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1. If possible, buy from the author directly (I mostly read tech books, so that's often an option).
2. Otherwise buy from elsewhere, without DRM.
3. If all other options fail, buy from Amazon but immediately download a DRM-free copy from libgen and use that.
This is both ethical and practical.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The USA has a lot of criminalised speech, despite the 1A. The most obvious historical example is "I am going to assassinate the president tomorrow at noon", but recently there have been a lot more things you can't say, such as "Fuck Donald Trump" which got someone arrested and deported.
One can have a visa revoked for any arbitrary reason, as they are a guest in the country and not a citizen. But yes, obviously serious threats of violence are not protected speech.
Don't force me to either get another AI to remove all the fluff, or to skim read.
There's an interesting article here, covered in a layer of AI slop.
For books only available through Amazon my workflow used to be buying it, downloading it with their desktop app, importing into Calibre, converting to epub and stripping DRM, then pushing it onto my Kobo. They broke that a while ago by making their DRM even worse, so now I just pirate those books.
I have to say that I usually only download ebooks illegally when the DRM stops me reading them! I only have Linux machines at my disposal and I have a PocketBook. The device is nice, but the store is truly abysmal. Often there is some adobe based DRM on books I want to buy and I never got it to work with my ereader. I just gave up and pirate them now, unless there is a DRM free version (authors like Ruther Bregman an…
For books only available through Amazon my workflow used to be buying it, downloading it with their desktop app, importing into Calibre, converting to epub and stripping DRM, then pushing it onto my Kobo. They broke that a while ago by making their DRM even worse, so now I just pirate those books.
Books have got to be the least expensive form of entertainment out there. The value to cost ratio is incredible. Consider buying books to support authors and publishers. If you can't afford it, then libraries are nice too. I personally know people who pirate books, but pay hundreds of dollars a year for streaming services or battle pass type video games. It blows my mind. Books are so cheap people! I recently bought…
Can't Amazon be sued for false advertising by having "buy" on the button when it is actually "rent"? #justasking genuine question on interpretation of the term in USA.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/i-like-plaintiffs-ch...
Lovely, great effort. I wonder if Kindle Web reader supports word search, but that probably just searches server side and then returns indexed selections. And how about copy-and-paste and accessibility, there must be some a11y support?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> they made it against the law to even tell anyone. I’m no fan of the DMCA, but I am pretty skeptical of your apparent claim that this post itself is a potential violation of 17 USC § 1201. Obviously the act of circumvention itself qualifies, as does the code in the GitHub repository the post links to, but can you point to any prosecution of someone for a _prose description_ of circumvention (as opposed to actually m…
I wonder how that will if/when LLMs get to the point where they can turn a blog post about a DRM liberation into code. (Are they there already?) These sorts of code are usually pretty short, right? It isn’t as if it needs to be maintainable or have a nice GUI.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tangentially related to the question of legality of prose describing otherwise illegal instructions, I'm reminded of the epic DeCSS haiku [1]. (CSS here being 90's era DVD DRM). [1] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/decss-haiku.txt
Content Scrambling System vs Cascading Style Sheets I do remember trying to learn CSS for web definitely made me feel like it was a Cascading Style Scrambling