I stopped buying anything at all at Amazon several years ago. Even when I got my first ereader, I avoided Kindle, but at that time it was more to avoid being locked in than for ethical reasons.
I buy most of my books at Kobo, for convenience. It would, of course, be more ethical if I first checked whether I could buy it directly from the author, but I almost never do that. I sometimes buy from a Norwegian ebook shop, because I'd rather pay taxes to my own government than to somewhere else, but they usually don't have the books I want. And I buy some Humble Bundles.
I lost several books when a bookshop went under lots and lots of years ago. Since then, I remove DRM from all books I buy, and store a backup of my library in the cloud.
My workflow after having bought a book is:
- Download the book to my PC
- (If it's an .acsm link, click on the link and wait until the book is opened in Adobe Digital Editions)
- Open Calibre
- Import the book into Calibre. (DRM is removed, and the book is copied to a cloud backup of my Calibre library, automagically)
- If I feel like it, edit the tags and series information
- Plug my ereader to my PC and use Calibre's "Send to device"
This is, of course, more hassle than clicking a buy link in the ereader, but to me it's worth it to know that I'm not going to lose my books in some accidental bug or deliberate enshittification event.
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Originally Posted by Flaneurette
All this long and rambling blathering is I guess a search for justification to just go ahead and buy the dang ebooks and quit dithering around with the whole baggage of it all.
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As a general rule, I try to be a somewhat ethical consumer, but I have no ambition to be perfect. There are lots of things I could do to avoid giving money or personal data to companies I dislike, but which I don't do because it's too much hassle. I'm not going to condemn anyone else for not being perfect
Quote:
Originally Posted by Yapyap
I do have to say though that when I’m presented with a button that says “Buy” (not “acquire a license that we may withdraw, or you can lose if our servers go under, or maybe we go out of business and then you can’t read this any more”), then I’m intending to actually keep that copy and be in charge of my own backups as well as converting it to whichever format currently suits me. I realise I’m breaking rules and possibly laws while doing so, but this is something I don’t feel guilt over.
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I agree!