Quite right about being a 'system'. Society is made of systems, and therefore the kind of systems we allow to exist dictate how we live.
The Bitter Reality of Ebooks and the Kindle Model
11–20 of 65 posts
Re: The Bitter Reality of Ebooks and the Kindle Model
#12I wonder if NFTs could be a solution to ensure interoperability and resale value of ebooks.
No DRM neeeded, which are useless anyway since it's easy to download any book online, and it's all about the legal ownership title (the NFT) and possibly exclusive benefits for holding one (eg. access to author's community or events).
Re: The Bitter Reality of Ebooks and the Kindle Model
#13Some valid points here, but there's also a little bit to be said for the stability of Amazon. For now, at least.
I've bought an ebook or two directly from the author and I'm not sure I could find them any more, so it feels more like my money went up in smoke.
Another thing I don't love about those "buy it from me directly" people is they're not submitting their work to reviews. Yes, there are problems with review systems and they can be gamed, but I still think they're better than "hey, trust me".
Re: The Bitter Reality of Ebooks and the Kindle Model
#14I've had a Kindle of some sort since 2011 and not once have I read a book through Amazon... not due to avoidance on my part, just haven't needed to! My first device was an "ad supported" Kindle 4 but since I never signed in to Amazon with it, I never saw an ad. I read library books on a Kobo Touch and use the Kindle 10th gen for DRM-free, purchased e-books. Calibre is amazing. I've got fond memories of using Plucker on my Palm m505 to read books found on FTP sites back in the early 2000s and cleaned up with Perl.
Re: The Bitter Reality of Ebooks and the Kindle Model
#15It should be illegal to say "buy" when you don't get full rights. Call it "rent" or "lease", but "buy" should only mean "buy".
Re: The Bitter Reality of Ebooks and the Kindle Model
#16I've had a Kindle of some sort since 2011 and not once have I read a book through Amazon... not due to avoidance on my part, just haven't needed to! My first device was an "ad supported" Kindle 4 but since I never signed in to Amazon with it, I never saw an ad. I read library books on a Kobo Touch and use the Kindle 10th gen for DRM-free, purchased e-books. Calibre is amazing. I've got fond memories of using Plucker…
I, too, have had a Kindle since 2011 and never read a book through Amazon. Every time I purchased a new Kindle, I put it in airplane mode the moment I took it out of the box. Then, I just loaded books onto it over USB.
In fact, I have never paid for an ebook at all – already in 2011 the ebook filesharing community was well developed, and today LibGen and Anna’s Archive have 95% of everything I want to read in English. Through Internet Archive scans of library holdings, Anna’s Archive now has loads of fairly obscure twentieth-century publications that I never expected to see in digital form unless I, or some other member of the community, had scanned and uploaded them ourselves.
Re: The Bitter Reality of Ebooks and the Kindle Model
#17Not the ideal solutions, but they work: Try https://libgen.rs/ or https://zlibrary.to/
LibGen is great, Z-Library is a fairly controversial for-profit endeavour, but Anna’s Archive is now the best single recommendation. Not only does Anna’s Archive have all the LibGen and Sci-Hub stuff in its index, it also contains myriad publications that came from other channels like Z or Internet Archive.
Re: The Bitter Reality of Ebooks and the Kindle Model
#18I wonder if NFTs could be a solution to ensure interoperability and resale value of ebooks. No DRM neeeded, which are useless anyway since it's easy to download any book online, and it's all about the legal ownership title (the NFT) and possibly exclusive benefits for holding one (eg. access to author's community or events).
Check out https://book.io
Re: The Bitter Reality of Ebooks and the Kindle Model
#19Regarding taking your Kindle books with you... the standard recommendation is to use the DeDRM plugin[1] for Calibre to convert your DRM'd books into plain old ePUBs. My understanding (I'm not a lawyer) is that this is perfectly legal to do in the US, because you're allowed to remove DRM from content you've purchased (a license to) for personal use. [1]: https://github.com/noDRM/DeDRM_tools
This doesn’t work anymore with the latest version of Kindle DRM unfortunately.
It has been changed substantially
Re: The Bitter Reality of Ebooks and the Kindle Model
#20Regarding taking your Kindle books with you... the standard recommendation is to use the DeDRM plugin[1] for Calibre to convert your DRM'd books into plain old ePUBs. My understanding (I'm not a lawyer) is that this is perfectly legal to do in the US, because you're allowed to remove DRM from content you've purchased (a license to) for personal use. [1]: https://github.com/noDRM/DeDRM_tools
This doesn’t work anymore with the latest version of Kindle DRM unfortunately. It has been changed substantially
That's why the Kobo Libra 2 is superior especially the sunken screen which is more paper like than any other e reader I tried including Kindles.