Amazon and DRM changes

[Unseen Entities]

Originally Posted by jhowell

But in reality who is going to do that?

The Kindle cloud reader plus an AutoHotKey click script would be a whole lot easier lol.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

Of course, the publishers and companies that sell you ebooks and ebook readers want you to believe you are a dirty criminal for exercising rights as a consumer.

Originally Posted by Patitapetit

Jejejejeje Well, we are in this Forum...

Is someone holding your feet to the fire to force you to keep reading this forum? Inquiring minds are eager to know!

[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Is someone holding your feet to the fire to force you to keep reading this forum? Inquiring minds are eager to know!

Since you quoted me as well, no. Nobody is forcing me to read this forum. I won't stop reading it, nor will I unsubscribe from this thread. I said what I said. I tested what was to test, out of curiosity. I like testing things for the sake of testing.

[odamizu]

Originally Posted by jhowell

Amazon's actions over the past several years lead me to believe that they intend to do away with Download & Transfer (D&T) ... I may be wrong but I expect to see the D&T feature continue to be available for fewer books going forward until at some point Amazon declares it to be used so infrequently that it can be eliminated completely ...

Thank you as always for enlightenment, jhowell. Your reasoning makes sense. Let's hope Amazon's plans to do away with D&T are still off in the future.

[ownedbycats]

If only people cared about being able to get books out of the Kindle ecosystem as much as they cared about sharing passwords on Netflix.

[haertig]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

If you borrow a book through KU and circumvent Amazon's intended tracking, then you literally steal money that was supposed to go to your author.

I completely disagree with that statement.

Not anymore, ... but I used to be able to pay for a KU subscription, download and transfer a book I borrowed from KU with Amazon's blessing, and sideload that onto my Kindle which is in airplane mode. Yes, I was circumventing Amazon's intended tracking. That wasn't my main goal in transferring the book this way, but was indeed one goal. But it was perfectly legal, perfectly ethical, and not stealing in any way shape or form. If this type of transfer allowed Amazon to keep every penny of my subscription money and not give one cent of it to the author, that is Amazon's doing, with the author's acceptance. I was not stealing from the author. But I might agree that Amazon was. However, the author evidently consented to this deal when they signed their contract with Amazon, so they really don't have a leg to stand on if they were to try and force Amazon to pay up. Amazon may have been a bully in creating this contract. But that does not mean that I "literally stole money from the author".

Now Amazon has blocked this method of transfer, which is probably good for authors (unless there is some other catch/caveat Amazon is exploiting here). That's their prerogative. And I will not be using KU anymore because of this change. That's my prerogative. And it has nothing to do with author payments.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

If only people cared about being able to get books out of the Kindle ecosystem as much as they cared about sharing passwords on Netflix.

Little hope for that. There are vastly more people watching movies than there are reading books.

[haertig]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

If only people cared about being able to get books out of the Kindle ecosystem as much as they cared about sharing passwords on Netflix.

The problem that Netflix will run into IMHO, is that the quality and variety of their content has taken a steep nosedive over the last few years. These days there are a ton of streaming companies and they all have dug foxholes and each has their own exclusive content. Content that used to be available on Netflix. Now Netflix has much less content from other places than they used to. They are filling in the gaps with content that they are producing themselves. Some of it is good, but a lot of it is bad.

They raise prices over time, and give you less and worse content than before. So many subscribers reach the point where they say, is it still worth paying for this? The solution in the past has been to share a Netflix password between two or more people that divide up the Netflix cost. Netflix does not like this (obviously). They would like more money (obviously). But I'm afraid that as they force people into not sharing an account, they may find instead of having two subscribers where they used to have one, they might end up with zero subscribers where there used to be one.

Netflix has the moral high ground in trying to get rid of shared accounts. And it is certainly their right to do so. But they may find that what they want to charge each individual, for what they provide, is too high and their customers may start abandoning them.

The problem is not that Netflix is bad. The problem is that every content provider got greedy and decided to create their own streaming service with their "exclusive content" that nobody else is allowed to stream. Nobody wants to pay for all those different streaming services. So in the long run, they're killing themselves. Netflix may be one of the first casualties with their higher prices and declining content (quantity and quality).

[rantanplan]

Originally Posted by Patitapetit

It's legal to crack DRM? No. IS It legal Jailbreak? No. Here Is a forum very strange, some illegal ok, others not

In Germany, it's illegal to circumvent an effective copy restriction mechanism. Something that can be easily be removed as DVD CSS or Adobe DRM it not technically effective.

[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by haertig

I completely disagree with that statement.

Spoiler:

Not anymore, ... but I used to be able to pay for a KU subscription, download and transfer a book I borrowed from KU with Amazon's blessing, and sideload that onto my Kindle which is in airplane mode. Yes, I was circumventing Amazon's intended tracking. That wasn't my main goal in transferring the book this way, but was indeed one goal. But it was perfectly legal, perfectly ethical, and not stealing in any way shape or form. If this type of transfer allowed Amazon to keep every penny of my subscription money and not give one cent of it to the author, that is Amazon's doing, with the author's acceptance. I was not stealing from the author. But I might agree that Amazon was. However, the author evidently consented to this deal when they signed their contract with Amazon, so they really don't have a leg to stand on if they were to try and force Amazon to pay up. Amazon may have been a bully in creating this contract. But that does not mean that I "literally stole money from the author".

Now Amazon has blocked this method of transfer, which is probably good for authors (unless there is some other catch/caveat Amazon is exploiting here). That's their prerogative. And I will not be using KU anymore because of this change. That's my prerogative. And it has nothing to do with author payments.

Then, we will have to come to the understanding that your opinion on this is vastly different than mine.

[stumped]

Originally Posted by Unseen Entities

The Kindle cloud reader plus an AutoHotKey click script would be a whole lot easier lol.

as a test i opened a book in Kindle cloud reader, went full screen, then began tapping my foot to an imaginary beat on my bluetooth page turner pedal....

that danced nicely through the book.

I also own, for my music page turning practice, a 16 key bluetooth keypad and use powertoys to map pad keys to any windows key combination i wish ...

so in theory- with a bit of foot to hand co-ordination I could "drum" my way through the book, foot-hand, foot,hand.... triggering page turns and screenshots of each page...

then would just have to combine all the screenshot images into a book


and the book has to be worth going to all this trouble for - and 99.9% of what's in Kindle Unlimited sadly isn't

legality becomes an interesting but age old argument : if it is ok to eyeball something, and memorise what i see, perhaps writing it down later, when is it not ok to take a photo instead.

if i borrow a play from KU, I assume it's ok to look at the book until I have memorised my lines, then return it; but illegal to write down my lines afterwards, as an aide-memoire

[haertig]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

Then, we will have to come to the understanding that your opinion on this is vastly different than mine.

True. Luckily "stealing" is not defined in law nor prosecuted in court based on an opinion. Many people are maliciously mislabeled as something they are not based on an agenda of the accuser. This can occasionally be somewhat effective if repeated enough times, but it's still not true.

[mbovenka]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Any eink model newer than Kindle DX will work.

Even a Kindle DX(G) will work. It will just get you a Mobi file instead of a KF8 (I still have my old DXG on my account).

[JSWolf]

This issue (IMHO) is not so much to be able to download KU/Prime eBooks to remove the DRM, it's to future proof before it becomes too difficult or too expensive to do so.

I can easily see the price of used KF8 only Kindle pre-PW1 rise in price because of Amazon's shenanigans.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

This issue (IMHO) is not so much to be able to download KU/Prime eBooks to remove the DRM, it's to future proof before it becomes too difficult or too expensive to do so.

I can easily see the price of used KF8 only Kindle pre-PW1 rise in price because of Amazon's shenanigans.

It's also possible that Amazon will disable any old pre-PW1 Kindles entirely in the future. So that there will be no way to deDRM at all, unless the KFX encryption will be successfully cracked.