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.

  • MeatsOfRage@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Yea Audible too. I can’t remember the name of the tool but you can connect to your account and it pulls all your purchases locally DRM free. It was handy for setting up Audiobookshelf

    • ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net
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      3 months ago

      Thanks for the reminder! I’ve gotten a bunch of free audible books and haven’t backed them up in a while.