You don't own your Kindle books, Amazon reminds customer
www.nbcnews.com

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.

  • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
    21·
    2 months ago

    I buy DRM free books off humble bundle. Even if I already have previously downloaded them. I will not give money to anything with DRM on it if I don’t have to. These authors aren’t getting money from me because they don’t offer a product I want (DRM free books). Other sources do have this product so they can blame themselves or their publisher for losing sales.

    • NateNate60@lemmy.world
      21·
      2 months ago

      I would be astonished if publishers figured out a way to put DRM on a paper copy of a book.

        • NateNate60@lemmy.world
          41·
          2 months ago

          It might not be legal, but in my book, it is perfectly ethical to pirate a copy without DRM if you already own a legitimate copy (paper or DRM-inclusive)

          • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
            31·
            2 months ago

            I’m not buying a bunch of paper books and creating unnecessary waste just to make sure the author gets paid. I guess I could donate them but then the author loses sales that way. I’m certainly not rewarding the use of DRM by paying for it.

            • NateNate60@lemmy.world
              2·
              2 months ago

              You can donate books to the library, you know. They’re always looking for more copies of popular books and what they don’t add to their collection, they’ll resell them and use the money for more books.

              Paper books aren’t “waste” by any means as they are easily recycled.

              Most authors I’ve heard from (through their Internet posts) don’t mind libraries, but they’d rather you enjoy their books legitimately than pirate.