Once again, “if buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing.”
Guess we should also pirate all steam games too.
I always look on itch.io and GoG first!
I recently switched to Kobo as a Kindle alternative, but that also highlighted a problem. Kindle Unlimited includes a TOS for publishers that prevents them from selling their books on any other platform. A significant chunk of the Kindle catalogue is also included in Kindle Unlimited, which means a significant chunk of authors works are locked into the Amazon ecosystem.
It’s been very annoying to discover how many book series I’ve been reading that are simply unavailable elsewhere because they opted to take part in Kindle Unlimited.
I strongly encourage POLITELY reaching out to your favorite authors on social media to talk to them about this.
One of my favorite guilty pleasure reads is very open that this is why his ebooks are only on kindle. But he is also looking into alternatives (especially since he is now big enough to have at least a small publisher) because the readers he is trying to help with KU are the ones asking him to get away from it.
Not going to tear down my de-drm setup any time soon. But optimistic I might be able to before amazon does it for me.
Not going to tear down my de-drm setup any time soon. But optimistic I might be able to before amazon does it for me.
As far as I’m aware it’s now too late for that. Amazon has removed the ability to download ebooks to your computer meaning the only way to access azw files now is if you’ve found a way to rip them out of the Kindle memory (not possible using normal means, but maybe if you’ve cracked one open and probed the flash memory directly).
I used to de-drm all my kindle purchases using the manual download links Amazon had, but those have now been removed. That’s actually what prompted me to switch to Kobo. I’m not going to “purchase” a book I can’t create a backup of.
If you own a kindle reader you can just connect it via usb and dedrm the kfx files.
No you can’t. They changed the firmware so eBook downloads now go into a partition that’s not accessible when mounting the kindle over USB.
Relevant XKCD : https://xkcd.com/488/
