Another happy Kobo user, here. What surprised me most is it keeps getting updates—improving both the interface and speed—despite being a device from 2012.
But I am also surprised to learn that some software-only features are not included in updates to older devices. I have a Kobo Glo, and despite having finished an update less than fifteen minutes ago I don’t have the Dropbox syncing feature.
I stongly encourage anyone who uses a kindle for reading ebooks to back up their library via Calibre. If Amazon tried this rediculousness theres still a way to get all your content back via plugins that can convert them to plain epub. Unethical? Not if they steal from you first.
Worth pointing out that Amazon is busy killing this route too.
The latest format is to my knowledge currently unbroken - even with suitable plugins. So only way around is to get an old kindle which doesn’t support the new encryption and thus falls back on the old encryption
It's a cat-and-mouse game, to be sure, and the cat has orders of magnitude more money to protect the cheese. Nonetheless, I'm confident whatever new encryption method they introduce will be broken in time.
At the end of the day, as long as the decryption is protected by a key that is held somewhere on the Kindle device, hackers will find a way of exposing that key.
Be aware that by default it will be very aggressive about updates; after installing you immediately need to disable automatic update in settings, and be wary thereafter of surprise upgrade request prompts at startup and during usage.
Sometimes I consider myself lucky that most of the things I read, except for technical books, exist in the public domain.
I'm really not comfortable that my license of reading could be revoked. Or if the company somehow died, or if the kindle program is terminated, or if the relationships with the publisher deteriorate, my content will vanish.
I gained this anxiety when Netflix pulled away "House M.D.", which I binged watched until just before Season 8. Life became busy and I had to stop. When I came back, eagerly wanting to watch the last season, it was already gone from the catalogue.
TV shows, I can forego; book collections I cannot.
When one day I no longer reside in a small apartment, I'll probably go back to buying physical copies.
I live in a small studio and mostly read physical books. Probably a 50/50 between borrowing from the library and buying physical copies, I have a few bookshelves. The entire concept of having a license to read a book (which, as we've seen, can be revoked randomly) is ridiculous once you stop and think about it.
It is, but I hate lugging around big books that I can't properly read in a hammock, after dark, ...
Being able to read on my phone or a featherlight e-reader is absolutely fantastic. Before that, easily more than half of my vacation luggage was books. I don't need to lug around a tome everywhere just so I can read on the subway. That's worth a lot to me.
> I gained this anxiety when Netflix pulled away "House M.D."
To be clear Netflix didn't pull House, NBC Universal pulled it from Netflix and sold it to Amazon Prime. It's likely it will get pulled from Amazon Prime and end up on Peacock.
If you bought the book anyway I don't think it's unethical to unlock them no matter what. The author got paid, the content delivery mechanism got paid.
Considering everyone got their money, it's unethical to have any DRM on the book at that point.
I agree with your statement, yet the argument is that you are purchasing a license to consume the eBook and enforcement of that license is partially guaranteed by DRM built into those licensed copies, and since in some jurisdictions it is ilegal (immoral/unethical?) to break DRM and breach the license than, legally you shouldn't do that.
Edit: personally, I don't like to be told how I should compute so I reserve the right to do what I want with bits (state of my sillicon) I have. Regarding IP of the content: I make sure not to distribute things I'm not licensed to distribute.
Honest question: where does it say you're purchasing a license to read the book, and not a book? If it's buried in fine print, I'd say that's deceptive. If it says "buy this book" on Amazon, then customers have every right to expect they are buying books, not licenses.
> Upon your download or access of Kindle Content and payment of any applicable fees (including applicable taxes), the Content Provider grants you a non-exclusive right to view, use, and display such Kindle Content an unlimited number of times (for Subscription Content, only as long as you remain an active member of the underlying membership or subscription program), solely through a Kindle Application or as otherwise permitted as part of the Service, solely on the number of Supported Devices specified in the Kindle Store, and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider.
It's clickwrapped, of course. No doubt the argument would be that, whether you read this or not, you agreed to it as a legally binding contract when you "bought" a Kindle book.
I'd like to see it really tested in court, but I don't expect to. For that to happen would probably take a very high incidence of people's accounts and/or access to paid content being revoked for no reason, and as far as I know that doesn't happen anywhere near often enough to make it an issue under public consideration - not that it's other than wrong either way, but I would be surprised to see Amazon legal permit a tactical blunder that would risk the company being hauled into court and forced to behave as if they thought their customers deserved fair consideration.
Yeah, not a lawyer, yet I'm playing devil's advocate.
Your's is a fair statement of our state of affairs. All these content distributors rely on increasingly complex models of distributions that rely on people's lack of willingness (or ability) to comprehend what they are buying.
If I re-read books, I would have long ago switched to an alternative reader. But as it is, I’d actually like a "Remove everything I’ve read"-switch on my kindle. Books are purely a one-time thing for me, once I’ve read them, I’m done. Well, besides technical books, but those I buy on paper anyway.
Can you backup your DRM'ed ebooks with Calibre without striping the DRM? If so, I'd like to know how. I own a ton of Kindle ebooks and would be infuriated if Amazon randomly decided to delete them.
The kindle for pc software downloads your books on a folder. These are the encrypted versions with no real evident names to identify but it is a local copy that you can backup.
If you want to go the dedrm way It has been answered a little further down the thread:
And this is why I immediately strip the DRM protections of any kindle book I buy from the site, and can then use them on any device or app that handles the format (or an epub conversion). There's no good reason whatsoever to buy a digital good and leave it beholden to the sometimes shitty whims of whoever sold it to you. That's not a purchase or ownership at all. It's just a long term lease but without a defined expiration date.
Well no, it's not. You're purchasing a license to consume the content, conditional on the terms of the license. What gives you the impression you're buying the book?
It's an easy mistake to make when the page for acquiring the license presents you with a picture of a book and requires you click a button labeled "add to cart".
This[0] is a guide on exactly how to do it, but basically you install a Calibre extension[1], get your Kindle books (Calibre can automatically pull them from your Kindle, or you can download from Amazon.com), and import them. The plugin will strip the DRM as they are imported into Calibre.
The other reply to this covers it well. I'll just add one more thing. Some latest versions of the kindle app give you an edition of the ebook that can't so easily be stripped down with calibre. In these cases, a couple solutions exist: first, there's a certain plugin for calibre that does support DRM stripping, which can be installed to the calibre app (i'll try to find it and post here) and secondly (what I myself do), just download and install an old version of the kindle app for your desktop machine and download your purchases to that, they'll appear in their older format which can be DRM stripped via Calibre, and even converted to other formats like epub.
None of this by itself is promotion of piracy as far as I'm concerned, since we're just talking about gaining full control of the things we DID buy and paid for from Amazon, so I refuse to consider it "wrong" despite their tiresome efforts at DRM lock-in.
so to follow up, the issue revolves mostly around the newer Kindle KFX format, and because it's been a while since I've done any DRM strips through calibre, it might at this point not even be an issue due to some more recent update. If it is though, this post from 2019 covers the details of getting around this too.
She could file a small claims case, which would get the matter resolved in two months or so. At the very least she would get a refund for all the books she purchased. There is probably an arbitration clause somewhere in the shrinkwrap which would be to her benefit because it would be easier to handle everything by mail and she doesn't need a lawyer. I am sure there are loads of attorneys in Seattle who would be happy to take a small claims case for $500.
I'm guessing that a consequence of a small claims case (maybe even a chargeback?) would be being permanently blacklisted by Amazon across name, address, and other identifiers — like what happened to the Kindle owner in the first place.
Taking a company like Amazon to small claims would absolutely result in you being blacklisted - your rights are null and void as far as they're concerned. And yes, it is grounds for a lawsuit but at that point you should be talking to whichever government body is responsible for enforcing consumer protections.
Every Small Claims court I am aware of forbids attorneys, the entire purpose of a Small Claims court is to not need one, and if a large company shows up with one you the person are disadvantaged, so even Amazon would need to send a Representative of the company not a lawyer
She lives in Norway. How she would sue across the borders? I am not judging, but Americans are quite often too quick to assume that everything happens in the US by default.
We need a digital consumer rights law. Companies should not be able to revoke data or software. Software and hardware that depend on external servers should carry "expiration date" labels that define the minimum amount of time the vendor is required to maintain those servers. People should be allowed to run their own servers for abandonware.
We need a long think about digital survivorship: accounts/data should be able to be escrowed/put into Trusts for future generations. Most terms of service agreements are between you specifically and the company, and will not survive you. "Could I gift my account/purchases when I pass to my loved ones?" is currently "legally and/or technically no" on almost every digital goods service.
Even if we have mostly given up on the more general "right of first sale" and "first sale doctrine" on digital goods (that we can resell purchases as "used"), survivorship should not be forgotten.
I know this is really old, but I wonder if it has really been decided completely in all jurisdictions if this is legally ok or not, because on the German Amazon website the button for ebooks is very clearly labelled with the German word for "buy", and it is merely labelled as a different format like hardcover or paperback. There might be legalese buried elsewhere (while creating the account or activating the Kindle or whatever), but according to their own words you buy a book in the Kindle format, you do not rent access to it.
I buy Kindle books all the time, and would love to see this decided in court...
The best way to use Kindle devices is in airplane mode with Calibre. There's an incredible KFX8 plugin that turns any old non-DRM epub/mobi into the special format that Kindles use to render the text.
Basically any book can be gotten from libgen. I usually buy books from living authors, then let those live in the cloud as a backup. I get the pirated version for personal use. If the author isn't living anymore then I don't buy it at all.
Me too. Although it's worth noting that just buying a Kobo and using the associated store doesn't save you from this kind of thing in principle. While the books are formatted using epub, they're encrypted using Adobe's DRM system, meaning you need an account with Adobe which can be similarly revoked. Unless you're only ever reading books in the public domain, it's very hard to protect yourself from this nonsense without breaking the law in some way.
She got her collection back, but without any explanation and she could just as well get it deleted again. Without transparency and understanding which rules she broke, exactly, she (and every customer) is at the mercy of Amazon's whims.
I say Amazon, but just as easily it could have been Google, or Apple, or any other similar vendors of digital goods. There are enough horror stories out there.
Isn't this a case where the GDPR would come in handy?
She could demand a transcript of all data Amazon has collected on her. Under the GDPR Amazon can not refuse.
This data should contain the reason why her account was closed. If there is an error in the data, you can demand a correction. Under the GDPR Amazon can not refuse.
If the data does not give a valid reason for closing an account, it must be incomplete. A GDPR violation!
Punishment for GDPR violations are rather severe, I doubt any company would take the risk.
This is simply a workaround to a deeper problem with DRMs, we're simply renting an unlimited access (that can be revoked at any time, sometime with a valid reason and sometime not) of purchases.
I'm still appreciative of all those folks working in the shadow to break those protections and provide a DRM-free version, even if it's illegitimate.
The lack of details make it tougher to side with the apparent victim here. I'd like to know whether she really did violate DRM in a meaningful way and the closure of her Kindle account was an appropriate response. I wouldn't go so far as the author and claim that DRM means you merely rent books from Amazon and they can be taken away at any time. This is likely something that affects a very small percentage of users and is like a freak accident when it happens, though according to radical skepticism, freak accidents may be much more likely than we intuit. However I agree that the response from the Amazon representative must have been very frustrating to receive and this would cause Amazon significant problems if the same thing happened to a large number of users. In the end I hope writing such articles about the problem helps resolve it before it does affect a large number of users.
> The lack of details make it tougher to side with the apparent victim here.
What do you mean? The victim provided every detail (and in fact, she later got her account restored, no apologies or explanations given -- again). All details missing are by Amazon, which is precisely the problem: the company can terminate your account and delete the items you bought while providing absolutely no information whatsoever.
It's as if a brick & mortar book store reserved the right to enter your house and take back a book you bought, without explaining everything besides "you broke a rule".
The glitch in their fraud detection system is not the biggest issue; glitches happen. Their total lack of transparency and explanations is the problem.
