Amazon and DRM changes

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

Here is one magic word: public library. There is plenty to read. For free. Everything else is entitlement.

Yeah. And there's other places to buy books as well.

[hleo12]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

Here is one magic word: public library. There is plenty to read. For free. Everything else is entitlement.

And this is a very western-centric way of thinking.

I would love for us to have a public library like the US and some European countries. But I don't ever see that happening. It's just not a priority of our government.

[DuskyRose]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

Here is one magic word: public library. There is plenty to read. For free. Everything else is entitlement.

I gave up on most libraries because they don't carry series. By the time I find one I'm interested in, there are several book in them, and the libraries don't keep the early ones. Not even across library systems. They're just sold off to make room for new books in the series.

Libraries aren't magic. They do what they can. But that's limited.

[John F]

Originally Posted by issybird

Sigh. If you see a mod notice and edit your post to say so, there’s no free pass to say what you wanted just the same. Posts have been deleted.

Darn! I thought they were onto something.

[tomsem]

Apologies if this has been pointed out before, but this seems to be mostly about retiring MOBI and KF8 and fully transitioning to the various flavors of KFX, so they can shut down the services that provide it.

It can be painful and expensive to maintain legacy services, which nobody wants to do in the first place, and at some point, entirely infeasible: the last person who knew anything about it retires or leaves the company, and it's hard to find someone to step in and figure it out. Who will even want to do it, and who's going to train them?

So it's probably more about mitigating engineering risks than anything else. For all we know they are facing the scenario I outline above.

If it happens to close DRM loopholes it's not as if they are going to intentionally open others going forward. And it's going to hurt them a bit when it's fully shut down, because people like some of us will start buying ebooks somewhere else. But not so much.

Some of you might remember that Adobe released unlicensed versions of (I think) Creative Suite 2, that anyone could download and use. I was working on the licensing team at the time. The key service was running on Windows 2000 Server or something and it was tied to certain unique hardware IDs of that specific machine, and it was no longer feasible to provide updates to the software and be able to switch to a different key server. So if it died (as was inevitable), people weren't going to be able to migrate the license to a new system. So it was proactively retired and the only nice thing to do was to make the software freely available.

[Leseratte_10]

Adobe had DRM on their own copy of the CS licensing server so even they couldn't properly migrate it to new hardware? Interesting ...

Do you know why that was the case? Was Adobe scared that an insider would "steal" the licensing server software and operate their own copy? Why else would a company restrict an internal-only server software to only run on one particular hardware ...

Though, I doubt that that's the case for Amazon and AZW3.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by Leseratte_10

Adobe had DRM on their own copy of the CS licensing server so even they couldn't properly migrate it to new hardware? Interesting ...

Do you know why that was the case? Was Adobe scared that an insider would "steal" the licensing server software and operate their own copy? Why else would a company restrict an internal-only server software to only run on one particular hardware ...

Though, I doubt that that's the case for Amazon and AZW3.

No, as long as there was capability to deliver updates, they could migrate the key server for it. Probably did so over its life cycle. And it wasn't a pants on fire thing: licensing team knew this was coming and only had to point it out to clarify the eventual business decision.

And of course there was physical security. And that DRM had been cracked anyway. This was about protecting interests of customers.

Who knows about AZW3. Looks like it's getting a little more difficult to get at, which is why this particular thread is so active. I hope the doom sayers here are wrong and it stays around a least a couple of more years in the Download and Transfer via USB form, which is what I use.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by tomsem

Apologies if this has been pointed out before, but this seems to be mostly about retiring MOBI and KF8 and fully transitioning to the various flavors of KFX, so they can shut down the services that provide it.

Not really. It's about updating the apps, which for a long time have been KFX.

Originally Posted by tomsem

Some of you might remember that Adobe released unlicensed versions of (I think) Creative Suite 2, that anyone could download and use. I was working on the licensing team at the time. The key service was running on Windows 2000 Server or something and it was tied to certain unique hardware IDs of that specific machine, and it was no longer feasible to provide updates to the software and be able to switch to a different key server.

The mobi/azw and azw3 doesn't use the Adobe method of a server. It's a very simple scheme that encrypts the file using the serial ID of the particular eink Kindle chosen as the download target for later USB transfer. That software can easily be migrated to newer servers.

There are situations that use ereaders where WiFi isn't permitted or isn't available. The desktop OS computer might be used to manage many physical Kindles and/or accounts with no removal of DRM.

KFX is about more than DRM.

Amazon various DRM systems are not the same thing as Adobe DRM. Amazon once used Adobe and then abandoned it.

[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by DuskyRose

I gave up on most libraries because they don't carry series. By the time I find one I'm interested in, there are several book in them, and the libraries don't keep the early ones. Not even across library systems. They're just sold off to make room for new books in the series.

Libraries aren't magic. They do what they can. But that's limited.

It is true that you are at the mercy of what is available to read. If you do have access to a library though, you could exclusively use it until your budget allowed you to save up for a basic Kindle (US$99 or CDN$129). The magic I mentioned was not meant in regards of selection, but towards the money required to read.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Amazon various DRM systems are not the same thing as Adobe DRM. Amazon once used Adobe and then abandoned it.

I wasn't claiming they were the same thing, at all. Creative Suite is an entirely different DRM than the Adobe ebook DRM(s), different teams entirely. In case you did not know this.

[slm]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

It is true that you are at the mercy of what is available to read. If you do have access to a library though, you could exclusively use it until your budget allowed you to save up for a basic Kindle (US$99 or CDN$129). The magic I mentioned was not meant in regards of selection, but towards the money required to read.

The original Paperwhite--which does not read KFX--is available in several places at around US$50 (used). But if you are applying DRM by downloading ebook files from the Amazon website "to be" transferred to the Paperwhite by USB, the state of the Paperwhite doesn't much matter.

[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by slm

The original Paperwhite--which does not read KFX--is available in several places at around US$50 (used). But if you are applying DRM by downloading ebook files from the Amazon website "to be" transferred to the Paperwhite by USB, the state of the Paperwhite doesn't much matter.

That would only be a viable option if you don't plan on reading on the device. The PW1 would also be a good option to remove DRM from future purchases. This will continue to work even if Amazon takes the download option completely away (unlikely) or forces KFX on newer models (more likely). As long as it is possible to buy books on the PW1 (or buy on computer and send to PW1), you can then plug the PW1 into the computer and move the new books into the main library directly in calibre.

[Rhooo]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

Here is one magic word: public library. There is plenty to read. For free. Everything else is entitlement.

A list of the benefits of public libraries in my country:

- no Overdrive/Libby/other-service-like-this integration of absolutely any kind;
- no borrowing of ebooks in general, ebook lending capabilities simply don't exist in our public library system;
- the only exception is a private, paid ebook lending service that launched only last year... and which has only local-language literary fiction. No English, no genre fiction for the foreseeable future;
- almost no English-language books available to borrow from libraries even in physical form (English-language genre-fiction, particularly new genre-fiction, is impossible to find). When I requested several titles, I was outright told that the fees charged by Western publishers aren't worth it just for one or two readers.

Incidentally, the "not worth it due to just one or two readers" is why the selection of English-language physical books in our bookshops is also tiny and heavily favoring blockbuster single titles, that will at least give some return on the cost in importing them.

The result is readers like me, who rent (KU, Kobo's service etc) and buy ebooks only from foreign sites (and even then, almost always only on sale), never bother with libraries... and rampant piracy rates in the region (which is just as much a purchasing-power induced issue, as it is one caused by lack of cost-free official availability).

[ottischwenk]

Originally Posted by Rhooo

A list of the benefits of public libraries in my country

Which country?

[Uncle Robin]

Originally Posted by hleo12

And this is a very western-centric way of thinking.

I would love for us to have a public library like the US and some European countries. But I don't ever see that happening. It's just not a priority of our government.

I agree with the sentiment. It is far from unusual for posters here to forget that there are countries outside the United States represented here, and snide sweeping put downs like the one you quoted are representative of that mindset.

I'm not in the US or Europe either, and while the library system where I live is excellent for physical books, it's nowhere as useful for ebooks. That's why I've spent hundreds of US dollars in the last 3-4 years buying from Kobo, because borrowing ebooks is not feasible for me.