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.

  • count_duckula@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 month ago

    I’ve been using KOReader on my phone now, ever since my Kindle one day decided to be unrecognisable on my computer. Couldn’t find a solution to fix it so it became a glorified paperweight.

    The screen real estate is slightly degraded, but fuck if I give Amazon any more of my money. Besides, I get to store epubs as epubs instead of converting to that god awful mobi format.

    • sopo@sopuli.xyz
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      1 month ago

      Way to go, modern phone screens are not too bad…I think a big reason I enjoy dumb ereaders is the lack of multitasking lol

      Your kindle probably has a busted micro usb port (the cables too can stop working for data transfer), no idea if it’s too difficult to solder a new one… I would try cleaning it up really well first