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.

  • Benign@fedia.io
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    29 days ago

    If someone want an alternative there is ebooks.com. The two titles I got from there were way cheeper than on the store linked to my device. No nonsense app or anything, just download the file from the store and do what you want with it.

    • mipadaitu@lemmy.world
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      29 days ago

      This section implies their books are DRMd. I don’t know how ebooks.com works, but according to their about page, you still don’t own the content.

    • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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      29 days ago

      The two titles I got from there were way cheeper than on the store linked to my device.

      I searched a few books on both kindle store (web) and ebooks.com. The prices for the books were the same down to the penny.

      Do you have an example of a title that is cheaper on ebooks.com?