Quote:
Originally Posted by sadievan
I have a question. If I remove the DRM from a book and load it on a Kindle, can Amazon tell that it had been de-DRM'd?
Carol
|
As far as we know, Amazon takes no notice of "side-loaded" books--any of the ones you didn't purchase from them. There's no obvious, direct way of knowing if DRM has been removed from an ebook (other than comparing it to the DRM'd version and seeing how well the metadata matches, if it hasn't been changed, and whether it's got the same typos).
Someone at Amazon might know "that ebook is only sold in DRM'd versions," but they have no way to tell where *your* version came from. Maybe you typed the whole thing in by hand. Maybe you're a book reviewer and the company gave you a DRM-free copy for review. Maybe you're a personal friend of the author and the version you have is one of the pre-print versions that he shared with friends before sending it to the publisher. (Yeah, none of those is particularly likely, but there are other, more complicated and less unlikely, possibilities of having a legitimate non-DRM'd version of a book that's only sold in paper and ADE epub.)
Having a non-DRM'd version of a current popular book on your reader is not a direct sign of wrongdoing.
Also, Amazon has much better things to do with its time & bandwidth than to go crawling through Kindles looking for filenames that *might* be bootleg ebooks. (If I have a book called "Harry Potter 3" on my ebook reader--that could be a bootleg of "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," or it could be a legit copy of "Harry Potter and the Bound Prince, Book 3: The White Queen," a Harry/Draco fanfic.)