Regarding taking your Kindle books with you... the standard recommendation is to use the DeDRM plugin[1] for Calibre to convert your DRM'd books into plain old ePUBs.
My understanding (I'm not a lawyer) is that this is perfectly legal to do in the US, because you're allowed to remove DRM from content you've purchased (a license to) for personal use.
This is only going to help a few people, but if you're still on one of the older kindles, such as the old original kindle paperwhite, when you ask for the file, you can request it for these older devices, and the book format will have the old DRM which can easily be stripped.
The flush screens of the Kindle have an extra layer to achieve the flushness which adds some reflectivity and makes the screen less paper like. The Libra 2 doesn't have a flush screen and appears much sharper and far more paper like in my eyes and many others.
I’m probably an outlier in tech circles but I really like the kindle experience, it’s convenient, the store has all the books I could ever want to read, the price is reasonable and since I never reread books I really don’t mind that I don’t own them forever. I’ve probably bought 200 books from Amazon since I got my kindle back in 2010. If I had to go through the hassles of stripping drm and side loading the books I’d read less as I just don’t plan that well.
Arguably since physical books do degrade over decades you also don’t own those forever but since the time frame is so long it’s a moot point.
>I’m probably an outlier in tech circles but I really like the kindle experience
Why do you think that you are an outlier? That every discussion of it online inevitably descends into discussion of DRM does not mean that people (techie or not) in general like using Kindle and its ecosystem.
I also really like Kindle (and the newest one's faster speed makes it all the better). iOwning one surprised me in how it changed the way I read. I did not anticipate the freedom of being able to move between books at any time for any reason.
I have many dozens of cards from libraries around the US, and can borrow almost anything at any time. It's great being able to hear about an interesting book, finding it at overdrive.com (which searches across multiple libraries), then borrowing it within 30 seconds.
Pretty much the same, except I do re-read the odd book... and they're all still there. I've not had a Kindle book disappear. I used to use calibre, but at some point I realised I was just curating a massive library for no reason. Same with music files. The time spent looking after a collection was time that I could spend reading new books or listening to new music, or doing something else.
So yeah, all power to those who feel a need to own physical copies of everything, I no longer subscribe to that ideal. I'd rather a library model where we pay collectively.
Kindles now read Epubs just fine. Mobi is a deprecated format. You have to email the Epub to your Kindle account, but that's the only bit of friction from that side.
From the other side, DeDRM(doDRM) and the KFX input plugin can remove the latest Kindle DRM, and Calibre can convert the AZW folders to an Epub.
I've had a Kindle of some sort since 2011 and not once have I read a book through Amazon... not due to avoidance on my part, just haven't needed to! My first device was an "ad supported" Kindle 4 but since I never signed in to Amazon with it, I never saw an ad. I read library books on a Kobo Touch and use the Kindle 10th gen for DRM-free, purchased e-books. Calibre is amazing. I've got fond memories of using Plucker on my Palm m505 to read books found on FTP sites back in the early 2000s and cleaned up with Perl.
I, too, have had a Kindle since 2011 and never read a book through Amazon. Every time I purchased a new Kindle, I put it in airplane mode the moment I took it out of the box. Then, I just loaded books onto it over USB.
In fact, I have never paid for an ebook at all – already in 2011 the ebook filesharing community was well developed, and today LibGen and Anna’s Archive have 95% of everything I want to read in English. Through Internet Archive scans of library holdings, Anna’s Archive now has loads of fairly obscure twentieth-century publications that I never expected to see in digital form unless I, or some other member of the community, had scanned and uploaded them ourselves.
Not snarking, genuine question: how do you expect the authors to make a living creating and writing the content you enjoy reading if you don’t pay for it? Do you only read content that authors publish for free?
Much of what I read – on linguistics, art cinema, or art music – is published by academic presses. No matter how much a scholarly publication might interest the general public, those books are usually priced at a level where only university libraries, and occasionally hired faculty, are expected to actually buy them. The retail price of what I have read in the last month alone already goes into the thousands of euro.
For English-language works of fiction that I will read a single time, I have no qualms about downloading them. People in English-speaking countries could get these for free through their public library, whether there on the shelves or through ILL. What, I have to pay for them just because where I am, I have no access to such libraries?
I still buy a lot of physical books, but I tend to purchase only what I know I will read multiple times over the years. That means, in the first place, poetry. And since poetry is a genre where page layout really matters, and ebooks still struggle with complex and large-format layout, it is especially nice to have the physical book.
Just a data point here but I am an aspiring author who negotiated with several university presses and ended up going with a small independent press instead and I strongly disagree on the audience you mentioned in your first paragraph. That may be the built in readership, but authors desperately want to reach larger audiences, even through academic presses, and often can exert little independent control over pricing. I would invert your assumption -- the authors that can afford to lose money from a shared copy are the ones published by the big five, many of whom received advances that their books won't pay back anyways, it's the authors published by academic presses and indie/nonprofit publishers that desperately need every dollar of revenue.
Trust me, I know books are expensive, they're probably my biggest line item after rent and food, but it really is meaningful for the publisher and author when you purchase a book.
edit: I also wanted to add that the publishing industry is decidedly low tech and a huge amount of assumptions about what gets chosen to be published is based on historical (mediocre, for a host of reasons) sales data via Bookscan, so when you don't purchase a book there also is is now one fewer piece of a demand signal that may lead another similar book to be greenlit.
As I said, what I have read in just the last month from academic presses goes into the thousands of euro. No individual reader is realistically going to spend all that. And especially not when one is in Eastern Europe and makes a fairly typical living here.
Furthermore, I question your claim that me purchasing a scholar’s book would benefit hurting authors. At least within my own discipline (I’m an occasional researcher when a funded project comes along, and I have published on a number of occasions) authors do not materially benefit from publishing a monograph, getting an article into a collection, or serving as an editor of a collection. It’s all for prestige/career advancement alone. In fact, the PDFs on LibGen are sometimes surreptitiously uploaded by authors themselves, who have little love for the big academic publishers like Brill.
There are two cases in my own discipline where authors do care about sales. One is textbooks, and the other is a case where a group of scholars came together to found their own press so they wouldn’t have to deal with the big corporate publishers any more. But those do not form a significant part of my own reading.
Sounds reasonable - and yes academic works are priced so far beyond consumer retail they’re not missing your revenue.
I get your point about libraries, and if you outright don’t have access in your location that’s valid - one thing I’d add though is that libraries do have constrained supply and limited loan periods (even for digital content) and also a smaller collection of books so it’s not a total free access service as you suggest (at least in the UK, I can’t speak to others) - but now I’m nit picking.
I tend to read fairly unpopular literary fiction, not hot bestsellers or whatever, so I am confident that if I were in the USA or UK and could request such books from a local library there, I wouldn’t have to wait long to receive it. “Smaller collection” isn’t actually true if the library has access to ILL. And again, a limited loan period hardly matters if this is going to be a one-off reading experience.
Some valid points here, but there's also a little bit to be said for the stability of Amazon. For now, at least.
I've bought an ebook or two directly from the author and I'm not sure I could find them any more, so it feels more like my money went up in smoke.
Another thing I don't love about those "buy it from me directly" people is they're not submitting their work to reviews. Yes, there are problems with review systems and they can be gamed, but I still think they're better than "hey, trust me".
I buy direct from authors wherever possible. No problems so far. I don't trust reviewers (and definitely don't trust Amazon's review system).
I maintain my own library using Calibre. I have a directory on my laptop that has my books in it, and use Calibre to maintain and access it. I back it up onto an external hard drive about once a month.
I briefly experimented with creating a Gitlab repo to store books in, so that it was at least as safe and secure as my code. But it's just easier with Calibre. Also I didn't feel entirely comfortable using Gitlab's free service for something other than what it is intended for, and I've learned the lesson that storing things long-term on free accounts isn't wise.
All true but at the end of the day, just buy a physical copy to support the author ,download the ebook from libgen or whatever and just use the kindle as hardware. In some way I admire people who try to abide by all the 50 pages of legalese you're forced to agree to but I couldn't be bothered with it.
Especially all the books she lost that were associated with the account. If anyone had bought something from me once and lost access because Amazon screwed them over, you can't convince me there's one author in the world who'd care about you pirating it.
If you're downloading from libgen anyway, you might as well buy the kindle version to support the author, instead of the dead trees. Or any other ebook, or the audible.
One solution is to buy and donate a copy of the book to a local library.
Cory Doctorow actually had a system for this for his earlier books for matching teachers who wanted hardcopies of his books and donators who wanted to "pay" Cory in some way [1].
I wonder if NFTs could be a solution to ensure interoperability and resale value of ebooks.
No DRM neeeded, which are useless anyway since it's easy to download any book online, and it's all about the legal ownership title (the NFT) and possibly exclusive benefits for holding one (eg. access to author's community or events).
Lost me at Web 3. Sorry for the snark but do books really need to be turned into decentralized assets? Is that really the optimal way to solve this problem for consumers/industry?
The author's repeatedly-stated fixation about how illegal or sometimes "barely legal" all this DRM evasion nonsense regarding the kindle is comes out as absurd. Who gives a shit? Stupid, self-serving, bad laws absolutely should be ignored and there's nothing in the least bit immoral about it, especially considering how Amazon and similar treat you as a supposed "owner" of content you bought.
Just quit the silly hand wringing and get to stripping that DRM parasitism away, straight to hell. No, you're not in any way immoral for doing so.
> Unfortunately, if the book is DRM-protected (very likely!), you would need to strip out DRM before conversion which is downright illegal LMAOOOOOO!!!!!
Isn't it legal to circumvent DRM for personal use?
There are very specific exceptions to prohibitions against DRM circumvention, but many of those are so encumbered as to be useless. The standards and regulations addressing these are long, complex, and difficult to parse.
I see listed: educational and derivative uses; accessibility of audiovisual works; accessibilty of literary works; medical device data; the unlocking, jailbreaking, and repair of computer programs and systems; security research; software presentation; video game preservation; and 3D printers.
But as a general exemption "for personal use", nothing at all.
Those rights of ownership tend to be governed by universal standards such as fee simple ownership (of real property), or within the US, the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), which is established at the individual state and territorial level, and includes both perpetual ownership and resale ("first sale doctrine) rights, see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Commercial_Code>
"Licenced" usage rights are individually prescribed, at least at the level of individual products and licensors, and may well be specific to individual transactions. The specific rights granted or denied may be changed at any time without notice as well, or simply revoked outright, which has occurred numerous times in the case of digital works, rather notoriously with a version of George Orwell's 1984 sold^Wlicenced from Amazon, Inc.:
You can 'buy' a house with a restrictive covenant or an airline ticket you can't resell. The idea that 'buy' has some simple universal meaning and you're going to get Amazon for not using it properly is fanciful at best.
Yes, it is true that there are certain restrictive covenants which can apply to real property.
However, those covenants, deed restrictions, etc., etc., are themselves limited and governed by both local/state and federal law, to the Constitutional level in the US (e.g., restrictive covenants based on gender, race, and/or religion are utterly prohibited and unenforceable).
Real estate transactions are also exceptional among those being discussed here in that they almost universally involve multiple lawyers for multiple parties (buyer, seller, lender, buyers' and sellers' estate agents, possibly individual representatives for individuals buying a house together in some cases, e.g., family law / marital disposition of property concerns). Which is to say that this is a very high-overhead and complex transaction.
Which is precisely the opposite of what makes, in general, retail commerce possible.
When I go into a shop and purchase an apple, or a prepared meal, or a set of dishes or cookware, or a toaster, or a magazine or book ... I select product, pay (via cash, debit, or credit), and the transaction is closed, with certain exceptions for warranties and the like, though those have limited applicability for most of the items mentioned.
There are also distinctions in corporate and government purchasing, of both goods and services, where there is often (though not always) a substantial administrative overhead involving contracts and committments, though the two parties are typically operating as equals to at least a first approximation.[1]
And yes, there are other exceptions such as contracts of adhesion (you may find these on travel fares, parking services, and the like), though these both 1) are uniform for all transactions between a given vendor and their customers and 2) are very frequently also subject to strong regulation and limitations as to terms and variability.
But to state that there are no transactions in which ownership rights are near-total and all-but-universally uniform is utterly misleading. To all practical intents, there are purchases in which full rights in at least the material object do in fact manifest.
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Notes:
1. There is of course a range. National-level governments are often the more powerful party in purchase arrangements, whilst local (city, county, and often even state- or provincial-level governmental units) may be the inferior party. But both typically have at least some transactional support for tenders, and institutional expertise, not found in general retail transactions.
None of this changes the fact that there are lots meanings of 'buy', they include the buying of things with limited resale, redistribution and modification rights and nobody is going to make it illegal for Amazon to label their buttons 'buy' when they sell ebooks.
The principle problems I have with your responses, despite some technical correctness, is that they studiously ignore:
- That Amazon has extended special-case retail transactions to domains in which they were previously utterly absent: retail transactions of books, music, film, and other information goods.
- That the degree, scope, timeframe, variability, and obscurity of Amazon's licensing are all tremendously greater than of other similar prior transactional forms.
- That what were previously simple finite limited and closed transactions --- buying a book, music or video recording, magazine, etc., are now anything but.
- That you're introducing other examples of recent retail practices, post-dating Amazon's significant entrance into markets and subsequent distortions to those. (I'll put that at the mid-to-late aughts, though Amazon itself of course dates to the mid-1990s.) And yes, there's been a significant transition increasingly toward licensing information product sales, most especially of software and information products, which can go back a few decades, but again hadn't applied to books, printed matter, music, and video to any appreciable extent.
That Amazon, and you, continue to equivocate the term buy for transactions which are far better described as leasing or licensing. This specifically includes language on the Amazon website such as "Buy now" (for physical goods, ebooks, and audiobooks). Ultimately this is misleading and fraudulent in Amazon's case, and deceptive in yours.
You're doing this repeatedly in this thread, not just in response to me, and are similarly failing to concede any points raised which contradict or reduce your own claims. Contrast my own multiple concessions.
Etymology for buy: "get by paying for, acquire the possession of in exchange for something of like value; redeem, ransom; procure; get done".
There's a distinct difference of buying DRM-free ebook and renting DRM ebook and thinking you can use it on any device that you own - and "owning" here is still a central thesis.
I agree with this. I think that current Kindle users have a valid class action lawsuit against Amazon. It's fraud. And if that lawsuit fails, then it only adds fuel to the antitrust fire.
I know we've switched completely away from indie bookstores and consolidated them into the behemoths, but I wonder if there's a future where authors and readers can win with cheap ebooks without so many middle men.
Even when I do think of buying an ebook, so often there's a $15 price tag. Purely as a consumer, that doesn't ever seem like a good deal to me.
LibGen is great, Z-Library is a fairly controversial for-profit endeavour, but Anna’s Archive is now the best single recommendation. Not only does Anna’s Archive have all the LibGen and Sci-Hub stuff in its index, it also contains myriad publications that came from other channels like Z or Internet Archive.
I've written four books. Each book is the result of thousands of hours of experience and hundreds of hours of work. My books are all over these sites, and have been used to train AI. Without my consent.
I didn't write books to make money - I've made the national bestseller list and still get paid < minimum wage for my writing time. But it is disrepectful to my time and expertise to use such pirated sites. You probably make money with your mind and your fingers and your creativity. Why wouldn't you take some tiny part of the money you make and use it to allow me to do the same.
And for those who say "its the same as a library" - libraries buy books. And lend them on a limited basis. Sites like this are just simple theft.
My understanding (I'm not a lawyer) is that this is perfectly legal to do in the US, because you're allowed to remove DRM from content you've purchased (a license to) for personal use.
[1]: https://github.com/noDRM/DeDRM_tools