Comment

Comment on YSK: You don't own your Kindle e-books.

I know that would allow you to back up the ebook file elsewhere and use it however you please, but could Amazon still potentially delete the file from your Kindle device?

source

Sort:hotnew top

AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
I don’t know.

You can put unmanaged files (in a readable format) onto a Kindle via USB, though, so if you’d backed up the file somewhere you could presumably put it back again.

source
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Doesn’t even really let you do that.

A “DRM Free” kindle ebook still basically requires a physical kindle (or shenanigans with apps) to even access the raw file of. If you just go to your content library to try and download it to transfer via USB you get told to pound sand and buy a kindle. That might change if you have a physical kindle registered to your account (I currently read exclusively via my phone and my onyx boox) but… yeah.

And yeah, as long as it is in The Cloud, amazon can do whatever they want. I am not aware of having any books removed from my account but I do recall having the option to “upgrade” an ebook to a newer version in the case of publisher screw ups.

source
- AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Yeah—I finally got a physical Kindle in part to simplify the process of downloading and backing up my ebooks.
  
  To be fair, though, their devices and apps have mutually-incompatible file formats, so if the only point of downloading a file were to put it on an offline Kindle via USB (which is the only use case they acknowledge), they’d need to know what device you’ve got so they can convert it to an appropriate format.
  
  source
  - NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    My understanding is a lot of those were just wrappers for mobi files to add even more drm, but I haven’t looked super closely.
    
    I dunno. I used to be super hardcore about ripping every book and putting it in my calibre library. Then I eventually realized that… mostly I don’t care. There are very few books I am going to re-read and the majority of those were so good that I either want the hardcover to put on a shelf or don’t mind buying again from a vendor that gives the author a better percentage.
    
    source
    AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Yeah. In my case, though, a lot of my library consists of relatively expensive reference works that I use regularly and that would be prohibitive to replace if Amazon decided to play games with them.
    
    source