You don't own your Kindle books, Amazon reminds customer
www.nbcnews.com

This is not an anti-Kindle rant. I have purchased (rented?) several Kindle titles myself.

However, YSK that you are only licensing access to the book from Amazon, you don’t own it like a physical book.

There have been cases where Amazon deletes a title from all devices. (Ironically, one version of “1984” was one such title).

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html

There have also been cases where a customer violated Amazon’s terms of service and lost access to all of their Kindle e-books. Amazon has all the power in this relationship. They can and do change the rules on us lowly peasants from time to time.

Here are the terms of use:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201014950

Note, there are indeed ways to download your books and import them into something like Calibre (and remove the DRM from the books). If you do some web searches (and/or search YouTube) you can probably figure it out.

  • Draconic NEO
    9•3 months ago

    That’s why you shouldn’t buy books from Amazon or other online ebook stores instead just download the ePubs elsewhere.

    I’d also highly recommend KOreader if you have a Kindle or Ereader which supports it, as it supports many more formats and has a nice interface.

    • @[email protected]
      2•3 months ago

      The interface is 100% of the reason I won’t use it. It’s by far the worst experience for navigating a library I’ve ever seen. It’s just access to your filesystem, except with effectively no files on the screen at a time.

      There’s no tags, no ability to choose between by author, series, publisher, genre, etc, just a really bad presentation of your filesystem.

    • @AusatKeyboardPremi
      2•3 months ago

      Thank you for introducing me to KOReader and Kindle jailbreaking.

      Fortunately, the Kindle Paperwhite I use is no longer supported, and is compatible with few of the jailbreaks out there.

      A good rabbit hole to dive into over the weekend.

      • Draconic NEO
        1•3 months ago

        Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I personally like it, even so my main reason for recommending it is the fact that it has many features and supports a wide range of ebook formats, more than the stock Ereader apps usually do.