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I stongly encourage anyone who uses a kindle for reading ebooks to back up their library via Calibre. If Amazon tried this rediculousness theres still a way to

I stongly encourage anyone who uses a kindle for reading ebooks to back up their library via Calibre. If Amazon tried this rediculousness theres still a way to get all your content back via plugins that can convert them to plain epub. Unethical? Not if they steal from you first.

komali2 6y ago
If you bought the book anyway I don't think it's unethical to unlock them no matter what. The author got paid, the content delivery mechanism got paid. Considering everyone got their money, it's unethical to have any DRM on the book at that point.
- 627467 6y ago
  I agree with your statement, yet the argument is that you are purchasing a license to consume the eBook and enforcement of that license is partially guaranteed by DRM built into those licensed copies, and since in some jurisdictions it is ilegal (immoral/unethical?) to break DRM and breach the license than, legally you shouldn't do that. Edit: personally, I don't like to be told how I should compute so I reserve the right to do what I want with bits (state of my sillicon) I have. Regarding IP of the content: I make sure not to distribute things I'm not licensed to distribute.
  - the_af 6y ago
    Honest question: where does it say you're purchasing a license to read the book, and not a book? If it's buried in fine print, I'd say that's deceptive. If it says "buy this book" on Amazon, then customers have every right to expect they are buying books, not licenses.
    - 627467 6y ago
      Yeah, not a lawyer, yet I'm playing devil's advocate. Your's is a fair statement of our state of affairs. All these content distributors rely on increasingly complex models of distributions that rely on people's lack of willingness (or ability) to comprehend what they are buying.
    - throwanem 6y ago
      From the Kindle Store TOS: > Upon your download or access of Kindle Content and payment of any applicable fees (including applicable taxes), the Content Provider grants you a non-exclusive right to view, use, and display such Kindle Content an unlimited number of times (for Subscription Content, only as long as you remain an active member of the underlying membership or subscription program), solely through a Kindle Application or as otherwise permitted as part of the Service, solely on the number of Supported Devices specified in the Kindle Store, and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider. It's clickwrapped, of course. No doubt the argument would be that, whether you read this or not, you agreed to it as a legally binding contract when you "bought" a Kindle book. I'd like to see it really tested in court, but I don't expect to. For that to happen would probably take a very high incidence of people's accounts and/or access to paid content being revoked for no reason, and as far as I know that doesn't happen anywhere near often enough to make it an issue under public consideration - not that it's other than wrong either way, but I would be surprised to see Amazon legal permit a tactical blunder that would risk the company being hauled into court and forced to behave as if they thought their customers deserved fair consideration.
Havoc 6y ago
Worth pointing out that Amazon is busy killing this route too. The latest format is to my knowledge currently unbroken - even with suitable plugins. So only way around is to get an old kindle which doesn’t support the new encryption and thus falls back on the old encryption
- robk 6y ago
  The old version of the Kindle app for PC works as long as you don't upgrade it.
  - throwanem 6y ago
    Be aware that by default it will be very aggressive about updates; after installing you immediately need to disable automatic update in settings, and be wary thereafter of surprise upgrade request prompts at startup and during usage.
- AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
  It's a cat-and-mouse game, to be sure, and the cat has orders of magnitude more money to protect the cheese. Nonetheless, I'm confident whatever new encryption method they introduce will be broken in time. At the end of the day, as long as the decryption is protected by a key that is held somewhere on the Kindle device, hackers will find a way of exposing that key.
the_af 6y ago
Can you backup your DRM'ed ebooks with Calibre without striping the DRM? If so, I'd like to know how. I own a ton of Kindle ebooks and would be infuriated if Amazon randomly decided to delete them.
- robarr 6y ago
  The kindle for pc software downloads your books on a folder. These are the encrypted versions with no real evident names to identify but it is a local copy that you can backup. If you want to go the dedrm way It has been answered a little further down the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24272631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24272631 Edit: link to the dedrm post.
Semaphor 6y ago
If I re-read books, I would have long ago switched to an alternative reader. But as it is, I’d actually like a "Remove everything I’ve read"-switch on my kindle. Books are purely a one-time thing for me, once I’ve read them, I’m done. Well, besides technical books, but those I buy on paper anyway.
- pritambaral 6y ago
  > I’d actually like a "Remove everything I’ve read"-switch And you should have that. As for the rest of us out here, we should have the option to back our books up.
  - Semaphor 6y ago
    Oh, I fully agree. I even did that for a while early on. I was simply saying why I didn’t switch away from a kindle.
powersnail 6y ago
Sometimes I consider myself lucky that most of the things I read, except for technical books, exist in the public domain. I'm really not comfortable that my license of reading could be revoked. Or if the company somehow died, or if the kindle program is terminated, or if the relationships with the publisher deteriorate, my content will vanish. I gained this anxiety when Netflix pulled away "House M.D.", which I binged watched until just before Season 8. Life became busy and I had to stop. When I came back, eagerly wanting to watch the last season, it was already gone from the catalogue. TV shows, I can forego; book collections I cannot. When one day I no longer reside in a small apartment, I'll probably go back to buying physical copies.
- JackFr 6y ago
  > I gained this anxiety when Netflix pulled away "House M.D." To be clear Netflix didn't pull House, NBC Universal pulled it from Netflix and sold it to Amazon Prime. It's likely it will get pulled from Amazon Prime and end up on Peacock.
  - haltingproblem 6y ago
    Mea culpa for the nitpick, but in high probability Netflix was equally an part to this as they refused to pay what NBC Universal wanted.
- parliament32 6y ago
  I live in a small studio and mostly read physical books. Probably a 50/50 between borrowing from the library and buying physical copies, I have a few bookshelves. The entire concept of having a license to read a book (which, as we've seen, can be revoked randomly) is ridiculous once you stop and think about it.
  - dividedbyzero 6y ago
    It is, but I hate lugging around big books that I can't properly read in a hammock, after dark, ... Being able to read on my phone or a featherlight e-reader is absolutely fantastic. Before that, easily more than half of my vacation luggage was books. I don't need to lug around a tome everywhere just so I can read on the subway. That's worth a lot to me.

komali2 6y ago

If you bought the book anyway I don't think it's unethical to unlock them no matter what. The author got paid, the content delivery mechanism got paid. Considering everyone got their money, it's unethical to have any DRM on the book at that point.

627467 6y ago
I agree with your statement, yet the argument is that you are purchasing a license to consume the eBook and enforcement of that license is partially guaranteed by DRM built into those licensed copies, and since in some jurisdictions it is ilegal (immoral/unethical?) to break DRM and breach the license than, legally you shouldn't do that. Edit: personally, I don't like to be told how I should compute so I reserve the right to do what I want with bits (state of my sillicon) I have. Regarding IP of the content: I make sure not to distribute things I'm not licensed to distribute.
- the_af 6y ago
  Honest question: where does it say you're purchasing a license to read the book, and not a book? If it's buried in fine print, I'd say that's deceptive. If it says "buy this book" on Amazon, then customers have every right to expect they are buying books, not licenses.
  - 627467 6y ago
    Yeah, not a lawyer, yet I'm playing devil's advocate. Your's is a fair statement of our state of affairs. All these content distributors rely on increasingly complex models of distributions that rely on people's lack of willingness (or ability) to comprehend what they are buying.
  - throwanem 6y ago
    From the Kindle Store TOS: > Upon your download or access of Kindle Content and payment of any applicable fees (including applicable taxes), the Content Provider grants you a non-exclusive right to view, use, and display such Kindle Content an unlimited number of times (for Subscription Content, only as long as you remain an active member of the underlying membership or subscription program), solely through a Kindle Application or as otherwise permitted as part of the Service, solely on the number of Supported Devices specified in the Kindle Store, and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider. It's clickwrapped, of course. No doubt the argument would be that, whether you read this or not, you agreed to it as a legally binding contract when you "bought" a Kindle book. I'd like to see it really tested in court, but I don't expect to. For that to happen would probably take a very high incidence of people's accounts and/or access to paid content being revoked for no reason, and as far as I know that doesn't happen anywhere near often enough to make it an issue under public consideration - not that it's other than wrong either way, but I would be surprised to see Amazon legal permit a tactical blunder that would risk the company being hauled into court and forced to behave as if they thought their customers deserved fair consideration.

Havoc 6y ago

Worth pointing out that Amazon is busy killing this route too. The latest format is to my knowledge currently unbroken - even with suitable plugins. So only way around is to get an old kindle which doesn’t support the new encryption and thus falls back on the old encryption

robk 6y ago
The old version of the Kindle app for PC works as long as you don't upgrade it.
- throwanem 6y ago
  Be aware that by default it will be very aggressive about updates; after installing you immediately need to disable automatic update in settings, and be wary thereafter of surprise upgrade request prompts at startup and during usage.
AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
It's a cat-and-mouse game, to be sure, and the cat has orders of magnitude more money to protect the cheese. Nonetheless, I'm confident whatever new encryption method they introduce will be broken in time. At the end of the day, as long as the decryption is protected by a key that is held somewhere on the Kindle device, hackers will find a way of exposing that key.

the_af 6y ago

Can you backup your DRM'ed ebooks with Calibre without striping the DRM? If so, I'd like to know how. I own a ton of Kindle ebooks and would be infuriated if Amazon randomly decided to delete them.

robarr 6y ago
The kindle for pc software downloads your books on a folder. These are the encrypted versions with no real evident names to identify but it is a local copy that you can backup. If you want to go the dedrm way It has been answered a little further down the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24272631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24272631 Edit: link to the dedrm post.

Semaphor 6y ago

If I re-read books, I would have long ago switched to an alternative reader. But as it is, I’d actually like a "Remove everything I’ve read"-switch on my kindle. Books are purely a one-time thing for me, once I’ve read them, I’m done. Well, besides technical books, but those I buy on paper anyway.

pritambaral 6y ago
> I’d actually like a "Remove everything I’ve read"-switch And you should have that. As for the rest of us out here, we should have the option to back our books up.
- Semaphor 6y ago
  Oh, I fully agree. I even did that for a while early on. I was simply saying why I didn’t switch away from a kindle.

powersnail 6y ago

Sometimes I consider myself lucky that most of the things I read, except for technical books, exist in the public domain. I'm really not comfortable that my license of reading could be revoked. Or if the company somehow died, or if the kindle program is terminated, or if the relationships with the publisher deteriorate, my content will vanish. I gained this anxiety when Netflix pulled away "House M.D.", which I binged watched until just before Season 8. Life became busy and I had to stop. When I came back, eagerly wanting to watch the last season, it was already gone from the catalogue. TV shows, I can forego; book collections I cannot. When one day I no longer reside in a small apartment, I'll probably go back to buying physical copies.

JackFr 6y ago
> I gained this anxiety when Netflix pulled away "House M.D." To be clear Netflix didn't pull House, NBC Universal pulled it from Netflix and sold it to Amazon Prime. It's likely it will get pulled from Amazon Prime and end up on Peacock.
- haltingproblem 6y ago
  Mea culpa for the nitpick, but in high probability Netflix was equally an part to this as they refused to pay what NBC Universal wanted.
parliament32 6y ago
I live in a small studio and mostly read physical books. Probably a 50/50 between borrowing from the library and buying physical copies, I have a few bookshelves. The entire concept of having a license to read a book (which, as we've seen, can be revoked randomly) is ridiculous once you stop and think about it.
- dividedbyzero 6y ago
  It is, but I hate lugging around big books that I can't properly read in a hammock, after dark, ... Being able to read on my phone or a featherlight e-reader is absolutely fantastic. Before that, easily more than half of my vacation luggage was books. I don't need to lug around a tome everywhere just so I can read on the subway. That's worth a lot to me.