I don't mind temporary license if I trust in the business stability. Meaning either I have a minimum period guaranteed by law or the business is not changing the TOS for no reasons. I bought software on Apple's App Store and games on PlayStation Store and I'm fine that I only have a license tied to the existence of my account. But I have limited trust (no real reason) in Amazon regarding to Kindle.
I also think temporary licenses if they are marketed appropriately. This disclosure is a small step in the right direction, but I don't think it's enough yet.
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.
I agree that words like "buy" are deceptive, but changing the language won't fix the underlying problem that it's getting harder and harder to actually buy certain things permanently.
Not necessarily. The clear language would help consumers determine what they are getting out of the transaction. Many could decide it is not worth it or would search for a better deal elsewhere (where they could buy the book, not just rent it). I'm sure Amazon would come up with new ways to combat this though.
Yeah, and so we should change the rules, not accept a weakening of the meaning of buy or make it more clear that you're renting. Companies already have an enforcement mechanism against copyright infringement. It's called the courts. They don't need DRM, they're just assholes. We need to place reasonable limitations on DRM use. They don't need to have DRM for the entire 50+ years of the copyright term. Putting a digital lock on something shouldn't mean YOU get to decide what the customer does with something and how they interact with it.
I think “purchase a license” is correct in the cases when the license is perpetual and transferable, such as with (I’m showing my age…) boxed-software.
…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... ).
I think the word purchase should be allowed if you’re acquiring a perpetual, irrevocable, transferable license.
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.
Kindle has been around for over a decade. And Amazon is huge. Why the distrust?
Honest question. I'm trusting Steam with over 400 games. I don't read a lot of ebooks but I don't see why Amazon would redact something I've paid for.
Steal from one person (natural and otherwise) and you need to pay them back and get fined/locked up on top of it. Steal from thousands and can just give five bucks to each of them in a class action settlement.
"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.
Kindles don't really support epub. If you copy an epub into your Kindle it cannot read it. If you use the "send to Kindle" app, it sends the epub to Amazon, which converts it to their proprietary format and ships it down to your Kindle.
What is it grandpa is capable of doing, if not plugging the kindle in the computer and dragging and dropping a file onto the "kindle" device that is now mounted in his file explorer?
Kindle department at Amazon got a new manager who doesn't care about books. So he started to cut costs to drive up margins, and this included the cancellation of Kindle Oasis refresh.
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.
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.
Software, especially on mobile platforms, feels a little more ephemeral anyway. An app left unmaintained won't support high DPI, won't support new screen sizes, won't have dark mode, doesn't support 64-bit CPUs, or even just gets deliberately turned shitty via updates because there was money to be squeezed. So if I buy an app and come back in 10 years I'm pleasantly surprised to ever find that it still exists and works.
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.
