Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 114 posts

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

#71

Post by politelemon »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #40
karaterobot wrote: post #30

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. Bu…

Bookshop.org sells ebooks now. There is DRM based on publisher specifications unfortunately. For DRM free books, I ship physical copies for scanning to get a PDF, which is not great unfortunately. https://bookshop.org/info/ebooks

IMO this is worse because the DRM books are limited to their app, and so completely locked away in their control. No possibility of reading on eink devices.

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

#72

Post by tene80i »

kenmacd wrote: post #41
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.

> 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'm all for also buying books, but my local library has all the books too, so it is sort of how the commerce of books works (at least where I live). Also if people are still buying ebooks or kindles from Amazon after the whole 1984 fiasco I doubt they're going to care abou…

Libraries are great! And authors get paid for that too. Win-win.

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

#73

Post by belter »

giaour wrote: post #67
belter wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowadays nobody writes books for money so yes, it hurts only Amazon.

That's not true. Just like in every other time, many authors rely on multiple income streams, but book sales are an important part of that. Amazon would love for your assertion to be true, but we're not there yet.

Sorry...it is: "The median author income for full-time authors from their books was $10,000 in 2022" - https://authorsguild.org/news/key-takeaways-from-2023-author...

"Nobody makes money from books" - https://malwarwick-98471.medium.com/nobody-makes-money-from-...

Exceptions and wildly successful authors are just the exceptions that confirm the status quo.

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

#74

Post by tene80i »

belter wrote: post #51
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.

Nowadays nobody writes books for money so yes, it hurts only Amazon.

A wild, unsupported claim. And even if any particular author doesn’t make a full living out of writing, that doesn’t mean you’re hurting them by not paying.

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

#75

Post by Rhea_Karty »

paulcole wrote: post #69
karaterobot wrote: post #30

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. Bu…

> So, it's not possible for me to legally buy books from them Lol of course it is, you just convinced yourself that stealing was a better option. Get on with Amazon support and tell them that you’ve been a loyal customer for a decade and have a Kindle that no longer authenticates but want to continue buying books from them. If they don’t offer you a free Kindle, tell them you want one for free. I’ve done this a few t…

This is insane... we should not be throwing away good tech because of planned obsolescence and relying on groveling to customer service to use tech that we bought...

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

#76

Post by stryan »

paulcole wrote: post #69
karaterobot wrote: post #30

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. Bu…

> So, it's not possible for me to legally buy books from them Lol of course it is, you just convinced yourself that stealing was a better option. Get on with Amazon support and tell them that you’ve been a loyal customer for a decade and have a Kindle that no longer authenticates but want to continue buying books from them. If they don’t offer you a free Kindle, tell them you want one for free. I’ve done this a few t…

Begging for free things is not a solution to this problem, we should stop allowing corporations to break our things.

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

#78

Post by pipingdog »

karaterobot wrote: post #30

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. Bu…

The changes to their whatsits are likely certificate expiration related.

For the longest time the rumor was that backward compatibility was mandated (through certificate gymnastics) by Jeff because Mackenzie had a 1st gen Kindle that she adored. I reckon nobody any longer gives a shit about that.

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

#79

Post by jrm4 »

giaour wrote: post #68
jrm4 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the whiners in the thread. Now, as a lawyer I technically can't recommend this, but: Consider someone who goes to the library, reads books, and then only buys them if they like them. There is no meaningful moral difference between this and so called "piracy" + buying later. Please, buy books and support authors. But also, don't pooh-pooh the entire point of the existence of libraries.

Libraries purchase the copies they loan out. In the US, libraries can typically only loan out an ebook a fixed number of times, and in other jurisdictions (like the UK), authors are paid per check out. Please check out a book from a library instead of pirating it; it's much better for the author and your community!

I agree that you should do this

but I also completely get why people don't

It's just SUCH AN ARTIFICIALLY STUPID process, basically actively engineering the technology to work worse than "by default." As in, it's literally more difficult to do this lending thing than to just dump the books on the device and have them all there forever with their essentially infinite storage space.

Post reply on HN