434 points | by DavideNL1 day ago
I buy some ebooks, always without DRM where possible, and promptly strip DRM and stash free copies for others (e.g. from Kobo).
This could be - or is - an ultimate form of gaslighting. If it's not on your hard drive, you can never be sure that what you're seeing today is what you saw yesteryear.
Good thing it was zero to start with
Are there any examples where legitimately purchased licenses were made unavailable?
If an illegitimate provider commits fraud with a physical book, a megacorporation does not hire extra-legal mercenaries to break into my house, steal my copy, and leave cash equal to its price in its place.
But this is treated differently just because Amazon manufactured the Kindle (but no longer owns it - they sold it to you, it's not theirs anymore). I suppose if Amazon had built apartments, would we expect them to keep master keys to all the doors, so they can confiscate any of our possessions whose licensing has expired?
Except when they do. Hasbro/Wizards of the coast will send Pinkertons (old school corporate "security" firms of the break some kneecaps variety) after you if are inadvertently sent one of their products early by their distributor. They will barge into your home threaten you and take your things and leave not giving you compensation.
It showed everyone that electronic purchases can be yoinked away at the first whiff of controversy. Unlike all the copycat, fraudulent crap they continue to sell in physical form to this day.
― George Orwell, 1984
Don't confuse an illegitimately purchased license with a legitimately purchased illegitimate license.
This is the trouble with "licenses" instead of "items". If I purchase a bootleg book from a physical shop it's not getting clawed back later. The supplier might get in trouble, the physical shop might as well, but nothing is happening to the physical good that I purchased.
There are plenty other reasons to argue against DRM, but I'd argue the chance this one weakens the argument.
It's the same as when government agencies are given broad, sweeping powers with the explanation of "it makes it easier to do the right thing, and they won't use it to do the wrong thing". Only, the person that gets to decide what it gets used for can change. Then suddenly, they _are_ willing to use it for the wrong thing.
Not really. They went overboard. They reached into devices owned by their customers and deleted books without permission. That was absolutely outside of normal. Imagine amazon selling you a physical book and later sneaking into your house to take it back when they find out the seller had pirated them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/06/technology/sony-playstati...
Also, there are examples where a company arbitrarily changes its DRM - like when Microsoft launched its Zune media player, it wouldn't play their own "Plays For Sure" DRM music - they just dropped support. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PlaysForSure
You buy in-app credits, you use them to access series and episodes and download them (you download them in a way that you cannot easily save/copy them). Access is typically revoked a few months later or upon series end, and the expiration of your access rights is not announced.
These kinds of practices are why everyone is wary of DRM & Co.
From customers point of view, these purchases were legitimate.
But the important point is that they did it in the past and only the right balance between bad PR and expected profits will prevent them from doing again.
Not Amazon, but yes: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47810367
I have a paper book being shipped to me right now, and I'll have to wait a week. The only electronic version was the Kindle though, and fuck that noise.
Most HNers are employed building things that their customers will never have tangible representations of. It’s how life is today.
[1] technological or business limitations make promises of true perpetuity impossible as a practical matter today.
For literally all of the time that the written word has existed, if you bought a physical copy it was yours for whatever version of perpetuity you'd like to use.
Of course libraries exist, as do rentals, but it's clearly understood what the deal is with such services.
The specific issue i see here is that this is changing retroactively and without recourse, the ability to download a copy of the item you purchased, which was the deal at the time of purchase.
If you buy anything from now on, however, knowing the details of the sale, that's on you.
This was true of physical media (books, phonographs, etc.) and is true of downloaded media. You might own a paper copy of your favorite book, but you don’t own its words, and the law prohibits you from making a copy without the owner’s permission. You can transfer the medium to someone else, but you can’t preserve the content for yourself. If the book is destroyed in a fire, you must buy a new copy.
Similarly, you might own your Kindle, but you don’t own the content in it. You can read the content, but you can’t copy it.But there’s a minor advantage of a digital license: if your Kindle is destroyed in a fire, the publisher allows you to read-download the content to a new device.
In theory, the law only applies to distribution. Also, fair use and fair dealing exist in multiple jurisdictions, which includes personal-only usage. A company would have a hard time achieving a legal judgement against you for the mere act of copying a book. Distributing it? Sure.
Copyright law explicitly allows for backups, at least in the US, which is where most of the companies exhibiting this anti-ownership behavior are located and thus bound by US law, especially when the consumer is also US.
Owning a license means nothing when the other party to the license can revoke it at any time without further consideration.
Any words like "Buy", "Purchase", "Own", etc should be absolutely banned. They should be forced to to use verbs like "Rent". Saying you're purchasing a license is better than saying you're purchasing the book, but if it's not a perpetual license, they should be required to specify the duration (or, if indefinite but revocable, it should be so stated).
Things like:
- "Rent for 1 week"
- "$2.99 to borrow for a month"
- "Rent for as long as we decide to allow"
I also think if the marketing materials explicitly disagree with the terms within a clickwrap license agreement, the marketing materials should be binding.
…which is funny when large companies do it, because major software vendors expect they’ll only ever negotiate a non-perpetual, non-transferable license but in exchange they get major product updates for free so long as they pay-up (e.g. Microsoft’s “Software Assurance”) - whereas some companies find buying up liquidation-sales of ye olde boxed licenses is cheaper than SA (e.g. https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/06/valuelicensing_micros... ).
If a license meets those three elements, and there’s some actual mechanism for being able to self-backup the software/media/etc, then I would be happy to allow them to use the word purchase or buy.
ePub is the standard format. I’ve made sure to convert everything I’ve bought back to ePub without DRM.
I read a lot in Japanese. One nice benefit of this approach is that all the dictionaries and other language learning tooling is just ready to be used.
"Locked to Amazon unless you jailbreak" is overselling it imo. You've always been able to (very easily) sideload DRM-free ebooks and read them on your kindle.
Since "reading ebooks" is ostensibly why you'd buy a Kindle in the first place, I'm not sure what more you need.
"Easily" does not apply to grandpa and huge swathes of the human race.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Amazon
Read under the section “Anti-competitive practices”
They’ve done it multiple times. They have the mechanism to delete them. They also have the mechanisms to push content to kindles.
While I don’t have examples of them redacting, they can clearly do so. A government order would be a great example of this.
If it makes financial sense in the future to pull shenanigans with book access or content, they will do so unreservedly and with haste.
They have done this already in small amounts, no reason to think they won't do it on a larger scale if it becomes worth their while.
Steam is an interesting example, technically some of the games are DRM free (as in you don't need steam to run them) but most of them rely on steam in some form for continued usage.
The main difference here is that steam has better PR and a history of not fucking everyone over for an extra % on profit margins.
Will that remain the case, probably not, especially after Gabe Newell dies, but they certainly have the general trust of people who use the platform.
Not to say they haven't had their share of fuck-ups over the years but none of them seemed to have "I'm a billionaire so i can do whatever the fuck i want" energy to them.
That's just personal opinion though.
Now he's making sure customers are more locked-in into the Kindle ecosystem.
So the fear is that they'll start doing BS like showing ads and/or restricting features like family sharing.
That's very different from buying digital music (which I buy from Apple DRM free) and digital books, which should not change after I buy them, don't need compatibility updates, and really ought to work as long as I have the files, even if someone goes out of business and I can't redownload them.
Books really have much more in common with music than they do with software, and it's unfortunate that digital books and ebook readers escaped the "I bought hundreds of dollars of music and I should be able to play it on whatever MP3 player I want" arguments that freed us from music DRM lock-in.
From Wikipedia[1] ("1201" here refers to the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions):
Although section 1201(c) of the title stated that the section does not change the underlying substantive copyright infringement rights, remedies, or defenses, it did not make those defenses available in circumvention actions. The section does not include a fair use exemption from criminality nor a scienter requirement, so criminal liability could attach to even unintended circumvention for legitimate purposes.
Literary works, distributed electronically, that are protected by technological measures that either prevent the enabling of read-aloud functionality or interfere with screen readers or other applications or assistive technologies, or for research purposes at educational institutions;
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...
1: https://codes.findlaw.com/us/title-17-copyrights/17-usc-sect...
I guess OpenAI and Google use that to be able to build search and training ML-models. Almost all countries in the world is bounded by that.
> after you buy it
Generally, yes. What you do with that digital copy might be illegal, but the download was legal. Using a torrent to download (and seeding) might still be illegal even if only as a means to copying.
> after you buy it on kindle
That's a more interesting question. Given that they only grant you a license, you're in gray/black territory. When they previously gave you the impression that you were making a purchase you might have been in gray/light territory, but ignorance is rarely an excuse.
> legalities vs practicalities
Once I had one of those torrent honeypots catch a neighbor seeding. Comcast wasn't very careful with their timestamps or enforcement (or maybe the lawyer wasn't), and it happened close enough to an IP renewal that I caught the flak. If you don't get a lawyer involved, they'll blatantly ignore your right to counter DMCA claims and just infantalize you with a sermon about not stealing from intellectual property owners, placing you on a list of problem customers and eventually cancelling service (that last bit never materialized because it was my IP and my devices after the incident, so I never had too many strikes).
What happens, exactly, if you "legally" pirate a book after you buy it on kindle? Who knows, but it might have negative consequences on par with actual enforcement as if you'd broken the law.
There are exemptions granted to the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions every three years, but in general, e-books have not been exempted.
If you're just stripping DRM from your own purchased e-books, or are downloading a pirated copy from somewhere, it's unlikely that you'll get in trouble. But it's almost certainly not actually legal to do so.
(Of course, remember that if you're torrenting, you're also uploading, and the chances of you getting in trouble are higher... even if you disable your client's upload functionality.)
I'll take my business to whichever distributor acknowledges my ownership of the book. Kobo is crackable, I believe.
Also lib gen.
BTW I wish No Starch ships cheaper to Canada. It quickly adds up when I buy more. One of the best publishers out there I think.
At least one of our publishers did a translation for few of them...
I hope the huge new antipiracy push that is coming will require litigators to prove that you're actually viewing the material you pirate.
Which would make Plex and friends with their metrics a bad idea to trust with all of your pirated content.
Though the antipiracy push is going to focus on the torrent sites themselves.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
It's like everything I wanted to happen in the 00s did, but from the monkeys paw.
The only way I can think of fixing this is by giving rights to flesh and blood people that corporations don't have.
GPL? Humans only.
Free speech? Humans only.
"That sounds quite likely. Case dismissed!"
Buy books from responsible publishers. And please keep seeding the things you torrent that can't be purchased anywhere. And when I'm looking for that classic undubbed Jackie Chan movie and you are the single seeder making it possible to still get it, I salute you from the very bottom of my heart.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quod_licet_Iovi,_non_licet_bov...
The average person is put through hell and bankrupted. The large firm, at worst, pays a fine that amounts to some fraction of quarterly profit.
If you buy my book directly from my publisher's website, I'm extremely grateful. I get a fair amount for that. If you buy it from a local bookstore, at least they benefit.
But if you buy it from Amazon, you might as well just get it from Anna's Archive. At least you're not supporting the jungle.
This is why experiments like ONDC[1] (being pushed by the Indian Govt) are interesting. They want an alternative path between producer and consumer with out a middleman (Platform). Similar to how email works based on open protocols. Or UPI which has reduced dependence on Mastercard/Visa.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_economy [1] https://ondc.org/learn-about-ondc/
But personally, when I went to a local library, saw that they had two copies of my first book, and both were checked out, I was incredibly proud. I love libraries. I guess overall, I would make more money if everybody who checked out my book at the library bought it instead, but I don't care.
I have no idea how publishers feel about used book stores.
What my publisher does is sell books on Amazon, and then put a page in it to tell people to please buy the next book directly on the publisher's site. They believe that this is overall the least bad option.
I think it wouldn't be too difficult to make a system for authors to sell their e-books and physical books themselves on their own websites, but the problem is that authors would rage with fury for paying an upfront cost or paying 10% for such a system, and instead stay with the publishers to rip them off instead. You see this in every industry.
Tech books tend to not sell very high numbers (a book on a niche programming language is considered quite successful if it sells 10k copies), so it's important to make a good amount of money on each individual sale.
So for me personally, Kindle sales in particular are essentially worthless. Let's say I end up making 2 bucks on a Kindle sale (which is more than I make on average). If I sold 10k Kindle books, that would be 20k income for me, which is simply nowhere near enough to justify the effort of writing a book.
The 70% royalty is only available to books below $10, and also incurs other costs from Amazon. Which makes the calculation even worse, because now you're forced to sell at a lower cost, and you pay additional flat fees to Amazon for each sale.
In your case, if you sell the book for $10, you get about $6 ($7 minus fees), of which you get 25%, so you also only end up with about $1.50 per sale.
If the publishers of these authors wanted me to let me own a PDF, I'd gladly purchase, but until they actually do that I have several easy alternatives to getting sucked into Amazon's ridiculous ecosystem.
And this is a larger subset of books I want to buy than I would want, surprisingly.
A key point here is that GP expressed a willingness to pay. The analogy would be attempting to license a piece of GPL software that you've decided to integrate into your proprietary stack and being outright refused for ideological reasons. Still illegal but people are probably going to perceive it a bit differently.
My point was mainly saying the publishers are working hard to avoid their Napster moment, but missing that it wasn't only about 'free' music, but convenience. The harder publishers make it to use their content legally, the more people they will push to the pirate sites.
When we pay for a good, be it digital or physical, we want possession and ownership of that good.
When your class of people demand 'licenses to read' instead of the actual ownership of the book, you can shove it.
I would rather pay pirates to get actual non-DRM books than buy the temporary permission to view., especially since the eBook is more expensive.
I will buy physical books, drm-free books, and pirate. I'm not paying hard earned money for a temporary license.
If your publishers and authors can't understand first sale doctrine and actual ownership, then you can close up shop and quit.
people on royalroad make $10K a month, many more make over $1K...
and then there's AO3, the monster in the dark with everything for everyone
It's not really the same thing. A VPN is a way to avoid getting caught. Meta's legal defense is an attempt to avoid getting punished after getting caught.
I think there's an ethical way to both get free use of what should be yours to use, and also support the people who made it.
I'd say this is the case for Amazon as well, if you have an actual Kindle. I was able to convert my whole library to standard epubs last weekend using Calibre.
Eventually, we'll just end up in the same situation as we are now with video DRM; DRM being hard enough to bypass that the methods of doing so will be closely guarded scene secrets, but the output of those methods will hit Z-lib / LibGen / AnnasArchive / all the usual places.
The thing with books is that they're small by todays bandwidth and disk capacity standards, so it's really hard to stop their proliferation.
https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/download-kindle-books-to-comput...
See, but that's not actually the same thing as DRM-free. It's adversarial interop that's temporarily allowed to work, but if said interop becomes popular enough the publishers will force Kobo to fix it.
At this point I'm really only interested in spending money on books that I can actually own—either physical copies or (where available) fully and legally DRM-free ebooks. I want my purchases to send the right message to publishers: that DRM-free can work.
edit: haha, someone already made the comment further down the thread
https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24254922/california-digit...
https://www.theverge.com/news/612898/amazon-removing-kindle-...
From the article you linked:
>The new law won’t apply to stores that offer “permanent offline” downloads
Amazon is actively choosing to do this to maintain an even tighter grip on their ecosystem
Claiming you can "Buy this book" is a lie and false advertising.
Is it really fine for them to say "Buy this book *You aren't really buying it"? I guess we've seen "No bandwidth caps *We can arbitrarily cap your bandwidth". Could a food manufacturer say "Contains no nuts *Made on an assembly line that produces nut products"?
It's okay to lie to people, just not that much. Corporations don't operate above the law, they operate X% below the law where that % grows the larger they are because the cost to prosecute X% is too high, so all of them do it.
After reading about how they're taking away downloads I went and downloaded all of my books and found that at some point they must have lost the license to that book because I no longer had access to it.
Love it when my "purchases" can be taken away from me with no recourse. edit: and I was never even informed that the book had been taken away. It just is there in my collection with a few invalid characters at the front of the title and no cover picture. The link goes to a page that doesn't exist. And searching for it shows only paper copies now by third parties. So I know this isn't just a bug in the system.
I'm glad the government is forcing companies to be a little more honest about these "purchases." These companies wouldn't have done it on their own.
Of course, someone will say it is government overreach and competition will solve this instead.
Anything you've purchased will remain in your library unless:
1) You delete it (which can happen by accident, due to some bad UX).
If you have done this, you can contact Amazon Support and they can re-add it to your library for free. It's not possible to delete your purchase history on the Amazon website, and that includes all Kindle books.
Whenever I've seen people claim that digital content has gone from their Amazon account, it always turns out to be either:
a) They didn't buy it on Amazon in the first place.
b) They bought it on a different Amazon account.
It has, in fact, happened: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18am...
Not saying that's what happened in this case, but it has happened, and it's a great example of why having your books (or any media) locked up in a walled garden is a terrible idea. (though this is far from being the only objectionable angle)
And Amazon gave everyone a full refund.
This recent shift by Amazon ends that. I’m buying a Kobo reader and I’ll be buying all my ebooks from bookshop.org as soon as they launch their (promised) Kobo integration.
I understand this may have been how things worked all along, but Amazon making visible changes to reduce my feeling of ownership of my ebooks is a sign of bad things to come and I won’t support it.
I already downloaded and de-DRMed my whole Kindle library this week. Took an hour, well worth it.
On Kobo you also have access to your library and pocket integration.
Honestly Kobo feels like the more feature complete device
The whole thing is ridiculous anyway; I remember Amazon and others pushing the idea of e-books as a way to get cheaper books (since they don't have to physically print a book and mail it to you), but of course that turned out to be a lie. Occasionally I even see a book's Kindle version that costs more than a physical copy!
Whatever, every time I buy a Kindle book I download it to my laptop, strip off the DRM, and keep that copy safe as a backup. (If that starts becoming impossible due to Amazon removing the "download and transfer via USB" option, then I'm going to have to buy my e-books elsewhere going forward. Or just get them from my local public library; at least a library's terms of use are sane.
"disclosure" of information sounds like a good thing, but in terms of contracts, "a disclosure" is actually "a restriction/limitation" that you are agreeing to. This is Amazon "disclosing" that it is you who is not actually buying a copy of something.
Yes, it's better for you that limitations are disclosed, but the salient point is the limitation, not the disclosure.
You buy a digital, DRM-free file. It is yours forever. If you lose it (bad storage, malware, deletion), it's gone. It doesn't mean that it wasn't yours. It doesn't mean that anybody owes you a new copy in perpetuity. It doesn't make any of that "fake ownership".
I mean if I lose my copy of any media I own and the seller that provided isn’t around, that’s on me, right?
All of the above if you want a wireless experience, you can just use Calibre and plug in the reader via USB for a smoother experience.
It’s good that they are now being upfront about it, but it won’t impact my buying behaviour and it won’t for the majority of readers.
(The cover art is finikey sometimes.)
Physical copies of books might be tough if space is at a premium, but I love having a bookshelf. I can quickly look back to specific books or chapters or notes or whatever. Plus it gives my guests something to talk about - they can instantly see what I've read and how they can relate to me or my interests.
bookstore.org ebook purchases can support your local (participating) bookstores[0] by a revenue sharing arrangement. Their DRM set up looks dodgy, though? It's not clear whether they use Adobe under the hood or how easy it is to get the files to then DeDRM. Maybe paying for the license (and making sure to nominate a bookstore) through there and making or acquiring a DRM-free copy to keep can be the best of both worlds, at least as far as supporting local bookstores goes.
If anyone has experience with bookstore.org I'd love to hear about it
There are cases where I will toss an independent author a few dollars in exchange to read their book, but there’s no way I would ever pay Amazon or another publisher.
I know some people make this work by just having a queue that's constantly cycling, but I don't read print books (as opposed to audiobooks) like that. There's only a subset of all books that I would ever want in print at all, and when I want them I want them for a specific purpose (to consult for a quote or something) now, not months from now. Purchased ebooks fill that role, but I'm only interested in buying if they're DRM-free.
Not all of them. I've had at least one bundle where you redeem it via the Kobo store for DRMed ePubs. Most I've got via Humble Bundle have been DRM-free though.
There may or may not be easily findable plugins for [popular ebook desktop app] to remove the DRM.
I buy ebooks, remove DRM, and store them on my network storage drive so I can read them on any device I own.
The simplicity of the approach seemed pretty awesome
I just finished importing mine in Calibre and converting them all to epub
I did this just yesterday… the calibre reader is a hot mess but getting and decoding the books was a breeze
Note that this method is only going to work for four more days! I imagine that soon this will only be possible via jailbreaking, which is always a PITA
- they offer good quality books
- they also offer a subscription where you can view all books and download one book per month
- when you buy a digital book, they give you the book in several formats (kindle and pdf)
- you can read the ebook in multiple devices
O'Reilly should follow the same business model.
They used to, but they have their subscription service now.
You can still buy O'Reilly books DRM-free from the major ebook sellers.
Now I mostly buy from Kobo and labor.fm and many of the books they sell are DRM free. Often the prices are better also.
it's a real shame he was basically put away over the last years over completely unrelated issues.
unrelated, but on software there was another person that happened to be right, but for unrelated reasons: steve ballmer. he was right: open source software is cancer. because software should really be free (as intended by the free software foundation).
The page really needs to specify all limitations that differ from a physical copy, which would be non-revocable, transferable, worldwide, unlimited in time, geographic location, and method of consumption, etc.
But - yeah - this is not informative at all. Amazon did the least amount of work necessary to formally comply with those new California requirements (I suspect this is what it's about) about the language on digital licensing.
It's something, though. But I agree it would be nice to have a license summary label, like those broadband facts labels or nutritional labels.
The current state of reality is taking a dark turn, and I will be dammed to just ignore it. So many companies are too powerful, and we suckers have been too nice accepting abuse and obeying laws unilatery.
Think of companies like Meta and OpenAI pirating EVERYTHING they can lay their hand on online just to regurgitate to use behind paywalls. Also don't forget OpenAI recently crying foul because DeepSeek did the same to them.
all that remains is we become happy. where’s my soma?
Personally I've never had even slightest inclination to "buy" books this way.
Do not get locked out of your library.
(also did)