That’s why I don’t download or purchase ebooks from Amazon, but only get them from places I can download a non-DRM’d copy. I’m not looking to break any laws, but if I pay for it, I want to be able to have it whenever I want even when the Internet is down. Recently a buddy gave me his old blu-ray juke box, and now I’m doing the same thing with my favorite movies as well. And building a home lab. It’s finally time I decreased (not completely ended) my reliance on the cloud, given the shit show my nation collectively voted for.
Where do you usually go to find the DRM free books? Sometimes for new books I am unable to purchase a copy without any sort of DRM
I pirate everything. Because fuck you that’s why.
My wife borrows a lot of ebooks from our library, which are delivered to a kindle through Amazon. I’ve used this USB download option to remove the DRM from some of those borrowed books. Guess I’ll have to figure out a new approach now…
Holy cow i just looked up a blue ray “jukebox” used the sony 400 disc one is like $900. That’s fucking crazy.
I think it’s worth noting that the bigger issue here might not be the drm, but the access Amazon has into your device. Regardless if you can download ‘another’ version of the book or not (that is something you can find out for yourself relatively quickly) there is no reason it should be considered ok for the company to insist that it can connect to a device you own and modify the contents of it. Even with ownership of the books being a topic, certainly there should be little questions of whether you own the device, and along with that being able to control access to it.
Surely there is something in the user agreement that states accessing the download functionality also grants Amazon permission to go in and claw back things they’ve uploaded to the device, but i think that should be at least half the argument. Restrict whatever they want up front, I’ve downloaded it to my device and they consider that a fair exchange for my money, but to then say they screwed up on their end so they’re taking it back (assumedly without giving up the money they made as part of the agreement) is where things should be breaking.
This is what the class war looks like in nuts and bolts…
Most idiots are not even aware of the original tragedy of the commons so they are doomed to be degraded into owning nothing and being happy to pay monthly fee to exist without as much as an objection.
After all, a normie got nothing to hide!
Reminder that piracy is a service issue.
100%. I have always pirated, but the amount of things I pirated went way, way down when Netflix had a decent library of things to watch and was affordably priced.
I moved from MA to NC and I miss my library every day. (I also miss other things.)
I stopped pirating altogether thanks to Spotify, Netflix and Steam.
But now I’ve cancelled Netflix and I have a 24 TB NAS filled with movies
Piracy is also a “We’re underpaid and can’t afford shit in this economy” issue. It’s ethcal to pirate since the rich steals from us all the time.
Knew this would happen
I sure am glad I got a Kobo for myself for Xmas and ripped all my books to it. Guess I’ll be recycling my Kindle for good.
I just got a Kobo color (don’t recommend the color feature; no book is ever going to use it except the red-letter Bible and House of Leaves) and gifted the old Kindle to a friend. I e-reader is an awesome gift actually because for a lot of people it’s something they would never evenly in years take a chance on, but that they would love it if they tried.
It’s semi-decent for comics if you massage them a bit
That’s interesting. What kind of massage are you talking about here?
Answered in the sibling, but this basically: https://github.com/ciromattia/kcc
Thank you!
Massage them…?
There’s a script, which I can’t remember now, that can optimise the pages by removing any margins etc so that there is no useless wasted space and every bit of display is used for content.
EDIT: found it -> https://github.com/ciromattia/kcc
The color might make more sense if you’re into manga or graphical novels as opposed to just ebooks
Interesting that you don’t recommend Kobo Color. I was thinking of gifting my mother a kobo but I might just go for a BW version.
To be quite honest I never allowed my Kindle or my Kobo to go online and the experience is not that different. The build quality on the Kindle is a bit better superior and I might well go back. Calibre is the real hero of the story IMO.
Look to whom you are giving the money. That is a very important part of the whole story.
If your model accepts a custom OS, some of them make decent e-ink displays for weather, family photos, etc. Things look good in the black and white ones especially.
Yeah I’ve actually thought about doing that and making it an office desk calendar or something. Thanks for reminding me!
I literally just installed caliber recently. Are they following my every move or something? Trying desperately to prevent other “near techky” people from leaving the market place?
Calibre is open-source: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre
So if it had telemetry, we would have heard about it.
No I mean, now that I got caliber they block book downloads.
Ah, gotcha. Yeah, I’ve been in that position a few times, actually; though usually it’s after I put it on a todo list. I was planning to switch to Linux, then Microsoft made Windows intolerable to use. I was wanting to buy a new laptop, then Tr*mp started a trade war. I had “back up my Amazon ebooks” on a todo for several months, and then this news comes out.
It’s like all of these companies and groups have decided to push me into doing stuff I wanted to do anyway.
I’m guessing audible will follow soon after.
I told people years ago. You don’t own those books.
I own my books… They are made out of this thing called paper and line the wall of my office. All the volumes I value I have of copy of for myself and future generations of my family
And mine are digital, DRM stripped, stored locally, backed up to my NAS, and cloud.
Don’t be a Luddite.
The optimist in me says they’re doing this to avoid piracy.
The pessimist in me says they’re doing this so they can purge books because of the Trump administration.
Either way, I can’t say I’m a fan.
both seem just as terrible to me
The optimist in me says they’re doing this to avoid piracy.
Won’t pirates just buy their source copies on a different platform, so now Amazon loses the original sale as well?
The “original sale” in that case is not even pennies. So… not sure why amazon would care?
Also: Many smaller authors basically depend on kindle because of the ease of use of the web portal and incentives to do larger discounts for their audiences. One of my favorite guilty pleasures has talked about exactly this (although he IS investigating alternatives).
And, much like with video games: The Sandersons of the world will be pirated. MAYBE a Dalglish will be too. But nobody cares enough to go after a Samphire or Shel.
Por que no Los dos?
You will own nothing and like it!
https://github.com/Jedi425/BulkKindleUSBDownloader
Quick script to download all your Kindle ebooks.
If you know any other tools, please reply.
Reposting as a top level comment for visibility. Thanks gitamar.
I am getting prompts from the script for “Your Amazon Oath”
Any idea where I can actually find/download this ?
That’s terrible…
Just fyi there is some good publishers like baen that still support and don’t plan on removing ebook format downloads.
This won’t stop users from removing DRM. There will always be a way to own your e-books.
I get my books for my used Kindle off Libby because I have no expectation of ownership and I don’t want to give Amazon the satisfaction of my money.
This is why I almost never get any Digital Book. The only digital books I have are books that were free either originally or through a giveaway, or that were severely discounted and I already owned physically. That’s also why I don’t buy movies or TV series digitally. You’re just renting these things, and you’re only renting them when you have an internet connection.
You can download and keep countless ebooks from https://annas-archive.org/
🏴☠️
Physical vs. DRMed digital is not a dichotomy. Personally for books, I do prefer paper ones - and mostly read in my language on paper. However, pretty much all non-fiction I read is in English, and getting it in paper would cost a fortune (English books are not sold here that much as we’re not an English-speaking country, and shipping would likely cost more than the book itself).
As for movies and music - it’s all digital DRMless as well, unlike books, there isn’t even a functional difference between a file from a tracker vs. a file from a DVD, except that you wouldn’t have to throw out a perfectly good disk after ripping.
Its possible to buy DRM free ebooks from itch.io and it is where I get everything that I can.
Adding on to this that Barnes and Noble sells DRMed ePUB files that are relatively easy to strip DRM from using Calibre.
So if you can’t find a book anywhere else, at least they don’t use a proprietary format and still allow you to download your books using their PC software.
I was a semi-early adopter in the ebook space and I have refused to get onboard with the kindle ecosystem from the start. There’s no reason for their proprietary format other than complete control over things they pretend to sell you. Amazon is also the Walmart of books and uses their position to browbeat publishers and authors into taking smaller cuts of sales.
One of my friends got a book published and I waited and waited for it to be available anywhere else. Eventually just bought what was probably a print on demand copy from Amazon because that’s the only place his publisher sold books. I never buy physical books anymore but I’d rather do that than buy a kindle book.
Do the non-kindle e-readers link to Libby? I may eventually try to get my wife and I off our kindles and she uses that when she can.
100% yes on Nook, and as far as I know Kobo hasn’t dropped compatibility.
I hate Amazon’s proprietary format too because one time it was the only download available and my reader just can’t display it!!
