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Amazon's killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books

theverge.com

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Re: Amazon's killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books

#21

Post by nabla9 »

tene80i wrote: post #7
throwawaygmbno wrote: post #2

The simple solution is to stop buying eBooks from Amazon. Pirate all of your epubs and PDFs so you will always have an offline backup. If you enjoyed the book buy a hard copy for a friend, relative, book club, etc from a local book store. Amazon doesn't need your money anymore.

Your solution hurts authors more than Amazon. Just buy ebooks from somewhere else! Don’t be cheap and pretend it’s principled. I know you say buy a copy if you enjoyed it but that’s not really how commerce works and none of these authors agreed to offer you donationware.

If it's OK for Meta, the society accepts it.

Personally I'm glad to pay for a book later if author provides alternate method for payment. But to pay for the book just to flip trough it and decide it's not for me is not worth it.

Re: Amazon's killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books

#22

Post by agumonkey »

tene80i wrote: post #7
throwawaygmbno wrote: post #2

The simple solution is to stop buying eBooks from Amazon. Pirate all of your epubs and PDFs so you will always have an offline backup. If you enjoyed the book buy a hard copy for a friend, relative, book club, etc from a local book store. Amazon doesn't need your money anymore.

Your solution hurts authors more than Amazon. Just buy ebooks from somewhere else! Don’t be cheap and pretend it’s principled. I know you say buy a copy if you enjoyed it but that’s not really how commerce works and none of these authors agreed to offer you donationware.

Would be worth spending some community time to see what are the costs of improving non gafam or making a new distribution platform.

Re: Amazon's killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books

#23

Post by dvtkrlbs »

tejohnso wrote: post #13
tene80i wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your solution hurts authors more than Amazon. Just buy ebooks from somewhere else! Don’t be cheap and pretend it’s principled. I know you say buy a copy if you enjoyed it but that’s not really how commerce works and none of these authors agreed to offer you donationware.

> Just buy ebooks from somewhere else! Where can I buy ebooks (epub) that give me access to download the file so that I can copy it to my other devices and keep it on my own backups and organize it in my digital library the way I want to? I want a good selection of anime / manga / sci-fi, and a little bit of the typical best seller stuff.

I buy from Ebooks.com it comes with the adobe drm but it is super easy to strip using a calibre plugin

Re: Amazon's killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books

#24

Post by LoganDark »

tene80i wrote: post #7
throwawaygmbno wrote: post #2

The simple solution is to stop buying eBooks from Amazon. Pirate all of your epubs and PDFs so you will always have an offline backup. If you enjoyed the book buy a hard copy for a friend, relative, book club, etc from a local book store. Amazon doesn't need your money anymore.

Your solution hurts authors more than Amazon. Just buy ebooks from somewhere else! Don’t be cheap and pretend it’s principled. I know you say buy a copy if you enjoyed it but that’s not really how commerce works and none of these authors agreed to offer you donationware.

> I know you say buy a copy if you enjoyed it but that’s not really how commerce works

when I was younger I pirated all my OS X software because I couldn't afford it. That machine broke some years back (2021-ish) and I was on Windows for a while, but after I got a job I bought a Mac again and dropped probably over $500 on copies of all the software that I had once pirated.

I don't know how you think commerce works, but without piracy, a lot of this software I wouldn't even know exists, and certainly wouldn't have gotten my money, because I wouldn't have known at all which of it was worth buying to me. Sorry though for hurting all those authors by (eventually) giving them money.

Re: Amazon's killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books

#26

Post by dmd »

blakeburch wrote: post #6

This is... terrible news. This is primarily how I get books from the library. I found that if you keep the Kindle on Airplane mode and download + transfer them, they never expire. Nothing malicious. I just can't read books arbitrarily in a 21 day period.

This will not affect you at all. They're not stopping allowing you to transfer books to your kindle over USB. They're stopping letting you download book files from Amazon.

Re: Amazon's killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books

#27

Post by [deleted] »

throwawaygmbno wrote: post #2

The simple solution is to stop buying eBooks from Amazon. Pirate all of your epubs and PDFs so you will always have an offline backup. If you enjoyed the book buy a hard copy for a friend, relative, book club, etc from a local book store. Amazon doesn't need your money anymore.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon's killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books

#28

Post by muhehe »

haltcatchfire wrote: post #18
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kobo is pretty great. Good quality hardware and works well with Calibre.

It works - amazing - with Calibre actually. I set up Calibre-Web-Automated last week and setup my Kobo Libra 2 to sync with my Calibre server (swapping one url in a config file), and now my Kobo acts like my self hosted Calibre server is the actual Kobo Store, meaning I can browse and download all of my books. I think it syncs reading progress too.

Hey, this look neat. I'm not familiar with kobos, are they good (compared to kindles)? Does this require some sort of jailbreaking or are they quite open by default?

Re: Amazon's killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books

#30

Post by karaterobot »

I've got a 3rd generation Kindle. It's over a decade old, but it works flawlessly except that it can't authenticate with Amazon anymore, due to changes in their whatsits. So, it's not possible for me to legally buy books from them, which (according to me) gives me license to just pirate everything I want. Nobody will believe this, but I do buy physical copies of about 90% of the books I steal, if only used copies. But Amazon doesn't get a dime from me anymore.

I bring this up to mention how incredibly easy it is to sideload books into a Kindle (an old one at least; can't speak to the new ones).

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