I've only bought a few ebooks but even then, I've immediately went and pirated them too to feel like I have something, even though it's only a few hundred kilobytes. I know it's a digital book and I know someone worked really hard on it but when I buy an book from Amazon or some other site which works this way, I feel like I'm buying... nothing. I sometimes buy physical books with the intention of keeping them for when I'm in the mood to read them, sometimes this might be months or even years. But with a digital book delivered with a licence I've always got a niggle in the back of my mind thinking about a digital collection dissappearing or the service becoming obsolete. In regards to non-drm ebooks, the lack of tangibility peeves me slightly but isn't so much an issue as I actually have something I can keep. But licenced ebooks are fugazi, ethereal nothingness existing on the whims of a mega corporation.
This seems like an isolated case where an illegitimate provider committed fraud in the early days of the program. Amazon refunded and surely readers were able to purchase a valid copy not much later.
Are there any examples where legitimately purchased licenses were made unavailable?
The point wasn't that they sold something they weren't supposed to, but that they felt it reasonable to "un-sell" something after someone has received it.
It showed everyone that electronic purchases can be yoinked away at the first whiff of controversy. Unlike all the copycat, fraudulent crap they continue to sell in physical form to this day.
Don't confuse an illegitimately purchased license with a legitimately purchased illegitimate license.
This is the trouble with "licenses" instead of "items". If I purchase a bootleg book from a physical shop it's not getting clawed back later. The supplier might get in trouble, the physical shop might as well, but nothing is happening to the physical good that I purchased.
Still, this is an extreme, seemingly one-off outlier. There's nothing shady or below board about their actions. They made a mistake and made all parties whole.
There are plenty other reasons to argue against DRM, but I'd argue the chance this one weakens the argument.
It's not about shady or below board. It's about the fact that they can, at their choice, remove books from people that have paid for them. Since they have this power, and can (effectively) use it without repercussions, it's now just a question of under what circumstances are the people in charge willing to use it.
It's the same as when government agencies are given broad, sweeping powers with the explanation of "it makes it easier to do the right thing, and they won't use it to do the wrong thing". Only, the person that gets to decide what it gets used for can change. Then suddenly, they _are_ willing to use it for the wrong thing.
Not really. They went overboard. They reached into devices owned by their customers and deleted books without permission. That was absolutely outside of normal. Imagine amazon selling you a physical book and later sneaking into your house to take it back when they find out the seller had pirated them.
Sony has recently been caught up in a few things like this. The Discovery shows being the biggest example I’m aware of. It’s definitively not an isolated thing.
> Are there any examples where legitimately purchased licenses were made unavailable?
From customers point of view, these purchases were legitimate.
But the important point is that they did it in the past and only the right balance between bad PR and expected profits will prevent them from doing again.
What you’re buying is the right to consume someone’s hard work in quasi-perpetuity[1]. It’s not a tangible object, but it’s not nothing, either. That’s the essence of “intellectual property.”
Most HNers are employed building things that their customers will never have tangible representations of. It’s how life is today.
[1] technological or business limitations make promises of true perpetuity impossible as a practical matter today.
The difference is most of those things aren't built with tangible, perpetual representations in mind.
For literally all of the time that the written word has existed, if you bought a physical copy it was yours for whatever version of perpetuity you'd like to use.
Of course libraries exist, as do rentals, but it's clearly understood what the deal is with such services.
The specific issue i see here is that this is changing retroactively and without recourse, the ability to download a copy of the item you purchased, which was the deal at the time of purchase.
If you buy anything from now on, however, knowing the details of the sale, that's on you.
It is also hopefully going to result in people going back to libraries. If Amazon is telling you that you can never own an ebook, why pay for it at all? Just borrow it from the local library for free.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
As far as I understand, the "anti-circumvention" provisions of the DMCA don't make exceptions for fair use, so it's illegal to circumvent copyright protection even if a fair use defense would mean you're not infringing the copyright.
From Wikipedia[1] ("1201" here refers to the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions):
Although section 1201(c) of the title stated that the section does not change the underlying substantive copyright infringement rights, remedies, or defenses, it did not make those defenses available in circumvention actions. The section does not include a fair use exemption from criminality nor a scienter requirement, so criminal liability could attach to even unintended circumvention for legitimate purposes.
The DMCA does include exemptions that allow you to circumvent copyright protection in some circumstances, but these are pre-defined by the government every 3 years. I don't think "backing up e-books that you own" is currently exempted, the only thing I can find in that Wikipedia article that could maybe fit is this:
Literary works, distributed electronically, that are protected by technological measures that either prevent the enabling of read-aloud functionality or interfere with screen readers or other applications or assistive technologies, or for research purposes at educational institutions;
In other words: if you have an e-book that doesn't provide accessibility functions, you can crack it in order to be able to read it.
NAL, not legal advice, just my current understanding:
> after you buy it
Generally, yes. What you do with that digital copy might be illegal, but the download was legal. Using a torrent to download (and seeding) might still be illegal even if only as a means to copying.
> after you buy it on kindle
That's a more interesting question. Given that they only grant you a license, you're in gray/black territory. When they previously gave you the impression that you were making a purchase you might have been in gray/light territory, but ignorance is rarely an excuse.
> legalities vs practicalities
Once I had one of those torrent honeypots catch a neighbor seeding. Comcast wasn't very careful with their timestamps or enforcement (or maybe the lawyer wasn't), and it happened close enough to an IP renewal that I caught the flak. If you don't get a lawyer involved, they'll blatantly ignore your right to counter DMCA claims and just infantalize you with a sermon about not stealing from intellectual property owners, placing you on a list of problem customers and eventually cancelling service (that last bit never materialized because it was my IP and my devices after the incident, so I never had too many strikes).
What happens, exactly, if you "legally" pirate a book after you buy it on kindle? Who knows, but it might have negative consequences on par with actual enforcement as if you'd broken the law.
Not sure exactly what you mean, but it’s definitely on the books[1]. There’s also a decent body of case law around copying things you have access to (say, Sony v Betamax).
Fair use comes from Berne Convention §10 (snipet):
“It shall be permissible to make quotations from a work which has already been lawfully made available to the public…”
I guess OpenAI and Google use that to be able to build search and training ML-models.
Almost all countries in the world is bounded by that.
Fair use is just a defense if you have to go to court for a copyright infringement claim. So after you spend many thousands of dollars, you can claim fair use as one of your defenses. (In fairness, certain types of fair use are fairly well established so no one will probably take you to court within those guardrails.)
I had an issue with calibre+dedrm not working as of early 2024 (possibly due to an update the the DRM used by Amazon). Have you had luck doing this recently?
My strategy is to read a pirated copy for 2-3 chapters and then decide whether I want to buy the book. It's similar to the 90s when I used to read volumes and volumes in a bookstore but only with enough money to buy one or two every quarter.
BTW I wish No Starch ships cheaper to Canada. It quickly adds up when I buy more. One of the best publishers out there I think.
Very apt. The average individual downloader-not-seeder wouldn't have 1/10th of the cash required to fight a legal battle in court, whereas large firms seem to be able to just do whatever they want.
The average person is put through hell and bankrupted. The large firm, at worst, pays a fine that amounts to some fraction of quarterly profit.
Personally I really don't like the whole downloading-but-not-seeding approach. The whole point of p2p networks is to receive and to give and spread. Back in the day it was the leecher clients that got banned because they were amoral and breaking the system.
Buy books from responsible publishers. And please keep seeding the things you torrent that can't be purchased anywhere. And when I'm looking for that classic undubbed Jackie Chan movie and you are the single seeder making it possible to still get it, I salute you from the very bottom of my heart.
Almost the worst thing about Amazon and this gouging way of renting books is that it ‘legitimizes’ piracy. My partner works in publishing and we know a lot of authors. If you think piracy is going to sustain that industry and give you and your children books to read in the years and decades to come, you’re very mistaken.
As an author, I barely get any money from Amazon. In some cases, with the cut Amazon and the publisher take, I make a few pennies on a $30 book.
If you buy my book directly from my publisher's website, I'm extremely grateful. I get a fair amount for that. If you buy it from a local bookstore, at least they benefit.
But if you buy it from Amazon, you might as well just get it from Anna's Archive. At least you're not supporting the jungle.
I would love to buy ebooks directly from publishers, but publishers generally sell ebooks with DRM just as bad as Amazon's DRM, if not worse. If publishers insist on vendor lock-in, then I might as well stick with Kindle where most of my ebook collection already is.
I contacted a well known author about the shit latex rendering of his ebooks on Amazon. He said sorry and send me the a pdf copy he build with my name on all the pages. I really like the fact that I have a book dedicated to me by the author, but why the fuck do we need Amazon in this interaction?
Lot of people have asked that question ever since Amazon (Platform Economy[0]) emerged. But the answer is not simple.
This is why experiments like ONDC[1] (being pushed by the Indian Govt) are interesting. They want an alternative path between producer and consumer with out a middleman (Platform). Similar to how email works based on open protocols. Or UPI which has reduced dependence on Mastercard/Visa.
I know you probably don't have the option since it's part of the publishing contract, but if you could, would you opt out of being listed on Amazon and just sell direct from the publisher's site?
Plenty of books I've tried to purchase epub or PDFs of only have Kindle rental versions.
If the publishers of these authors wanted me to let me own a PDF, I'd gladly purchase, but until they actually do that I have several easy alternatives to getting sucked into Amazon's ridiculous ecosystem.
And this is a larger subset of books I want to buy than I would want, surprisingly.
I say the same thing about GNU licensed software: if the author just gave me my preferred licensing terms, I wouldn't be forced to use it in proprietary software without compenstion.
A key point here is that GP expressed a willingness to pay. The analogy would be attempting to license a piece of GPL software that you've decided to integrate into your proprietary stack and being outright refused for ideological reasons. Still illegal but people are probably going to perceive it a bit differently.
I think it’s wrong to pirate books, but making it harder and harder to use the thing someone buys will push people to pirate. The onerous DRM from the likes of publishers and Amazon will eventually back fire on them. They are fighting hard to not have books end up like music, but I feel it’s inevitable.
I think it's contextual whether it's even wrong to pirate books. A new book that just came out? Sure. If I want to read a copy of "Titus Groan" by Mervyn Peake, who died in 1968, you'd have to do some marvelous convincing to make me feel bad about pirating it. Piracy would be wrong if the copyright system was reasonable. As is, it's the lesser of two evils compared to following the law as written.
We need an AI that produces the text of a book, from a video of it as you flip through its pages. No special hardware, just a phone and a thumb. If a few pages get missed it can ask you to do it again.
It's not really the same thing. A VPN is a way to avoid getting caught. Meta's legal defense is an attempt to avoid getting punished after getting caught.
If they start logging and one of their customers gets sued, their entire business model is finished. So, why do you say it won't protect you for pirating?
Are there even any effective device fingerprinting methods for torrent clients? Given that it's a UDP protocol it's probably going to be pretty hard to get much useful information about the device aside from what the client might intentionally provide.
There are so many incredible works of literature that I’ve yet to read available in glorious DRM free epub on Standard EBooks and Project Gutenberg, I don’t know why I’d deal with this shit for imaginative fiction .
I would at least suggest buying a copy (not from Amazon) first, the author deserves a cut IMO and books tend to be relatively cheap. Kobo's store does have DRM, but it's easily bypassed by Calibre, or you can buy elsewhere (local is always good if possible) and then pirate an ebook copy.
I think there's an ethical way to both get free use of what should be yours to use, and also support the people who made it.
> Kobo's store does have DRM, but it's easily bypassed by Calibre
I'd say this is the case for Amazon as well, if you have an actual Kindle. I was able to convert my whole library to standard epubs last weekend using Calibre.
How were you able to do that? You can still download to USB but that is going away. I'm not aware of any way to convert the files on a recent Kindle to epub, does that exist?
> Kobo's store does have DRM, but it's easily bypassed by Calibre
See, but that's not actually the same thing as DRM-free. It's adversarial interop that's temporarily allowed to work, but if said interop becomes popular enough the publishers will force Kobo to fix it.
At this point I'm really only interested in spending money on books that I can actually own—either physical copies or (where available) fully and legally DRM-free ebooks. I want my purchases to send the right message to publishers: that DRM-free can work.
Is there a way to know beforehand if the e-book from Kobo is DRM or not? I thought they were all DRM free, but the last book I bought suddenly was DRM and haven't yet bothered to research (I have a couple of different size e-readers and just copying the file over has been handy.)
If they're DRM free it will be in the description. If you want to get rid of that DRM all you need is Calibre, a plugin called DeDRM... you open the ASCM file in the Adobe Editions program, copy the file from the root folder into Calibre, and that's it. DRM gone.
Yeah, and that's great! Where that's an option I'll definitely go for it. I'm just uninterested in spending money on a book that has DRM, regardless of how easy it is to bypass. I think it sends the wrong message.
combine Meta's statement with the WEF statement "You'll own nothing and you'll be happy". And you'll start to get a feel for the asymmetric "rules based order" the elites envision for the plebs.
It’s funny but predictable that the same website that has always said that piracy is a-okay changes its mind as soon as it’s Facebook who’s caught pirating stuff.
Yeah. I "bought" a Kindle copy of There Will Be War awhile back to get access to a few of the short stories in the collection.
After reading about how they're taking away downloads I went and downloaded all of my books and found that at some point they must have lost the license to that book because I no longer had access to it.
Love it when my "purchases" can be taken away from me with no recourse. edit: and I was never even informed that the book had been taken away. It just is there in my collection with a few invalid characters at the front of the title and no cover picture. The link goes to a page that doesn't exist. And searching for it shows only paper copies now by third parties. So I know this isn't just a bug in the system.
I built a DRM system for the major record labels. If you moved your music to a new computer it had to download a new license. It was disheartening reading that they shut down the license server in 2009. I read a lot of posts from suitably aggrieved buyers.
I'm glad the government is forcing companies to be a little more honest about these "purchases." These companies wouldn't have done it on their own.
Of course, someone will say it is government overreach and competition will solve this instead.
Anything you've purchased will remain in your library unless:
1) You delete it (which can happen by accident, due to some bad UX).
If you have done this, you can contact Amazon Support and they can re-add it to your library for free. It's not possible to delete your purchase history on the Amazon website, and that includes all Kindle books.
Whenever I've seen people claim that digital content has gone from their Amazon account, it always turns out to be either:
a) They didn't buy it on Amazon in the first place.
Not saying that's what happened in this case, but it has happened, and it's a great example of why having your books (or any media) locked up in a walled garden is a terrible idea. (though this is far from being the only objectionable angle)
I can't believe this sort of stuff is legal/passes the regulation.
Is it really fine for them to say "Buy this book *You aren't really buying it"? I guess we've seen "No bandwidth caps *We can arbitrarily cap your bandwidth". Could a food manufacturer say "Contains no nuts *Made on an assembly line that produces nut products"?
It's okay to lie to people, just not that much. Corporations don't operate above the law, they operate X% below the law where that % grows the larger they are because the cost to prosecute X% is too high, so all of them do it.
>Amazon Now Openly Discloses You’re Buying a License to View Kindle eBooks
"disclosure" of information sounds like a good thing, but in terms of contracts, "a disclosure" is actually "a restriction/limitation" that you are agreeing to. This is Amazon "disclosing" that it is you who is not actually buying a copy of something.
Yes, it's better for you that limitations are disclosed, but the salient point is the limitation, not the disclosure.
What would a true purchase of digital content look like? Just the lack of DRM? You could still lose your copy and the company you purchased it from could no longer exist.
Just like you could lose a physical book or the publisher could disappear? It feels like you're doing some reductio ad absurdum right now...
You buy a digital, DRM-free file. It is yours forever. If you lose it (bad storage, malware, deletion), it's gone. It doesn't mean that it wasn't yours. It doesn't mean that anybody owes you a new copy in perpetuity. It doesn't make any of that "fake ownership".
Thanks for the useful link!
I guess I am being overly paranoid, but I always also add a virus total check on top of it to make sure the file is clean [1]
[1] https://www.virustotal.com/gui/home/upload
Or better yet, jailbreak your kindle before the hole is closed, install koreader, and read epub natively. It's a much better reader compared to the built-in one anyway.
Someone should create a video streaming service with a vast catalog. That'd attract all the subscribers even at a higher subscription cost, and they'd surely be able to pay their licensing fees. So long as they don't need to grow infinitely for their shareholders and enshittify their offerings, it will be a sustainable and profitable business[0].
I don’t think I would ever buy an e-book. It makes no sense to me. If I want a copy for my personal collection I’ll keep it in hardcover. Otherwise I’ll just use Libby and check it out when it becomes available.
There are cases where I will toss an independent author a few dollars in exchange to read their book, but there’s no way I would ever pay Amazon or another publisher.
I really want to find a good way to buy DRM-free ebooks. Libby was great early on and is still fine, but at least in my library system the wait times for a lot of titles are measured in months.
I know some people make this work by just having a queue that's constantly cycling, but I don't read print books (as opposed to audiobooks) like that. There's only a subset of all books that I would ever want in print at all, and when I want them I want them for a specific purpose (to consult for a quote or something) now, not months from now. Purchased ebooks fill that role, but I'm only interested in buying if they're DRM-free.
Some publishers sell DRM-free e-books directly on their website. This is the best way to buy books, because it grants the greatest amount of money to the original author.
If you browse on Kobo, each book will tell you if it's DRM-free or not. Lots of small publishers will also sell books directly from their website, DRM-free in my experience. And Humble Bundle book collections are DRM free too.
> And Humble Bundle book collections are DRM free too.
Not all of them. I've had at least one bundle where you redeem it via the Kobo store for DRMed ePubs. Most I've got via Humble Bundle have been DRM-free though.
Calibre and DeDRM are the apps you're looking for; DeDRM doesn't include the decryption keys, you'll need to supply your Kindle's serial number or extract the keys from an old version of the Kindle app.
Yeah I did this with all the kindle books I ever bought before switching to a Kobo. Just need to try and get my partner out of the Amazon ecosystem now.
Awhile back I worked with someone who wrote a script to scroll through ebooks he purchased, screenshot each page and then aggregate the screenshots into a single PDF file.
The simplicity of the approach seemed pretty awesome
When I delay amazon shipping til the next week, they give me digital credits. I have over $35 in digital credits right now. I love to spend them on ebooks to support an artist or author directly with them bezos bucks.
Support your local bookstore, before they are all gone.
Physical copies of books might be tough if space is at a premium, but I love having a bookshelf. I can quickly look back to specific books or chapters or notes or whatever. Plus it gives my guests something to talk about - they can instantly see what I've read and how they can relate to me or my interests.
Disclaimer: I've never used this service and I don't know if it lives up to its promises.
bookstore.org ebook purchases can support your local (participating) bookstores[0] by a revenue sharing arrangement. Their DRM set up looks dodgy, though? It's not clear whether they use Adobe under the hood or how easy it is to get the files to then DeDRM. Maybe paying for the license (and making sure to nominate a bookstore) through there and making or acquiring a DRM-free copy to keep can be the best of both worlds, at least as far as supporting local bookstores goes.
If anyone has experience with bookstore.org I'd love to hear about it
Maybe not a super popular opinion on HN, but this effectively changes nothing for me. I love reading on my kindle, by far the most convenient way to buy and read books for me (esp when traveling often).
It’s good that they are now being upfront about it, but it won’t impact my buying behaviour and it won’t for the majority of readers.
My daughter will grow up with direct access to my entire library of books and all other media, and I'm beginning to think (assuming we have any kind of future beyond current and future crises) that's going to be an enormous advantage for her.
Why bother? Just download them off of LibGen, and save it on your hard drive. If you have bought them on Amazon, you have already paid off your debt metaphorically and literally
I don't know the details of the law, but I'm morally 100% OK with that. If I bought a copy of a book, I feel completely justified in reading it in whatever format's convenient for me. By analogy if I buy a DVD, I might rip it and watch it on my computer. I don't draw a moral distinction between ripping a copy of that DVD and downloading a ripped copy of it: the end result is a .mov file on my hard drive. Well, same with physical books and epubs. I could morally (and I'm pretty sure legally) scan and OCR that book myself as long as I don't distribute copies of it, so downloading seems to me to be just skipping the labor step in the middle.
I did this just yesterday… the calibre reader is a hot mess but getting and decoding the books was a breeze
Note that this method is only going to work for four more days! I imagine that soon this will only be possible via jailbreaking, which is always a PITA
Many years ago I started splitting my purchases between Amazon, Google Books, and Apple Books. It is a small nuisance but it felt better than using a single vender.
Now I mostly buy from Kobo and labor.fm and many of the books they sell are DRM free. Often the prices are better also.
The comments here are an interesting juxtaposition with some other posts on HN today with people arguing about supply and demand and markets. There's plenty of here people saying they're willing to pay for a DRM-free book, and some indications that authors are willing to sell them, but the market won't let that happen because it doesn't leave any room for oligarchs to leech money at every step.
I can't say I predicted this, but this sort of thing is why I bought a kobo instead of a kindle. Of course, for all I know Rakuten is worse than Amazon on this issue, but so far so good...
I can't believe anyone feels the need to buy digital copies of books anymore, especially from companies who have very obviously pirated every copyrighted work in existence as part of their AI offerings.
For audiobooks, instead of pirating I would recommend https://libro.fm - you can buy them DRM free and they donate part of the proceeds to your library of choice.
Doesnt directly answer the question, but nowadays there are good and free TTS that will essentially turn your entire ebook to an audiobook. (Elevenlabs Reader for example)
I like these tools for content where no narration exists (especially for proofreading my own writing) but they aren't anywhere near as good as a good human narrator. e.g: https://youtu.be/LPZrReZ5H9Q?t=103
What doesn’t make sense to me, is there is a more of a need than ever to own copies of the books we read. People will be creating their own RAG of the books they are reading to make use of the knowledge and expand upon the teachings. This way of thinking of licensing is antiquated. I’m sure Amazon will make some “Kindle LLM” but hopefully by then the industry is radically disrupted.
Is this at all informative? I think the fact that we're buying a license goes without saying, it's the terms of said license that matter, so I don't think this adds any useful information.
The page really needs to specify all limitations that differ from a physical copy, which would be non-revocable, transferable, worldwide, unlimited in time, geographic location, and method of consumption, etc.
Is it really that obvious? I genuinely don't know which services allow a permanent download that will continue to work in perpetuity and those that don't. My understanding of file formats gives me some insight but - I shouldn't need to know that and some smart, technical people don't have that knowledge.
Not to you and me, but there seem to be a lot of people who don't understand the principle and think they're actually buying a ebook.
But - yeah - this is not informative at all. Amazon did the least amount of work necessary to formally comply with those new California requirements (I suspect this is what it's about) about the language on digital licensing.
It's something, though. But I agree it would be nice to have a license summary label, like those broadband facts labels or nutritional labels.
What would actually mean to “buy” an ebook? The concept of ownership doesn’t really make sense for digital goods — no matter how you define it, it will be meaningfully different from owning a physical object.
I buy kindle / apple books completely for the convenience factor: formatting, delivery, cloud service and occasional updates. Though, I do wish there were some kind of change log for what they updated.
That's why I always recommend people buy Kobos. far superior product, far superior reading experience, and you get the extra bonus points of not throwing more money at fucking bezos
Amazon should be forced to refund every last Kindle book sold previously, and these “disclosures” (which basically seem like consumer fraud) should be required to be displayed in huge fonts during the purchase process, not fine print.
Every now and then when I’m lugging around a book or lamenting that my bookshelves are full, I wonder if ebooks and a Kindle would be simpler, better. Then Amazon does something like this and I’m reminded the headaches are worth it.
I've only ever bought DRM-less epub (mostly books from John Scalzi and a couple of other authors). I won't pirate, because I refuse any DRM-laden shite as a question of principle.
I've only bought a few ebooks but even then, I've immediately went and pirated them too to feel like I have something, even though it's only a few hundred kilobytes. I know it's a digital book and I know someone worked really hard on it but when I buy an book from Amazon or some other site which works this way, I feel like I'm buying... nothing. I sometimes buy physical books with the intention of keeping them for when I'm in the mood to read them, sometimes this might be months or even years. But with a digital book delivered with a licence I've always got a niggle in the back of my mind thinking about a digital collection dissappearing or the service becoming obsolete. In regards to non-drm ebooks, the lack of tangibility peeves me slightly but isn't so much an issue as I actually have something I can keep. But licenced ebooks are fugazi, ethereal nothingness existing on the whims of a mega corporation.
Ever since Amazon removed copies of Orwell's "1984" from people's Kindles after sale, it's served as a reminder that ownership is a fickle thing. https://gizmodo.com/amazon-secretly-removes-1984-from-the-ki...
I buy some ebooks, always without DRM where possible, and promptly strip DRM and stash free copies for others (e.g. from Kobo).
That was very memorable. Of all the books it could happen to, it had to be that one.
After I downloaded Fahrenheit 451 my hard drive caught fire.
shortly after pirating Three Body Problem my homicide count tripled
That's not what the countdown only you can see, the blinking stars at night, or the hyper realistic VR game with no power source meant ...
This seems like an isolated case where an illegitimate provider committed fraud in the early days of the program. Amazon refunded and surely readers were able to purchase a valid copy not much later.
Are there any examples where legitimately purchased licenses were made unavailable?
The point wasn't that they sold something they weren't supposed to, but that they felt it reasonable to "un-sell" something after someone has received it.
It showed everyone that electronic purchases can be yoinked away at the first whiff of controversy. Unlike all the copycat, fraudulent crap they continue to sell in physical form to this day.
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984
> legitimately purchased licenses
Don't confuse an illegitimately purchased license with a legitimately purchased illegitimate license.
This is the trouble with "licenses" instead of "items". If I purchase a bootleg book from a physical shop it's not getting clawed back later. The supplier might get in trouble, the physical shop might as well, but nothing is happening to the physical good that I purchased.
Still, this is an extreme, seemingly one-off outlier. There's nothing shady or below board about their actions. They made a mistake and made all parties whole.
There are plenty other reasons to argue against DRM, but I'd argue the chance this one weakens the argument.
It's not about shady or below board. It's about the fact that they can, at their choice, remove books from people that have paid for them. Since they have this power, and can (effectively) use it without repercussions, it's now just a question of under what circumstances are the people in charge willing to use it.
It's the same as when government agencies are given broad, sweeping powers with the explanation of "it makes it easier to do the right thing, and they won't use it to do the wrong thing". Only, the person that gets to decide what it gets used for can change. Then suddenly, they _are_ willing to use it for the wrong thing.
> made all parties whole
Not really. They went overboard. They reached into devices owned by their customers and deleted books without permission. That was absolutely outside of normal. Imagine amazon selling you a physical book and later sneaking into your house to take it back when they find out the seller had pirated them.
Sony has recently been caught up in a few things like this. The Discovery shows being the biggest example I’m aware of. It’s definitively not an isolated thing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/06/technology/sony-playstati...
> Are there any examples where legitimately purchased licenses were made unavailable?
From customers point of view, these purchases were legitimate.
But the important point is that they did it in the past and only the right balance between bad PR and expected profits will prevent them from doing again.
What profits are you referring to given that they refunded everyone?
Are there any examples where legitimately purchased licenses were made unavailable?
Not Amazon, but yes: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47810367
It's not so much that ownership is fickle as that it's become harder and harder to gain ownership of things.
The longer we stay in this time line capitalism starts to look like feudalism
What you’re buying is the right to consume someone’s hard work in quasi-perpetuity[1]. It’s not a tangible object, but it’s not nothing, either. That’s the essence of “intellectual property.”
Most HNers are employed building things that their customers will never have tangible representations of. It’s how life is today.
[1] technological or business limitations make promises of true perpetuity impossible as a practical matter today.
The difference is most of those things aren't built with tangible, perpetual representations in mind.
For literally all of the time that the written word has existed, if you bought a physical copy it was yours for whatever version of perpetuity you'd like to use.
Of course libraries exist, as do rentals, but it's clearly understood what the deal is with such services.
The specific issue i see here is that this is changing retroactively and without recourse, the ability to download a copy of the item you purchased, which was the deal at the time of purchase.
If you buy anything from now on, however, knowing the details of the sale, that's on you.
It is also hopefully going to result in people going back to libraries. If Amazon is telling you that you can never own an ebook, why pay for it at all? Just borrow it from the local library for free.
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.
Wouldn't be so sure about trusting PlayStation content to be there in a few years:
https://www.playstation.com/en-us/legal/psvideocontent/
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.
Didn't Amazon just discontinue their Android app store, including leaving people who bought stuff there hanging dry ?
all both of them?
Simple answer, profit, line must go up.
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.
That's just personal opinion though.
Kindle readers are far from the best and completely locked to Amazon unless you jailbreak.
ePub is the standard format. I’ve made sure to convert everything I’ve bought back to ePub without DRM.
I read a lot in Japanese. One nice benefit of this approach is that all the dictionaries and other language learning tooling is just ready to be used.
Kindles support epub now.
"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.
Amazon has deleted books off of people’s kindles before.
In response to what?
Rights, licensing, content guidelines, “offensive”, public backlash.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Amazon
Read under the section “Anti-competitive practices”
They’ve done it multiple times. They have the mechanism to delete them. They also have the mechanisms to push content to kindles.
While I don’t have examples of them redacting, they can clearly do so. A government order would be a great example of this.
That's not cool.
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.
It's much better when you don't even need to trust.
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.
Per fair use law in us - can you just pirate the book after you buy it on kindle?
As far as I understand, the "anti-circumvention" provisions of the DMCA don't make exceptions for fair use, so it's illegal to circumvent copyright protection even if a fair use defense would mean you're not infringing the copyright.
From Wikipedia[1] ("1201" here refers to the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions):
The DMCA does include exemptions that allow you to circumvent copyright protection in some circumstances, but these are pre-defined by the government every 3 years. I don't think "backing up e-books that you own" is currently exempted, the only thing I can find in that Wikipedia article that could maybe fit is this: In other words: if you have an e-book that doesn't provide accessibility functions, you can crack it in order to be able to read it.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...
NAL, not legal advice, just my current understanding:
> after you buy it
Generally, yes. What you do with that digital copy might be illegal, but the download was legal. Using a torrent to download (and seeding) might still be illegal even if only as a means to copying.
> after you buy it on kindle
That's a more interesting question. Given that they only grant you a license, you're in gray/black territory. When they previously gave you the impression that you were making a purchase you might have been in gray/light territory, but ignorance is rarely an excuse.
> legalities vs practicalities
Once I had one of those torrent honeypots catch a neighbor seeding. Comcast wasn't very careful with their timestamps or enforcement (or maybe the lawyer wasn't), and it happened close enough to an IP renewal that I caught the flak. If you don't get a lawyer involved, they'll blatantly ignore your right to counter DMCA claims and just infantalize you with a sermon about not stealing from intellectual property owners, placing you on a list of problem customers and eventually cancelling service (that last bit never materialized because it was my IP and my devices after the incident, so I never had too many strikes).
What happens, exactly, if you "legally" pirate a book after you buy it on kindle? Who knows, but it might have negative consequences on par with actual enforcement as if you'd broken the law.
As far as I understand, fair use is more a doctrine than a law. It seems like more of a moral position than a legal one.
Not sure exactly what you mean, but it’s definitely on the books[1]. There’s also a decent body of case law around copying things you have access to (say, Sony v Betamax).
1: https://codes.findlaw.com/us/title-17-copyrights/17-usc-sect...
Fair use comes from Berne Convention §10 (snipet): “It shall be permissible to make quotations from a work which has already been lawfully made available to the public…”
I guess OpenAI and Google use that to be able to build search and training ML-models. Almost all countries in the world is bounded by that.
fair use is part of copyright law, it’s just defined in a way that what you can claim as fair use is fought over in court.
Fair use is just a defense if you have to go to court for a copyright infringement claim. So after you spend many thousands of dollars, you can claim fair use as one of your defenses. (In fairness, certain types of fair use are fairly well established so no one will probably take you to court within those guardrails.)
Library Genesis has been a great alternative
Anna's Archive too
Same. I buy it and crack it.
I'll take my business to whichever distributor acknowledges my ownership of the book. Kobo is crackable, I believe.
Also lib gen.
You can remove the drm using calibre+dedrm. Legality may vary based on your locality.
I had an issue with calibre+dedrm not working as of early 2024 (possibly due to an update the the DRM used by Amazon). Have you had luck doing this recently?
no I've not used it for a while, and I never will after the 26th.
Amazon is removing the ability to download (DRMed) copies of Kindle book to your local store.
How do you read it on your device if it is not downloaded?
Yup. Next Wednesday (2/26) is the last day.
It's ok boys, now you're allowed to pirate all books ever published as long as you don't seed.
My strategy is to read a pirated copy for 2-3 chapters and then decide whether I want to buy the book. It's similar to the 90s when I used to read volumes and volumes in a bookstore but only with enough money to buy one or two every quarter.
BTW I wish No Starch ships cheaper to Canada. It quickly adds up when I buy more. One of the best publishers out there I think.
And apparently, as long as you don't read them, if you only need a license to view...
I hope the huge new antipiracy push that is coming will require litigators to prove that you're actually viewing the material you pirate.
Which would make Plex and friends with their metrics a bad idea to trust with all of your pirated content.
Though the antipiracy push is going to focus on the torrent sites themselves.
The torrent sites is how meta and friends get their books. They are safe.
Amazing how quick that story blew over.
wow i hadn't heard that before!
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
Teenage me who wanted information to be free didn't imagine this would be the result.
It's like everything I wanted to happen in the 00s did, but from the monkeys paw.
The only way I can think of fixing this is by giving rights to flesh and blood people that corporations don't have.
GPL? Humans only.
Free speech? Humans only.
Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi.
> Even if Jupiter is allowed to do it, that doesn't mean a cow is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quod_licet_Iovi,_non_licet_bov...
Very apt. The average individual downloader-not-seeder wouldn't have 1/10th of the cash required to fight a legal battle in court, whereas large firms seem to be able to just do whatever they want.
The average person is put through hell and bankrupted. The large firm, at worst, pays a fine that amounts to some fraction of quarterly profit.
Personally I really don't like the whole downloading-but-not-seeding approach. The whole point of p2p networks is to receive and to give and spread. Back in the day it was the leecher clients that got banned because they were amoral and breaking the system.
Buy books from responsible publishers. And please keep seeding the things you torrent that can't be purchased anywhere. And when I'm looking for that classic undubbed Jackie Chan movie and you are the single seeder making it possible to still get it, I salute you from the very bottom of my heart.
Almost the worst thing about Amazon and this gouging way of renting books is that it ‘legitimizes’ piracy. My partner works in publishing and we know a lot of authors. If you think piracy is going to sustain that industry and give you and your children books to read in the years and decades to come, you’re very mistaken.
As an author, I barely get any money from Amazon. In some cases, with the cut Amazon and the publisher take, I make a few pennies on a $30 book.
If you buy my book directly from my publisher's website, I'm extremely grateful. I get a fair amount for that. If you buy it from a local bookstore, at least they benefit.
But if you buy it from Amazon, you might as well just get it from Anna's Archive. At least you're not supporting the jungle.
I would love to buy ebooks directly from publishers, but publishers generally sell ebooks with DRM just as bad as Amazon's DRM, if not worse. If publishers insist on vendor lock-in, then I might as well stick with Kindle where most of my ebook collection already is.
I contacted a well known author about the shit latex rendering of his ebooks on Amazon. He said sorry and send me the a pdf copy he build with my name on all the pages. I really like the fact that I have a book dedicated to me by the author, but why the fuck do we need Amazon in this interaction?
In fairness you are the reason for needing Amazon. If you purchased it elsewhere Amazon would cease to exist.
It was the only place where you could purchase the ebook.
and that would be bad?
Lot of people have asked that question ever since Amazon (Platform Economy[0]) emerged. But the answer is not simple.
This is why experiments like ONDC[1] (being pushed by the Indian Govt) are interesting. They want an alternative path between producer and consumer with out a middleman (Platform). Similar to how email works based on open protocols. Or UPI which has reduced dependence on Mastercard/Visa.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_economy [1] https://ondc.org/learn-about-ondc/
What’s an authors perspective on libraries, including ebooks from apps like Libby?
Do authors not have agents any more? If an agent is that bad at negotiating residuals why even have them.
Because your own ability is even lower, and nobody else gets any more?
Can you clarify if you're talking about physical and/or ebooks?
Both.
huh, the publisher i work for pays 25 perecent of net receipts on ebook sales. and we’re an academic nonprofit org.
Then why do you sell on Amazon?
Publishers decide where to sell, not authors.
I know you probably don't have the option since it's part of the publishing contract, but if you could, would you opt out of being listed on Amazon and just sell direct from the publisher's site?
Plenty of books I've tried to purchase epub or PDFs of only have Kindle rental versions.
If the publishers of these authors wanted me to let me own a PDF, I'd gladly purchase, but until they actually do that I have several easy alternatives to getting sucked into Amazon's ridiculous ecosystem.
And this is a larger subset of books I want to buy than I would want, surprisingly.
I say the same thing about GNU licensed software: if the author just gave me my preferred licensing terms, I wouldn't be forced to use it in proprietary software without compenstion.
> without compenstion
A key point here is that GP expressed a willingness to pay. The analogy would be attempting to license a piece of GPL software that you've decided to integrate into your proprietary stack and being outright refused for ideological reasons. Still illegal but people are probably going to perceive it a bit differently.
How is pirating books to read them by myself comparable to proactively selling other people's work?
Neither belonged to you in the first place.
And yet, one of these options is much more benign than the other.
nope.
I think it’s wrong to pirate books, but making it harder and harder to use the thing someone buys will push people to pirate. The onerous DRM from the likes of publishers and Amazon will eventually back fire on them. They are fighting hard to not have books end up like music, but I feel it’s inevitable.
I think it's contextual whether it's even wrong to pirate books. A new book that just came out? Sure. If I want to read a copy of "Titus Groan" by Mervyn Peake, who died in 1968, you'd have to do some marvelous convincing to make me feel bad about pirating it. Piracy would be wrong if the copyright system was reasonable. As is, it's the lesser of two evils compared to following the law as written.
What's that capitalist moniker: adapt or die.
When we pay for a good, be it digital or physical, we want possession and ownership of that good.
When your class of people demand 'licenses to read' instead of the actual ownership of the book, you can shove it.
I would rather pay pirates to get actual non-DRM books than buy the temporary permission to view., especially since the eBook is more expensive.
I will buy physical books, drm-free books, and pirate. I'm not paying hard earned money for a temporary license.
If your publishers and authors can't understand first sale doctrine and actual ownership, then you can close up shop and quit.
We need an AI that produces the text of a book, from a video of it as you flip through its pages. No special hardware, just a phone and a thumb. If a few pages get missed it can ask you to do it again.
Moniker or not, I don't see Amazon or Kindle going anywhere anytime soon.
well, patreon definitely sustains the industry
people on royalroad make $10K a month, many more make over $1K...
and then there's AO3, the monster in the dark with everything for everyone
Well it does - if the business of Amazon is immoral, buying from them is immoral. Therefore piracy becomes the lesser evil.
Or patronize your local library.
I think the library would get upset at the way I highlight my books.
Only if you have Meta's budget for lawyers.
Or $5/mo. Just enough for a VPN
Only if you don't get caught.
It's not really the same thing. A VPN is a way to avoid getting caught. Meta's legal defense is an attempt to avoid getting punished after getting caught.
A VPN won’t protect you.
If they start logging and one of their customers gets sued, their entire business model is finished. So, why do you say it won't protect you for pirating?
Fingerprinting is pretty effective, no VPN will stop that.
How exactly does a bitorrent client fingerprint help anyone track you down?
Are there even any effective device fingerprinting methods for torrent clients? Given that it's a UDP protocol it's probably going to be pretty hard to get much useful information about the device aside from what the client might intentionally provide.
There are so many incredible works of literature that I’ve yet to read available in glorious DRM free epub on Standard EBooks and Project Gutenberg, I don’t know why I’d deal with this shit for imaginative fiction .
I would at least suggest buying a copy (not from Amazon) first, the author deserves a cut IMO and books tend to be relatively cheap. Kobo's store does have DRM, but it's easily bypassed by Calibre, or you can buy elsewhere (local is always good if possible) and then pirate an ebook copy.
I think there's an ethical way to both get free use of what should be yours to use, and also support the people who made it.
> Kobo's store does have DRM, but it's easily bypassed by Calibre
I'd say this is the case for Amazon as well, if you have an actual Kindle. I was able to convert my whole library to standard epubs last weekend using Calibre.
You’re lucky. There are now some KFX protected files that the DeDRM plugins don’t work against. I expect it to get tougher and tougher going forward.
Only until Feb 26th. After that they will be permanently locked.
https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/download-kindle-books-to-comput...
How were you able to do that? You can still download to USB but that is going away. I'm not aware of any way to convert the files on a recent Kindle to epub, does that exist?
Yeah I believe calibre can pull the files from the kindle as well as push to it. But I've only got an old kindle not a new one.
> Kobo's store does have DRM, but it's easily bypassed by Calibre
See, but that's not actually the same thing as DRM-free. It's adversarial interop that's temporarily allowed to work, but if said interop becomes popular enough the publishers will force Kobo to fix it.
At this point I'm really only interested in spending money on books that I can actually own—either physical copies or (where available) fully and legally DRM-free ebooks. I want my purchases to send the right message to publishers: that DRM-free can work.
A fair number of the books I've bought for my Kobo are drm free.
Is there a way to know beforehand if the e-book from Kobo is DRM or not? I thought they were all DRM free, but the last book I bought suddenly was DRM and haven't yet bothered to research (I have a couple of different size e-readers and just copying the file over has been handy.)
If they're DRM free it will be in the description. If you want to get rid of that DRM all you need is Calibre, a plugin called DeDRM... you open the ASCM file in the Adobe Editions program, copy the file from the root folder into Calibre, and that's it. DRM gone.
Yeah, and that's great! Where that's an option I'll definitely go for it. I'm just uninterested in spending money on a book that has DRM, regardless of how easy it is to bypass. I think it sends the wrong message.
Sure, then you can always buy a physical copy and pirate a digital one.
Kobo actually offers plenty of DRM-free books too. Google Play Books work the same way as well - either no DRM or Adobe's.
combine Meta's statement with the WEF statement "You'll own nothing and you'll be happy". And you'll start to get a feel for the asymmetric "rules based order" the elites envision for the plebs.
It’s funny but predictable that the same website that has always said that piracy is a-okay changes its mind as soon as it’s Facebook who’s caught pirating stuff.
[flagged]
Zuck?
This is the result of a recent law in California:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24254922/california-digit...
And it's also the result of policy changes that Amazon is making in a few days:
https://www.theverge.com/news/612898/amazon-removing-kindle-...
From the article you linked:
>The new law won’t apply to stores that offer “permanent offline” downloads
Amazon is actively choosing to do this to maintain an even tighter grip on their ecosystem
Thank you California!
That button should say "Rent this book".
Claiming you can "Buy this book" is a lie and false advertising.
Yeah. I "bought" a Kindle copy of There Will Be War awhile back to get access to a few of the short stories in the collection.
After reading about how they're taking away downloads I went and downloaded all of my books and found that at some point they must have lost the license to that book because I no longer had access to it.
Love it when my "purchases" can be taken away from me with no recourse. edit: and I was never even informed that the book had been taken away. It just is there in my collection with a few invalid characters at the front of the title and no cover picture. The link goes to a page that doesn't exist. And searching for it shows only paper copies now by third parties. So I know this isn't just a bug in the system.
I built a DRM system for the major record labels. If you moved your music to a new computer it had to download a new license. It was disheartening reading that they shut down the license server in 2009. I read a lot of posts from suitably aggrieved buyers.
I'm glad the government is forcing companies to be a little more honest about these "purchases." These companies wouldn't have done it on their own.
Of course, someone will say it is government overreach and competition will solve this instead.
This does not happen with the Kindle Store.
Anything you've purchased will remain in your library unless:
1) You delete it (which can happen by accident, due to some bad UX).
If you have done this, you can contact Amazon Support and they can re-add it to your library for free. It's not possible to delete your purchase history on the Amazon website, and that includes all Kindle books.
Whenever I've seen people claim that digital content has gone from their Amazon account, it always turns out to be either:
a) They didn't buy it on Amazon in the first place.
b) They bought it on a different Amazon account.
> This does not happen with the Kindle Store.
It has, in fact, happened: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18am...
Not saying that's what happened in this case, but it has happened, and it's a great example of why having your books (or any media) locked up in a walled garden is a terrible idea. (though this is far from being the only objectionable angle)
I can't believe this sort of stuff is legal/passes the regulation.
Is it really fine for them to say "Buy this book *You aren't really buying it"? I guess we've seen "No bandwidth caps *We can arbitrarily cap your bandwidth". Could a food manufacturer say "Contains no nuts *Made on an assembly line that produces nut products"?
It's okay to lie to people, just not that much. Corporations don't operate above the law, they operate X% below the law where that % grows the larger they are because the cost to prosecute X% is too high, so all of them do it.
Does it say “Buy this book” anywhere?
It says "Buy now with 1-click"
alias book="license"
>Amazon Now Openly Discloses You’re Buying a License to View Kindle eBooks
"disclosure" of information sounds like a good thing, but in terms of contracts, "a disclosure" is actually "a restriction/limitation" that you are agreeing to. This is Amazon "disclosing" that it is you who is not actually buying a copy of something.
Yes, it's better for you that limitations are disclosed, but the salient point is the limitation, not the disclosure.
At least it creates a situation where any vendor that does offer "true" purchases will stand out. There's a chance for disruption here.
What would a true purchase of digital content look like? Just the lack of DRM? You could still lose your copy and the company you purchased it from could no longer exist.
Just like you could lose a physical book or the publisher could disappear? It feels like you're doing some reductio ad absurdum right now...
You buy a digital, DRM-free file. It is yours forever. If you lose it (bad storage, malware, deletion), it's gone. It doesn't mean that it wasn't yours. It doesn't mean that anybody owes you a new copy in perpetuity. It doesn't make any of that "fake ownership".
The way most online stores let you buy music is drm free. Seems like a no brainer that this is how it works.
I mean if I lose my copy of any media I own and the seller that provided isn’t around, that’s on me, right?
the flag flies high and the seas are smoother than they've ever been.
Anchoring in Port Anna, are ye, or are there any other exciting harbours to set sails to, fellow adventurer?
The ePub comes from Port Anna, then a quick sanity check via EPUB FIX [1] then finally to the official amazon.com/sendtokindle
All of the above if you want a wireless experience, you can just use Calibre and plug in the reader via USB for a smoother experience.
[1] https://kindle-epub-fix.netlify.app/
Thanks for the useful link! I guess I am being overly paranoid, but I always also add a virus total check on top of it to make sure the file is clean [1] [1] https://www.virustotal.com/gui/home/upload
Or better yet, jailbreak your kindle before the hole is closed, install koreader, and read epub natively. It's a much better reader compared to the built-in one anyway.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43073969
/sendtokindle seems a bit brave if you obtained your epub off the back of a lorry..
Myanonamouse
Oh what I’d pay for a 100% legal version of Plex (e.g. allows me to easily buy and stream my media)
Someone should create a video streaming service with a vast catalog. That'd attract all the subscribers even at a higher subscription cost, and they'd surely be able to pay their licensing fees. So long as they don't need to grow infinitely for their shareholders and enshittify their offerings, it will be a sustainable and profitable business[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros
Interesting quote.
I don’t think I would ever buy an e-book. It makes no sense to me. If I want a copy for my personal collection I’ll keep it in hardcover. Otherwise I’ll just use Libby and check it out when it becomes available.
There are cases where I will toss an independent author a few dollars in exchange to read their book, but there’s no way I would ever pay Amazon or another publisher.
I really want to find a good way to buy DRM-free ebooks. Libby was great early on and is still fine, but at least in my library system the wait times for a lot of titles are measured in months.
I know some people make this work by just having a queue that's constantly cycling, but I don't read print books (as opposed to audiobooks) like that. There's only a subset of all books that I would ever want in print at all, and when I want them I want them for a specific purpose (to consult for a quote or something) now, not months from now. Purchased ebooks fill that role, but I'm only interested in buying if they're DRM-free.
Some publishers sell DRM-free e-books directly on their website. This is the best way to buy books, because it grants the greatest amount of money to the original author.
If you browse on Kobo, each book will tell you if it's DRM-free or not. Lots of small publishers will also sell books directly from their website, DRM-free in my experience. And Humble Bundle book collections are DRM free too.
> And Humble Bundle book collections are DRM free too.
Not all of them. I've had at least one bundle where you redeem it via the Kobo store for DRMed ePubs. Most I've got via Humble Bundle have been DRM-free though.
Ebooks.com has a filter for DRM free ebooks, unfortunately it's only a small subset of publishers that allow it currently
In retrospect all the ebooks I bought were a waste of money because I can't get them off Kindle easily, if at all, to digest via an LLM.
You can (could?) get all of them up until the end of the month when Amazon removes the ability to download them from your amazon.com account page.
There may or may not be easily findable plugins for [popular ebook desktop app] to remove the DRM.
I buy ebooks, remove DRM, and store them on my network storage drive so I can read them on any device I own.
Calibre and DeDRM are the apps you're looking for; DeDRM doesn't include the decryption keys, you'll need to supply your Kindle's serial number or extract the keys from an old version of the Kindle app.
Yeah I did this with all the kindle books I ever bought before switching to a Kobo. Just need to try and get my partner out of the Amazon ecosystem now.
Awhile back I worked with someone who wrote a script to scroll through ebooks he purchased, screenshot each page and then aggregate the screenshots into a single PDF file.
The simplicity of the approach seemed pretty awesome
I’ve bought some stuff from sites like Humble Bundle. I think that’s still okay
When I delay amazon shipping til the next week, they give me digital credits. I have over $35 in digital credits right now. I love to spend them on ebooks to support an artist or author directly with them bezos bucks.
I buy a lot of hardcovers but sometimes an ebook is just easier to read
There are times when I would like to read a book on a digital device, without waiting for weeks for it to become available.
Oh, if Libby does it, you are paying already. My local library has almost nothing.
Support your local bookstore, before they are all gone.
Physical copies of books might be tough if space is at a premium, but I love having a bookshelf. I can quickly look back to specific books or chapters or notes or whatever. Plus it gives my guests something to talk about - they can instantly see what I've read and how they can relate to me or my interests.
Disclaimer: I've never used this service and I don't know if it lives up to its promises.
bookstore.org ebook purchases can support your local (participating) bookstores[0] by a revenue sharing arrangement. Their DRM set up looks dodgy, though? It's not clear whether they use Adobe under the hood or how easy it is to get the files to then DeDRM. Maybe paying for the license (and making sure to nominate a bookstore) through there and making or acquiring a DRM-free copy to keep can be the best of both worlds, at least as far as supporting local bookstores goes.
If anyone has experience with bookstore.org I'd love to hear about it
[0] https://bookshop.org/info/ebooks
Maybe not a super popular opinion on HN, but this effectively changes nothing for me. I love reading on my kindle, by far the most convenient way to buy and read books for me (esp when traveling often).
It’s good that they are now being upfront about it, but it won’t impact my buying behaviour and it won’t for the majority of readers.
My daughter will grow up with direct access to my entire library of books and all other media, and I'm beginning to think (assuming we have any kind of future beyond current and future crises) that's going to be an enormous advantage for her.
If you somehow acquired the ePub by some other means, you can still side-load it to your Kindle, correct?
and like that, the frog boils
"doesn't affect me!" Yet.
Will there ever be a "Bandcamp for books"? Or is there already such a thing?
Looks like Stallman was right, again. https://www.stallman.org/amazon.html
You’ve still got a couple days to download (DRM’d) copies of the books before they remove that option!
I just finished importing mine in Calibre and converting them all to epub
Why bother? Just download them off of LibGen, and save it on your hard drive. If you have bought them on Amazon, you have already paid off your debt metaphorically and literally
I don't know the details of the law, but I'm morally 100% OK with that. If I bought a copy of a book, I feel completely justified in reading it in whatever format's convenient for me. By analogy if I buy a DVD, I might rip it and watch it on my computer. I don't draw a moral distinction between ripping a copy of that DVD and downloading a ripped copy of it: the end result is a .mov file on my hard drive. Well, same with physical books and epubs. I could morally (and I'm pretty sure legally) scan and OCR that book myself as long as I don't distribute copies of it, so downloading seems to me to be just skipping the labor step in the middle.
Maybe it does not matter, but I paid for _that_ file dammit. I only go to pirate stuff I already paid for if I somehow get locked out of the purchase.
by that time, it could be too late.
How?
here ya go: https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/02/how-to-bulk-download-kind...
I did this just yesterday… the calibre reader is a hot mess but getting and decoding the books was a breeze
Note that this method is only going to work for four more days! I imagine that soon this will only be possible via jailbreaking, which is always a PITA
I have bought books from Amazon and Manning.com, mostly technical books. I have to say, I am so happy with the business model of Manning.com:
- they offer good quality books
- they also offer a subscription where you can view all books and download one book per month
- when you buy a digital book, they give you the book in several formats (kindle and pdf)
- you can read the ebook in multiple devices
O'Reilly should follow the same business model.
>O'Reilly should follow the same business model.
They used to, but they have their subscription service now.
You can still buy O'Reilly books DRM-free from the major ebook sellers.
Many years ago I started splitting my purchases between Amazon, Google Books, and Apple Books. It is a small nuisance but it felt better than using a single vender.
Now I mostly buy from Kobo and labor.fm and many of the books they sell are DRM free. Often the prices are better also.
The comments here are an interesting juxtaposition with some other posts on HN today with people arguing about supply and demand and markets. There's plenty of here people saying they're willing to pay for a DRM-free book, and some indications that authors are willing to sell them, but the market won't let that happen because it doesn't leave any room for oligarchs to leech money at every step.
Feels relevant to post this here. Guy called it in 2008. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/keep-control-of-your-computin...
I can't say I predicted this, but this sort of thing is why I bought a kobo instead of a kindle. Of course, for all I know Rakuten is worse than Amazon on this issue, but so far so good...
I can't believe anyone feels the need to buy digital copies of books anymore, especially from companies who have very obviously pirated every copyrighted work in existence as part of their AI offerings.
I spend a few thousand (USD) a year for content on my Kindle. Super convenient, I always have something to read when I want it.
This would only be acceptable if the ebooks cost 5 to 10% of what the physical book costs.
It would be nice if more physical copies of books came with a sort of passport for all major digital versions.
In other words, Amazon has technically and officially stopped selling Kindle books.
Well, no, they never sold Kindle books, they just decided to say so in fine print under the Buy button rather than in even finer print in the ToS.
Where's a good place to pirate audio books these days? Is bittorrent still where it's at?
For audiobooks, instead of pirating I would recommend https://libro.fm - you can buy them DRM free and they donate part of the proceeds to your library of choice.
Doesnt directly answer the question, but nowadays there are good and free TTS that will essentially turn your entire ebook to an audiobook. (Elevenlabs Reader for example)
I like these tools for content where no narration exists (especially for proofreading my own writing) but they aren't anywhere near as good as a good human narrator. e.g: https://youtu.be/LPZrReZ5H9Q?t=103
Doesn't directly relate to your comment, But I hate ElevenLabs for purchasing Omnivore and shutting it down.
Same way I feel about HP for doing the same to Palm
Basically torrent is the best option, check readarr.
I heard a bloke at the pub mention audiobookbay dot various TLDs. I have no idea if that's true or not.
What doesn’t make sense to me, is there is a more of a need than ever to own copies of the books we read. People will be creating their own RAG of the books they are reading to make use of the knowledge and expand upon the teachings. This way of thinking of licensing is antiquated. I’m sure Amazon will make some “Kindle LLM” but hopefully by then the industry is radically disrupted.
Is this at all informative? I think the fact that we're buying a license goes without saying, it's the terms of said license that matter, so I don't think this adds any useful information.
The page really needs to specify all limitations that differ from a physical copy, which would be non-revocable, transferable, worldwide, unlimited in time, geographic location, and method of consumption, etc.
Is it really that obvious? I genuinely don't know which services allow a permanent download that will continue to work in perpetuity and those that don't. My understanding of file formats gives me some insight but - I shouldn't need to know that and some smart, technical people don't have that knowledge.
Not to you and me, but there seem to be a lot of people who don't understand the principle and think they're actually buying a ebook.
But - yeah - this is not informative at all. Amazon did the least amount of work necessary to formally comply with those new California requirements (I suspect this is what it's about) about the language on digital licensing.
It's something, though. But I agree it would be nice to have a license summary label, like those broadband facts labels or nutritional labels.
What would actually mean to “buy” an ebook? The concept of ownership doesn’t really make sense for digital goods — no matter how you define it, it will be meaningfully different from owning a physical object.
It would simply mean to own an individual digital file, which would only be restricted by copyright law itself, no contracts.
I buy kindle / apple books completely for the convenience factor: formatting, delivery, cloud service and occasional updates. Though, I do wish there were some kind of change log for what they updated.
That's why I always recommend people buy Kobos. far superior product, far superior reading experience, and you get the extra bonus points of not throwing more money at fucking bezos
Yeah, I just got a Clara BW recently - really liking it so far!! My first e-reader. There was no possible way I was going to get Amazon's e-reader.
They should be obligated to offer refunds.
This is fine. Text is some of the most free information on the Internet. And I am small enough to be unencumbered by licensing concerns.
we are quick owning less and less things
all that remains is we become happy. where’s my soma?
Facebook found the solution to all these shenanigans
Unless it's physical and in my possession I will pirate it.
Amazon should be forced to refund every last Kindle book sold previously, and these “disclosures” (which basically seem like consumer fraud) should be required to be displayed in huge fonts during the purchase process, not fine print.
Well they can go fuck themselves with their books, Kindles and licenses.
Personally I've never had even slightest inclination to "buy" books this way.
People, buy an EPUB direct and send it to the kindle app or to Apple Books.
Do not get locked out of your library.
Every now and then when I’m lugging around a book or lamenting that my bookshelves are full, I wonder if ebooks and a Kindle would be simpler, better. Then Amazon does something like this and I’m reminded the headaches are worth it.
I've only ever bought DRM-less epub (mostly books from John Scalzi and a couple of other authors). I won't pirate, because I refuse any DRM-laden shite as a question of principle.
My dream regulation would be that they can't use the word "buy". Call it license, rent, subscription, etc. but your not buying anything.
There was Jim Baen, and he said it all.
(also did)
Just another opportunity to remind everyone that every kindle can now be jailbroken.
you can pirate as long as you don't seed.
never forget: https://xkcd.com/488/
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