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Originally Posted by Elfwreck
It's entirely uncertain how much access Amazon has to sideloaded & personal document reading info. If it wasn't purchased through Amazon, they may not have a way to track it--and more, they have much less right to collect or sell that information; the Kindle TOS gives them rights to certain data related to digital purchases, but its rights to your other data are a lot blurrier.
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It would actually be more an effort for Amazon to set up their software to not track sideloaded content. After all think about how sideloaded content behaves. Does it not show up in the library where you select a book on the device? Does it not open when you tap on it? If its showing up in the library that means the device found the file and parsed it's metadata so it could show you the Title and Author of the book. If you open the book to read then it clearly can read and see the file.
As a programmer, why would you write instructions that says "IF sideloaded content THEN don't store metadata into database that syncs to cloud ELSE store metadata into database that syncs to cloud". No, its easier to write a program that just stores everything in the device database regardless of how the book was loaded. If side loaded content displayed in a different library view and reader than items purchased from Amazon then there would be a different story.
Now is there some legal restriction on whether they can track side loaded content? I don't know and I didn't read the TOS? I'm a programmer, not a lawyer.
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Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Much of that depends on whether it's illegal to strip DRM for personal use, an issue that has yet to hit the courts. If that's legal, they can easily all be legit.
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It can easily "all be legit" and it can easily all be illegal too. Nothing is really decided as far as I know.
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Originally Posted by Elfwreck
I suspect that checking the details of non-DRM'd/sideloaded content, even if it's allowed by the TOS, is far too much of a bandwidth drain
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No, it's really not a bandwidth drain. Books in themselves are very small in the scheme of a network that now supports transmission of video. And they don't need to upload the entire book, they just need to grab the meta data parts. This metadata will be much smaller than what it takes for them to serve up a single web page when you go to their site.
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Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Amazon (nor anyone else) doesn't have the time to put into sorting out what personal content has similar filenames to works in copyright that are currently only distributed with DRM. I don't think any retailer is going to start tracking use of personal documents, just because there's so *much*, and the potential return to them is so little, even if they do have the legal right to read those documents, which I'm not at all sure they do.
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Most purchased books (not interested in personal PDF documents that you made yourself) will have a ISBN that looks like this in the OPF: <dc:identifier id="ISBN" opf:scheme="ISBN-HERE">ISBNHERE</dc:identifier>. That's a unique identifier for the book. You also have Title <dc:title> and Author <dc:creator> that in many cases end up being a unique identifier when combined. And for good measure most books have <dc:publisher> also. You talk about filenames, but if you have used Calibre and loaded books into Calibre then you must realize that filenames are irrelevant. You can name an epub whatever you want and Calibre is going to add the book to the library with the appropriate title, author, etc because its reading the OPF not the file name.
And it isn't a matter of having the time. I don't believe anyone actively monitors people's accounts. What happens is that all this information is stored in a database. In general, these databases are permanent and information can be sorted, search, manipulated in any way imaginable at any time in the future. It's very hard for someone who hasn't worked with some of the tools out there to realize how powerful the technology for understanding and manipulating data is.
I don't think Amazon is interested in turning people in for DRM violations. I don't know if they track whether the files are encrypted or not. I think its an easy thing to do if they wanted from a technical perspective. And I don't think tracking such things are a serious resource drain (network usage or storing the information). I think there is more of a concern with a company likes Barnes and Noble that is financially unstable and could be bought by anyone and sold off in pieces. There is also a concern that the book industry equivalent of the RIAA could come in and try to obtain this data if it exists.