71–80 of 149 posts
Combined with the announcement that they're killing the old Kindles as well...this is 100% about preventing people from liberating DRM from their books. Full stop. They are closing each and every remaining hole.
Combined with the announcement that they're killing the old Kindles as well...this is 100% about preventing people from liberating DRM from their books. Full stop. They are closing each and every remaining hole.
Which is silly because you can easily just use OCR and screenshots to create DRM free versions of Kindle books.
And OCR is generally just not accurate enough and still makes very visible mistakes throughout the text.
Have you read many OCR'd ebooks? I have, and every single one was massively inferior. Most I would consider barely readable.
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Not to mention it’s as easy to download books from Anna’s Archive as it is to buy them from Amazon. It’s weird going through so much effort to lock down books people already paid for. I wonder how much this is about making it difficult for people to migrate to another platform. I recently switched to Kobo and the reader is far superior to Kindle. I had a hell of a time moving my library though.
I suspect at least some of this comes from publisher pressure. An acquaintance works for one of the big global book publishers and his general sense from upper management is that they still hate having to sell digital books. It feels like the last major media industry that is holding out against a "future" that has been here for a long time already.
A vanishingly small % of would-be ebook buyers even know pirated ones exist, and an even smaller one knows how to get those onto their Kindle.
My wife buys dozens of ebooks per year on Amazon, her friends too. I'm guessing if I poll that group, none of them would even know where to start, nor care to.
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It’s sort of funny that this kind of thing could be, not just something that they will probably just get away with, but totally uncontested and not even surprising really. Just sorta like, yeah, obviously you don’t own your library and they’ll cut off access to it whenever they want!
Access to your library continues to be available with free apps on phone, or Windows, or a newer Kindle as well as any browser, so the loss of support of 14 year old mobile devices doesn’t seem like huge news. There can’t be too many still in use even.
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I stopped doing Kindle purchases in the last few years because I sensed they were going in this direction. There are tons of vendors that will give you an epub of most titles. They often come with Adobe DRM but the UX of breaking that is even easier than how it used to be with Kindle.
Sadly the Kindle Unlimited program has gotten so popular that if you wish to read anything independent, you basically can't without using Kindle.
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I stopped doing Kindle purchases in the last few years because I sensed they were going in this direction. There are tons of vendors that will give you an epub of most titles. They often come with Adobe DRM but the UX of breaking that is even easier than how it used to be with Kindle.
Sadly the Kindle Unlimited program has gotten so popular that if you wish to read anything independent, you basically can't without using Kindle.
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I got this April 8th: "Dear Customer, Thank you for being a longtime Kindle customer. We're glad our devices have served you well for as long as they have. Starting May 20, 2026 — 14 to 18 years after their initial launches — we are discontinuing support for Kindle devices released in 2012 or earlier. Here's what this means for you: You can continue to read books already downloaded on these devices, but you will not…
wtf. I’ve had my kindle since 2011, the battery still lasts weeks, it works perfectly, and I frequently praise Amazon for this. wtf. Will I be able to load books via USB? Or there is some new DRM the kindle won’t be able to decrypt?
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I'm pleased with OBOOK5. It runs Obook OS which is a Linux OS. Never nagged me to connect to WiFi or anything, I simply plugged a cable to transfer my local stuff. Also hearing good things about XTEINK X4.
I have an XTEINK X4. It's quite small, but if that's ok with you, then it's a fantastic little reader.