Comment on Kindle Is Making It Harder to Switch to Rival eReader Brands.

• MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  And Amazons owns them? I would be furious as a publisher.

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  • madjo@feddit.nl ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    No, the files are mostly owned by the publisher. That’s why you sometimes have stories where books disappear from Kindles because the rights holders revoke Amazon’s license to sell their books. It’s what happened with one version of Orwell’s 1984, ironically.

    It’s ridiculous, if you ask me, but that’s the reality with Broken By Design DRM ebooks.

    That’s why it’s prudent for any buyers of ebooks to download them as soon as you can, and put them in a library like “Calibre”, that way, even if Amazon loses their license to sell those publishers books, you still have access to the ebooks you bought with your money.
    And that’s why it’s bad that Amazon is removing the option to download the files yourself. And why I recommend people to take their business and wallets elsewhere! Stop giving Bezos your money.

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  • Badland9085@lemm.ee [bot] ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Uneducated 2 cents. afaik the publishers have some kind of “part ownership”, where they can pull it out from the store whenever. The “anti-piracy” feature you get with DRMs is why many publishers actually like them tho. The part ownership thing is just icing on the cake. So no, a good chunk of publishers won’t be furious at all. DRM gives what publishers want and more, at the expense of the consumers in a way that most wouldn’t realize.

    And if anything, I think it makes more sense to think that these publishers are also just granting Amazon some kind of “license” to sell their e-books.

    Amazon would absolutely be destroying their relationship with a publisher though, if they decide to block the selling or access of a book to large group of people who are would-be buyers. But, at the end of the day, publishers want to know how much they’re making from putting their e-books on Amazon, and as long as that revenue is enough to satisfy their needs, they don’t need to care too much about the odd customer who had their book revoked, and they would generally be pretty shielded from any sort of disputes as long as Amazon is making those revoking calls.

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