases where Amazon deletes a title from all devices. (Ironically, one version of "1984" was one such title).

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html

There have also been cases where a customer violated Amazon's terms of service and lost access to all of their Kindle e-books. Amazon has all the power in this relationship. They can and do change the rules on us lowly peasants from time to time.

Here are the terms of use:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201014950

Note, there are indeed ways to download your books and import them into something like Calibre (and remove the DRM from the books). If you do some web searches (and/or search YouTube) you can probably figure it out.

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[–] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Yeah—I finally got a physical Kindle in part to simplify the process of downloading and backing up my ebooks.

To be fair, though, their devices and apps have mutually-incompatible file formats, so if the only point of downloading a file were to put it on an offline Kindle via USB (which is the only use case they acknowledge), they’d need to know what device you’ve got so they can convert the file to an appropriate format.

[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

My understanding is a lot of those were just wrappers for mobi files to add even more drm, but I haven't looked super closely.

I dunno. I used to be super hardcore about ripping every book and putting it in my calibre library. Then I eventually realized that... mostly I don't care. There are very few books I am going to re-read and the majority of those were so good that I either want the hardcover to put on a shelf or don't mind buying again from a vendor that gives the author a better percentage.

[–] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

Yeah. In my case, though, a lot of my library consists of relatively expensive reference works that I use regularly and that would be prohibitive to replace if Amazon decided to play games with them.