Say you buy a Kindle, or a B&N reader or a Google reader, buy hundreds of books and in a few years it becomes obsolete or simply stops working. Nothing lasts forever. Are those books now gone, victims of DRM? I think I own several thousand books and, while some have disappeared (I think they are there somewhere) but essentially I own them. Is there any protection in the case of e-books?
One blogger’s Kindle DRM roadblock.
Doing a bit more research it appears DRM is the culprit. When you “buy” an ebook you really are buying a subscription license with an unknown number of downloads available to you for any particular ebook. Amazon says book publishers don’t tell anyone what a particular ebook’s subscription value may be, other than it ranges from one to six downloads. So if you reach you subscription limit, you are SOL. You will be required to buy a new subscription.
Do your own search about ebook DRM removal tools. Board rules won’t allow any more than that.
Eh? I don’t know the law, but I make copies of everything onto my computer. But then, I never download straight to my Kindle - I dowload everything onto my computer first. I figure if my Kindle ever does go belly up, I can just transfer the files.
With the Kindle, that is OK, but not necessary. If your Kindle dies, is lost or stolen, you get another one, log on to Amazon, and every book you bought is there and can be downloaded again.
Unless, of course, Amazon goes belly-up too.
Many years ago I had a Rocket eBook, which was great, incorporating many of the features now in other readers. Also had a touchscreen. To my dismay, eventually they were bought by the British company Gemstar. They never advertised or promoted it, so nobody knew about it other than word-of-mouth. As they naturally did not sell many books, they eventually discontinued it.
They did give us some notice, so I bought a bit batch of books, but when all of them were read, I just reverted to reading the classics from Gutenberg. They are free too, even now.
Once the Sony Reader came out, I got one, and once the Kindle showed up, I happily got that, as it had a lot more features than the first Sony Reader.
I still have my Kindle1, more than two years old, used every day, and it is still chugging along, even with the original battery.
I regularly dig through my electronics archives and find old files that I can’t open because I don’t have the application anymore, or the formats have changed, or whatever. If Amazon goes belly-up, odds are good all those e-books would become useless.
It’s one of the reasons I don’t get e-books from them. Other formats can be moved from reader to reader with ease. If I avoid Amazon, I can always decide that I like Nook or Sony or iPad or whatever the hot new reader is ten years from now, and take all my ebooks with me when I switch.
If Amazon goes belly up, I don’t know if I’ll be able to afford candles to read by.
Yeah – the tools certainly exist to strip the DRM from Kindle and Nook files, and the arguments about whether or not they’re legal for personal backup use have raged back and forth, but the opinion of intellectual property / copyright lawyers I’ve seen in the discussions seems to generally be “not currently legal under the DMCA.” (Though I’d be thrilled to be corrected about that if I’m wrong.)
Wait, what? I don’t understand what you’re saying. Amazon’s Kindle books aren’t any more protected than Nook or Sony books – significantly less, in fact, than Sony books. You can switch between a Kindle and other readers just as easily as you can switch from a Nook or a Sony, although again, the DRM-stripping that will be required for (most) e-books may not be legal.
Unless you buy only from Baen Books or some other place that doesn’t use DRM at all, of course.
With most ebook formats, you can load them on multiple readers. It is my understanding that Amazon’s ebook format can only be read by the Kindle or by their Kindle software on other platforms.
On my iPad, for example, I can load ebooks in a variety of formats. They live on the computer and the iPad, and I can transfer them to other readers at will. Should I happen to buy an Amazon ebook, the only way to read it on my iPad is to load Amazon’s app. If Apple went belly-up, I’d just transfer the ebooks to the next device. If Amazon went belly-up, I’d be hosed.
Amazon also has the ability to reach into your Kindle and delete books. I know of no other vendor that does this.
Nope, most Kindle books are in Mobipocket format, which is readable in any Mobipocket reader on any platform and is readily convertable to many other formats.
The rarer Topaz format (which Amazon uses for some books where the electronic version is not handy and they have to start from a physical copy, supposedly) is only officially supported by Kindle apps, but can easily be converted to HTML or SVG.
Of course, just like every other ebook platform, you can only move it to a different device if you remove the DRM first.