Amazon and DRM changes

[meghane_e]

I'm seriously sitting here having a quiet rage attack about Amazon & the publishing industry in general blocking the written word.

The balance between paying authors fairly, and readers being able to pay (or not able to in many cases) has been completely subsumed by Amazon and other publishers taking larger and larger cuts from the authors, while making it more and more costly to RENT a book.

This is not OK. Bleh...
Sorry, I just had to vent to people who understand.

[Aleron Ives]

Originally Posted by meeera

"their". Singular 'they' is hundreds of years old, and much less clumsy

A simple tuning of the subject-verb agreement works even better.

Originally Posted by C-novice

Does Amz pays so well that an author would bound his/her/other pronouns works for life to that one entity?

"Does Amz pay so well that authors would bind their works for life to that one entity?"

Correct verb tenses are also helpful.

[stumped]

Originally Posted by meghane_e

I'm seriously sitting here having a quiet rage attack about Amazon & the publishing industry in general blocking the written word.

The balance between paying authors fairly, and readers being able to pay (or not able to in many cases) has been completely subsumed by Amazon and other publishers taking larger and larger cuts from the authors, while making it more and more costly to RENT a book.

This is not OK. Bleh...
Sorry, I just had to vent to people who understand.

Console yourself with the fact that historically, there's been no such thing as an uncrackable DRM

This is like the " I'll never buy a game from xxxx outrage" that happened when uncrackable DRM denuvo was applied to some computer games.. within weeks we saw the first break and after a few months it was an easy bypass.

So you have the option to continue buying and wait for some smart apprentices to find a way around it

It would be interesting, in a separate thread, to discuss how it works and then how to break it, except that it would be against the rules? Maybe on a different site, those discussions are already happening. The I am curious "how does it work" bit would be ok here ?

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by stumped

So you have the option to continue buying and wait for some smart apprentices to find a way around it

They have. Then Amazon changed it, sometimes within hours.

[Lys]

Originally Posted by stumped

I don't get why it's necessary to stop buyng from Amazon just because there is no way to de.drm their books.
Accept that you are paying to licence, not own, the book for as long as you, or Amazon live, and quit griping about the licence terms.

Leaving aside the question about what I buy when I buy an ebook, I don't own a Kindle device, I won't read on a pc/smartphone, so if I can't put a book I buy on Amazon on my ereader there's 0 reason for me to buy from them. It's not that hard to understand that for some of us stripping the drm away from books bought on amazon is a necessary step if we want to read that content.

I can't de drm a netflix movie but that does not make me want to cancel my subscription

I do assume you can still watch your netflix movie to start with, though. If you had no way to watch your movie, I doubt you would keep your subscription up just because you love throwing out your money to some big company.

The only practical impact of having them drm protected is that I'd not be able to delete front and back annoyances like previews of next. Book in series, show- off epigraphs, dedications to people I've never met, and stylistic choices I disagree with.

Good for you? Once the mail I used for my ADE and Amazon account was doxed. I had to cancel it and if I hadn't de-DRM my previous purchases I would lose all my books. And I'd like to be able to choose whatever device I want to read on very much, thank you.

I'm not going to strip the DRM to share what I buy on the net, but a reminder that the DRM just causes headaches to those who actually buy the book (while doing exactly 0 for piracy).

[stumped]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

They have. Then Amazon changed it, sometimes within hours.

i get that. Its an ongoing dance. hence me suggesting the current panic is in need of a HHGTTG towel or two

there was much doom and gloom & FUD in these forums when 1st gen " uncrackable" kfx debuted ~2018

i confess to be ignorant of the precise trick bits within A's current build-a-wall. but if the feeble brain of a years-old kindle can decrypt it, then surely some very smart guys with state-off-the-art PCs and hacking tools will find a way

another of my annoying analgoes follows so feel free to stop now

music and video

record industry loses billions thru vinyl-to-cassette tape coping. tries everything they can think of, even lose a lot more lobbying for an anti-piracy levy on every blank tape sold...

but then they invent CD - shiny new hi-tech- and think hey we could DRM THAT. but it aint cheap and cooler, wiser heads prevail...

with hind-sight and Billions of lost revenue, the media industry realises they rue the short term cost savings of not having hard drm after standardising on a CD format, with no copy-protection at all.

They see a chance of redemption with DVD so invest heavily in very smart cryptology, and encrypt every DVD sold. unfortunately then were dumb enough to not protect some private master key and once that was out in the wild you could buy dvd copy software that worked...

well OK, 2 strikes down but now we have Blu Ray , we've spent 10x on the encryption this time around, so they launch Blu Ray with betcha can't crak this drm on every shiny disc... well guess how that turned out.

with 90GB storage to spare and some shareware trial you can backup your latest blu ray purchase and store it forever ( until it succumbs to bit rot )

its an arms race that Amazon, like Sony before them, can never win



i bet in six months time we'll be back shopping at amazon , making our clean backups again and saying " well that didn't take long..."

[meeera]

Originally Posted by Aleron Ives

A simple tuning of the subject-verb agreement works even better.
D

Yeah, I'm not gonna correct what looks to be a perfectly comprehensible non-first-language error.

[ottischwenk]

Originally Posted by Lys

Leaving aside the question about what I buy when I buy an ebook, I don't own a Kindle device, I won't read on a pc/smartphone, so if I can't put a book I buy on Amazon on my ereader there's 0 reason for me to buy from them. It's not that hard to understand that for some of us stripping the drm away from books bought on amazon is a necessary step if we want to read that content.

But you can still read the content:
At least on the device you "bought" it on.
There's K4PC, or the Cloud Reader.

[Rhooo]

Question -- does the Kindle connected to the Amazon account need to be an older one for "download and transfer via USB" to work for de-DRM purposes, or can it be one from the last 2-3 years as well?

I ask because my country is poor enough that the second-hand market for more niche devices like e-readers is almost nonexistent and the few older Kindles I could find second-hand were either busted beyond repair or I couldn't trust that they hadn't been blacklisted. The newer SH ones were so close to retail pricing that I finally decided to just buy a new one, rather than risk a blacklisted device. I went with a 2019 Kids' Edition (the cheapest I could find in our shops) and now I'm worried I'll get the newer ebook format rather than the older, cracked one when downloading.

[Rhooo]

Question -- does the Kindle connected to the Amazon account need to be an older one for the "download and transfer via USB" option to work for de-DRM purposes, or can it be one from the last 2-3 years? I ask because I'm worried I'll end up with the new, unbroken format, vs the older one.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Rhooo

Question -- does the Kindle connected to the Amazon account need to be an older one for the "download and transfer via USB" option to work for de-DRM purposes, or can it be one from the last 2-3 years? I ask because I'm worried I'll end up with the new, unbroken format, vs the older one.

At the moment, it can be a new one. No one here knows what Amazon is going to do in the future.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by ottischwenk

But you can still read the content:
At least on the device you "bought" it on.
There's K4PC, or the Cloud Reader.

We don't want to read it in the PC app or in the web browser. No can do.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

We don't want to read it in the PC app or in the web browser. No can do.

Also the PC app hasn't worked for me for years. Not interested in firing up a Win10 VM to read a book.

Having to have an internet connection to consume content you bought is a fail in my book!

And no, I'm not going to subscribe to anything. Used to. At least my local library is free.

[ottischwenk]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

We don't want to read it in the PC app or in the web browser. No can do.

But thats your problem

[ottischwenk]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

At the moment, it can be a new one.

No.
The devices that can DRM are supplied with DRM - at least from amazon.de