Dissapointed in Amazon :/

[ProDigit]

Perhaps this is old news,
But I recently went on a hunting spree for Amazon free ebooks.
When you have prime, Amazon allows you to download a list of free ebooks, some of which are permanently free, some of which are temporarily reduced to zero price.

Before I would regularly update and download free ebooks, so I had about 1000 free ebooks this way. Some of which are quite expensive otherwise (for an ebook).

I tried this again last week, and Amazon notified me that I need to 'return the ebooks', before I could 'purchase' more books!

Turns out their free ebooks, aren't free anymore, but has turned into a library borrowing system

[fjtorres]

You may want to check your Amazon account settings.
You may have accidentally signed up for Kindle Unlimited.
Or, if you're a Prime subscriber, be using your Prime Reading privileges.

There are several ways to read Kindle books for "free" on the Amazon store that require you to return books befire downloading more.

This is in *addition* to the books priced at zero as a temporary promotion or, less common, permanently. There's still thousands of those at any one time but there is well over a million of the Kindle Unlimited titles.

Downloading one of the Kindle Unlimited books is all it takes to enroll in a 30-day free trial of Kindle Unlimited, which lets you download a queue of ten of those titles to read. Once you've finished one, you return it and downkoad another. No limit on how many you can read as long as the subscription is active. Of course, once the free 30 day trial is uo, you get charged $10 each month. You may find the rate acceptable or not. Enough people do that Kindle Unlimited (by itself) is a bigger business than most other ebookstore combined. If you don't find it acceptable, make note of the renewal date and cancel the subscription. Then read as many of the KU titles as you can in your free month.

You need to read the description near the buy button to know what you're getting.
It's been a whole new ballgame since 2014.

(Prime Reading lets Prime subscribers check out a subset of about a thousand KU titles without being subscribed to KU. The titles are supposed to rotate every three months or so. Just another Prime Perk, of which there's a whole bunch.)

[DrD123]

Don't forget your monthly "Kindle First" free book! I have found a number of good books that way. Also - if you have a Samsung device, you can use the "Kindle for Samsung" app to select another free book each month (that you can then send to your kindle) - granted, 2 books per month isn't thousands, but it's better than no free books per month!

[Ken Maltby]

What disappoints me about Amazon is that they are again using a DRM that is not easily removed. Despite all the ebooks I have purchased from them, they insist on making it so I can no longer use their ebooks. Too bad for those authors that only release their books on amazon. I can't understand how a company can think that it is a good idea to make their products unusable, for those who were routinely buying from them.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Ken Maltby

What disappoints me about Amazon is that they are again using a DRM that is not easily removed. Despite all the ebooks I have purchased from them, they insist on making it so I can no longer use their ebooks. Too bad for those authors that only release their books on amazon. I can't understand how a company can think that it is a good idea to make their products unusable, for those who were routinely buying from them.

DRM on sales is a publisher's choice. Many publishers choose to go DRM-Free. Others don't.
Ever tighter DRM is an ongoing demand of the big publishers.

On the other hand, since Kindle Unlimited is big business by now, Amazon *needs* tighter, "unbreakable" DRM on those titles to prevent the unscrupulous from checking out and DeDRM'ing titles by the hundred.

Add them up and...
That is why we can't have nice things.

[Cinisajoy]

Sounds like you either did KU or Prime Borrowing.
If you clicked the Read for Free box, you signed up for kindle unlimited.
Prime has always been borrow except for the kindle first books.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

DRM on sales is a publisher's choice. Many publishers choose to go DRM-Free. Others don't.
Ever tighter DRM is an ongoing demand of the big publishers.

On the other hand, since Kindle Unlimited is big business by now, Amazon *needs* tighter, "unbreakable" DRM on those titles to prevent the unscrupulous from checking out and DeDRM'ing titles by the hundred.

Add them up and...
That is why we can't have nice things.

People keep pointing to this sort of expected behavior as justification, yet that behavior turns out to be very rare. It didn't happen with streaming music and it doesn't seem to be an issue with ebooks. Contrary to some opinions, not everything that Amazon does is in the best interest of anything except Amazon's profit margins.

[fjtorres]

Amazon is a middleman company.
They need to balance customer satisfaction and supplier satisfaction to maximize profits.
They lean more towards customer satisfaction than most companies but they need to make occasional gestures to assuage publishers riled up by promoters of "piracy will bankrupt us" memes. And if Amazon messing with DRM inconveniences owners of epub gadgets, well, that is too bad but any theoretical losses they might sustain matter less than shutting up the publishers. Money talks, after all.

We've been through this over and over: the vast majority of their customers don't care about DRM one way or another.
We are outliers, all of us here.
But thanks to Digimarc and Adobe and others, publishers (even Indies) do care about DRM.

(Shrug)

I don't like it any more than any other epub device owner but I see where they are coming from and I'm not going to raise my blood pressure over a triviality I can manage.

There's more important things to worry about.

[ProDigit]

Well, the one book for free a day, was really that. Get a book for free with prime.
Now, I can get no more than 10 books, but have to return them.

Generally it's the same. I just have to read them and return them before I can read others, and can't hoard them anymore. :/

[Pajamaman]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

DRM on sales is a publisher's choice. Many publishers choose to go DRM-Free. Others don't.
Ever tighter DRM is an ongoing demand of the big publishers.

Amazon sure are going to a lot of effort to do something they don't want to do. KFX anyone?

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by ProDigit

Well, the one book for free a day, was really that. Get a book for free with prime.
Now, I can get no more than 10 books, but have to return them.

Generally it's the same. I just have to read them and return them before I can read others, and can't hoard them anymore. :/

Oh, you get a bit more than that if you have Prime.
You get one (of six preselected books) a month, to keep.
Those you can hoard.
And the books that are promotionally free or perma-free you can still hoard.
There's still plenty to be found on a given day.

You just go to the Kindle ebook home page:
https://www.amazon.com/Kindle-eBooks...node=154606011

And,on the left side, select your prefered genre. Say, Science fiction.
Then, on the upper right side you sort "price low to high":
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_st_p...price-asc-rank

You'll see a ton of free books.
Look carefully and some will be flagged "Kindle Unlimited" and some will be flagged Kindle Edition/BUY NOW WITH 1-CLICK.

Most of the ones flagged Kindle Edition should be hoardable. No 10-book queue limit.

Amazon hasn't taken anything away.
They *have* added a subscription service that allows publishers to be paid for books you read for free so, yes, there are going to be less permanently-free books than there were before KU but they still allow KDP ebooks to be offered for free five days a month, like always. And if a book is free at another ebookstore it will also be free at Amazon.

So there should be no shortage of free books to hoard.
The main change is you have to read the tags to tell the hoardable books from the KU books.

Now go fill up that reader.

[ProDigit]

Yeah, but the free ebooks, are of lower quality, and often for free for reasons of a writer advertising himself.
Or, it's where the second book is free out of a trilogy.

Not anymore where good books are for free, but then the next week it's back to original price.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by ProDigit

Yeah, but the free ebooks, are of lower quality, and often for free for reasons of a writer advertising himself.
Or, it's where the second book is free out of a trilogy.

Not anymore where good books are for free, but then the next week it's back to original price.

Times change.
Many Publishers discovered that giving away free ebooks didn't result in enough added sales over not giving them away. (They finally remembered that free books don't count toward ranking.) They also discovered that KU gave the same or better results and *paid* them. (And since KU reads *are* paid for, they do count towards ranking. And ranking = visibility.)

So permafree is fading away.
Surprisingly, so is $0.99 regular pricing.
(Readers are proving to be more skeptical of $0.99 books than $1.99 and above.)
Free and $0.99 remain but for limited time sales, maybe a few days a month.
Different times, different strategies.

Reader behavior is also changing. By now hoarding and deep-bargain hunting is fading away. Many people who grabbed everything in sight are now pruning their reading lists because they have years and years of free books they never got around to reading and don't even remember why they grabbed them in the first place.

The market is maturing.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by ProDigit

Yeah, but the free ebooks, are of lower quality, and often for free for reasons of a writer advertising himself.
Or, it's where the second book is free out of a trilogy.

Not anymore where good books are for free, but then the next week it's back to original price.

If it has the kindle unlimited tag, it can only be free 5 days out of every 90.
Otherwise, it is a permafree and may or may not be worth a darn.
So check for that tag. To buy, do not click read for free but buy with one click even if the price is $0.00.

Oh and you said you could only borrow 10, that means you are subscribed to kindle unlimited at roughly $10 a month.

[Dazrin]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

Oh and you said you could only borrow 10, that means you are subscribed to kindle unlimited at roughly $10 a month.

Not necessarily, the Prime Reading system allows you to borrow 10 at a time as well. Not nearly the selection though.