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What does Jeff Bezos think is going to happen?
- O5vYtytb 4mo agoMaybe you should ask Andy Jassy, the current CEO?
- rzzzt 4mo agoDoes Andy know what Jeff thinks is going to happen?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- __MatrixMan__ 4mo ago> Well, from now on the workflow will be: > - Find the book I want on Amazon. > - Buy it. > - Find the same book on a torrent site. > - Download it. > - Physically copy it onto the Kindle via a USB cable. Wait a second... you're rewarding Amazon and the publisher for their bad behavior by continuing to buy from Amazon? Nothing about this plan is discouraging the problem. Cut out the middlemen. Torrent it and send the author some money.
- stavros 4mo agoThe next sentence says: > And it can hardly escape anyone’s notice that I would achieve exactly the same end-state — the book on my Kindle — if I just skipped the first two stages.
- __MatrixMan__ 4mo agoSure but why pussyfoot around the issue? We should be actively encouraging each other to punish misbehaving companies. It's the right thing to do. They're deaf to anything besides pain. If you want to help your fellow humans, you need to inflict that pain. Otherwise the company won't change.
- stavros 4mo agoI agree, but I think that the author is saying the same thing.
- munk-a 4mo agoI think by spelling out the process in this manner and then highlighting the absurdity of the first two steps your argument is defusing a lot of the bad faith responses that are likely to arise. It does feel cumbersome to execute the argument in this manner but it feels rationally defensive.
- breuleux 4mo agoI just see it as a way to highlight the absurdity. They're heavily implying they won't buy books on Amazon anymore in the next paragraph: > So it looks as though this move — both mean-spirited and commercially incompetent — will result in the loss of about 50 book sales per year.
- jldugger 4mo ago> Sure but why pussyfoot around the issue? We should be actively encouraging each other to punish misbehaving companies. It's the right thing to do. Probably because doing what you suggest would not look great in court: "Dear Jeff Bezos, Here is my signed confession letter of intellectual property theft. Yours Truly, Mike Taylor"
- randallsquared 4mo agoThe poster isn't pussyfooting around the issue, he's feigning discovery to emphasize the point as a rhetorical move.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 4mo agoRight? I never understood why people think it's morally right to buy books/movies/music from predatory service providers
- Aarostotle 4mo agoIt’s very simple. They purchased the right to distribute the books on their terms. You don’t like the terms, so you call them predatory. You want the product, so you just take it on your own terms. Morally, that’s no different than your employer just deciding to pay you less than your contract states, because he decides he doesn’t like the terms of the agreement anymore. You don’t gain a right to take things just because you want them or need them.
- ElevenLathe 4mo agoYour morality is pretty strange if it equates ignoring some of the more odious terms in a hundred-page click-through EULA to knowingly engaging in wage theft. I would honestly like to hear you explain that further.
- saaaaaam 4mo agoAuthors’ wages are paid by people buying their books.
- Aarostotle 4mo agoThe moral principle here is just property rights. One case is more complex than the other, but that does not change the fundamental. Two cases: 1) Two parties agree to a trade under certain terms, one party decides he does not like the terms, and decides he wants to take the benefit without complying with the agreement. 2) One party decides he does not like the offered terms, does not accept the agreement, but takes the benefit anyway. With that said, I think you have a point that the current way EULAs work are questionable under contract law. They're specifically designed to be unreadable and to encourage people not to read them, not to keep up with updates, and generally to be unaware of terms they've agreed to. I'd be interested in some smart legislative reform here and I'm hoping you can point me to some people doing good work in this area. There's a live issue here, but the fact that contract law has flaws does not give anyone the right to defraud or steal.
- bspammer 4mo agoDid you read to the end of that list and then close the article?
- joe_mamba 4mo ago>Cut out the middlemen. Torrent it and send the author some money. If this is the ideal model, why don't authors skip the middleman themselves and just put the .pdf/.epub on their website directly in exchange for donations? On the same note, why do game devs need to give Steam 30% of their money and not just sell to the public directly and pocket the 30%? Maybe because those middlemen platforms provide a combination of discoverability, user review rating system, network effect, convenience, and trusted return policy at scale that's valuable to both consumers and developers/authors enough for both parties to tolerate it as the status quo even if it's not perfect, it's just good enough to be the default.
- CuriouslyC 4mo agoBecause Amazon gets millions of views per day, and their personal website gets a dozen or so. Literally the only reason.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- zbentley 4mo ago> why don't authors skip the middleman themselves and just put the .pdf/.epub on their website directly in exchange for donations? Some do! https://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm https://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm
- shimman 4mo agoRead the Rifter's trilogy because of this, quite good IMO. Made buying Blindsight in hardcopy way easier once money wasn't a strain.
- paul7986 4mo agoor use Cloudflare's "Pay Per Use," tech so real humans and or more so AI sucking up your content for free is forced to pay you something to gain access.
- Georgelemental 4mo agoIf you read what follows, he makes it very clear he intends to do more or less what you suggest
- badgersnake 4mo agoOr just buy an actual book from and independent bookshop.
- Cider9986 4mo agoThat doesn't cut out the publisher.
- shimman 4mo agoPublishers aren't as evil compared to big tech. Maybe a random lieutenant of hell versus Lucifer's advisor here. You can also buy DRM free self-published books quite easily nowadays. Amazon doesn't have a monopoly on e-commerce, not yet at least.
- lstodd 4mo ago> Publishers aren't as evil compared to big tech. Haha yes, they are even more evil en masse.
- badgersnake 4mo agoI don’t think that’s even possible.
- themadturk 4mo agoMost publishers demand their ebooks be sold with DRM. This can be seen as an aspect of "evil."
- saaaaaam 4mo agoThat’s fine if you have one near to you, don’t have mobility issues that make it hard to visit or accessibility issues that make book print hard to read. And it stocks the kinds of books you want to read. Without being all woke about it, indie book stores can be great if you like reading the sorts of books your particular local flavour of indie book stores stocks.
- InsideOutSanta 4mo agoAs somebody who wrote a book in the past, yes, this. Give Amazon no money. If you want to spend money because pirating makes you feel bad, send a few bucks to the author, buy something on the publisher's store, or go to your local book store and spend some money there. But never feel bad about not sending money to Amazon.
- pointlessone 4mo agoHow much money? I mean, the natural answer is full price but that’s not the amount the author gets from a regular sale. There’s a whole range where it’s cheaper to freebooters and still more profitable to the author. I’ve seen an argument that buying an album from a musician (or a physical media or merch) and pirating the rest of their library in most cases more profitable to the musician than streaming. I suppose there’s a similar dynamic in publishing where the overhead created by all the intermediaries is significant compared to the actual work done by the author, editor, designers, and so on.
- InsideOutSanta 4mo agoIf you send the author half of what the book costs, there's an almost 100% chance this is more than they would have made if you had bought the book. If you send the author 20%, that's roughly what most authors earn per book sale. It can be substantially higher or lower depending on a bunch of factors, but I think it's a reasonable rule of thumb. > I’ve seen an argument that buying an album from a musician (or a physical media or merch) and pirating the rest of their library in most cases more profitable to the musician than streaming. Streaming is a particularly brutal example for musicians. Book authors make quite a bit more per book sale than musicians make per stream.
- __MatrixMan__ 4mo agoWouldn't it be cool if we could get to the point where authors (and artists generally) are making more from voluntary direct payments than they are from the platforms? It would be a great way to demonstrate how broken the funding model is, and all of that money would be money that didn't contribute to the surveillance/censorship tech that copyright is used to justify.
- shinycode 4mo agoActually if authors could sell directly I’ll gladly buy from them each and every time and cut off the middle man.
- rzzzt 4mo agoWhat is making it complex for authors to sell directly? Edit: hah, only 15 minutes late with my attempt at Socratic spiel: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48810056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48810056
- saaaaaam 4mo agoA lot of authors are not technical people and/or are busy writing. There isn’t a simple system with a large audience of potential book purchasers that makes it easy for authors to sell their books because Amazon became that place but now wants to irritate its users by mangling the kindle.
- shinycode 4mo agoAlso unfortunately the problem lies when the platform has too much power and makes this relationship with the author disproportionate. At first such a platform seems like a good deal for everyone, except when it stops being one
- tzs 4mo ago> What is making it complex for authors to sell directly? If an author living at place X sells directly to a reader living at place Y and it is not true that for all governments G PlaceInJurisdictionOf(X,G) == PlaceInJurisdictionOf(Y,G), then the author is making a cross border sale which can have annoying tax considerations. The internet made it very easy for someone to physically run a small business that conducts transactions across dozens or even hundreds of borders, especially if they are selling intangible goods, but as far as I know the legal environment has not been updated for that. Hence it is a lot easier to use a middleman who handles the legal stuff with cross border transactions and you only have to deal with the middleman.
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- jtbayly 4mo agoOr buy it literally from anybody other than Amazon.
- tsujamin 4mo agoI ended up migrating to ebooks.com and importing them into Calibre (after some work to get Adobe Digital Editions to import nicely) and using that to manage my Kindle. Did the same with my old Amazon library too when they were talking about stopping you exporting the azw3's
- francisofascii 4mo agoAssuming the author and publisher are not evil, you want to at least give them their legitamate cut.
- __MatrixMan__ 4mo agoSure, but they've claimed to "sell" you something, and now they're making your continued "ownership" of that thing contingent upon some future purchase. "Evil" is maybe a strong word, but I see no reason to continue playing by their rules after shenanigans of that sort.
- trencedamp 4mo agoI went to kobo when my Kindle told me if would no longer work. Now I don't buy anything from Amazon
- SoftTalker 4mo agoI have a kobo. I use it to check out books from the library via Libby/Overdrive. I have never purchased an e-book.
- Marsymars 4mo agoI find that integration near-useless. Even obscure books (if available) tend to have a multi-month wait at my library. Since the wait times seem to be semi-random, it's basically impossible to queue up books in a way that syncs up to my pace of reading. (I guess if I really wanted to, at my rough reading pace of one book per week, I could place a hold on two books per week, and on average every week I'd get two books available, pick one to read, and just cycle the other back into the hold queue.)
- SoftTalker 4mo agoHmm, I've had pretty good success with it. The current bestsellers are hard to get, but haven't really had a problem with anything else. I wonder if it depends on the library?
- Marsymars 4mo agoYeah, I'm sure it does - libraries buy licenses to a specific number of books that can be lent out. I've got no insight into how the licenses my library has stack up against other libraries though.
- asveikau 4mo agoCame here to complain about this workflow too. If you don't want to resort to piracy, there are many vendors that sell epubs with weak DRM and presumably give money to publishers. Ebooks.com is one. If you have not already, I would recommend looking into calibre for managing such titles. (I did this even when I used to buy from Kindle, first thing I would do is break the DRM and put it into calibre even if I was only reading on Amazon devices, because I never trusted Amazon in the first place. But supposedly the DRM breaking flow is broken with new kindle releases.)
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- mjhay 4mo agoBuying the physical book from Amazon isn’t a great way to stick it to Bezos. Just have your local bookstore order it for you, it’s easy.
- b40d-48b2-979e 4mo agoOr just get it from your library. I rarely find myself re-visiting books, so that model is ideal to me.
- pyrale 4mo agoIf you want to stick it to Jeff, the best part is to give/lend/sell them once you've read them. Or even better, get them from the (public) library.
- bluefirebrand 4mo agoJeff doesn't care what you do after you've already given him the money though Yes, you prevent him from selling a copy to your friend, but he already has your money!
- Dumblydorr 4mo agoJeff doesn’t care what you do period. They’re in another plane, it’s some poor schmucks now with only a few million fighting for table scraps of the billionaires who don’t care.
- badgersnake 4mo agoCancel your prime is a good start.
- toomuchtodo 4mo agoWith regards to buying physical books, https://bookshop.org/ https://bookshop.org/ or https://betterworldbooks.com/ https://betterworldbooks.com/ are better options than Amazon imho if you're not going to buy from your local bookstore. Bookshop allows you to configure your local bookshop to receive a cut of your purchases from Bookshop (https://bookshop.org/pages/bookstores https://bookshop.org/pages/bookstores). The public library is of course an option as many mention, assuming they have the book in their inventory. You might also be able to check it out from https://openlibrary.org/ https://openlibrary.org/
- josefritzishere 4mo agoI buy paper books. So far zero have been stolen by Jeff Bezos. They take up a bit of space but there are always trade offs.
- munk-a 4mo agoIf you find yourself with an excess of books buy a bird house and set up a little library[1] somewhere in your neighborhood to outsource that storage and the knowledge contained in those books! I liberally loan books that I love out though the ones I really love go to homes I know will appreciate them. 1. Also called a loan-library in some areas - basically a box that random folks can put books into and take books out of without any strings attached.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- wwweston 4mo agoI’ve got an old DX. The fact that it doesn’t have net access anymore is now a security feature and an anti distraction mechanism. I can load what I want by USB. It doesn’t do epub3 which is a problem, but it does PDFs and conversion tricks are possible. The Amazon ecosystem isn’t uniquely untrustworthy, but it’s not where I want to keep future electronic purchases.
- lpapez 4mo agoThere is a very good open source conversion tool called "Calibre". I use it all the time to convert my, erm, security backups of books I own.
- mrwh 4mo agoI used to read the New York Times on my kindle. It was great: delivered each morning, no waste paper by the afternoon, a simple subscription, etc. I was on my 4th kindle at least, which says more about the use I got out of them than their endurance. And then the service disappeared for reasons I never really understood.
- mattmaroon 4mo agoIt’s cute he thinks Jeff Bezos thinks about this. Whoever made this decision has probably never met anybody who has met Jeff Bezos.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- bogrollben 4mo agoI have an older kindle and I can still load it with epubs by emailing the unique kindle address. I think there are other ways too, via USB for example. My understanding is that it's only downloading via the amazon kindle store that is no longer supported for devices that are considered end-of-life, which makes sense to me personally. The kindle web browser is probably based on an ancient android version of chrome. That browser is not going to last forever.
- Wingman4l7 4mo agoIt is indeed trivial to "side-load" ebooks onto an older Kindle; you plug it in via USB and drop the files into, IIRC, the "/documents" directory. Kindle, for many years and I think even now, does not actually support EPUB, for likely unethical reasons you can probably guess; I believe the Kindle email address method hides a conversion to the AZW / AZW3 format.
- hyperhello 4mo agoNothing is going to happen. Amazon is like a very large redwood tree that is all grown. It has no interest in fire, drought, animal life, human culture, or anything else you value. Your old Kindle is as one of its pinecones on a mantelpiece somewhere.
- dinkblam 4mo agoon the other hand 14 years of usage of a ~100$ device sounds ok. these days you need to be happy if things last more than a few months…
- ThrowawayTestr 4mo agoWhat electronics are you buying that only last a few months?
- Ancalagon 4mo agotbh the dev support/infra for the old devices was probably more than the money they were making in sales on those devices. They noticed and just decided to cut them off and that was the extent of that decision.
- blaqq2 4mo ago[dead]
- markstos 4mo agoKobo e-readers can connect directly to library e-book stores and download many titles directly for free from libraries.
- rickdeckard 4mo agoIt's an exceptionally odd decision, but planned for approx. a year now. - First they stopped allowing download of purchased books for cable-transfer to kindle in 2025. - Then they amped up their effort to avoid jailbreaking by suddenly releasing more firmware updates than before. - Now they stopped supporting a wide range of kindles. Amazon obviously assumes that they sufficiently killed the competition so they don't need to worry about customers leaving. As for me, I managed to exit on-time, applied a jailbreak on my kindle touch and now buy my books elsewhere...
- mmmlinux 4mo agoToo bad, I remember when kindles came with a free 3g connection and web browser.
- rickdeckard 4mo agofunny enough, just noticed on jailbreak that my kindle touch web-browser never lost its "beta" label, in all those years :)
- themadturk 4mo agoKobos have web browsers, and they have be in "beta" forever as well.
- ahf8Aithaex7Nai 4mo agoGreat! You currently have just one other comment pointing out that Bezos is no longer CEO, as if that were a piece of information that would make even the slightest difference in this matter. Unfortunately, my comment isn't any more sympathetic either. These people couldn't care less whether you can continue reading the digital books you've already purchased on your existing device or not. And yet you insist on paying for these books instead of just pirating them outright. Sorry, but that's exactly what Nietzsche called "slave morality." You're making a virtue out of clinging to the very structure that disadvantages you. And that whole "commercial incompetence" thing can't really be true, can it? The company dominates e-commerce, and the guy has enough cash to fly into space in his own rocket. So the business hasn't gone under yet just because it missed out on a few book sales to nerds with old devices. I find your whole perspective kind of baffling. I realized right from the start that I would either buy digital books as fully functional PDFs or continue to buy paper books that I could put on my bookshelf, because anything else would amount to exactly what you're describing now. And a small suggestion for improving your workflow: first check to see if the book is available on a torrent site, and only buy it afterward.
- 6510 4mo agoIt's a fascinating bit of biology to see a species collectively sacrifice its well being for the benefit of one man almost entirely without getting something in return. Not to argue rich people never did anything useful for humanity. The pun is that one may be promoted to great status for doing great things but after that there is no obligation to continue doing great things. We are in an endless war against the great void and we've appointed many generals who at best couldn't care less about the war and at worse joined the dark side. You've paid the man and now you get to see books you like fly into the great nothingness. Funny as hell! He showed non of the kindness and generosity he is known for? You should give him more money, maybe something different happens next time. haha
- ahf8Aithaex7Nai 4mo ago> It's a fascinating bit of biology to see a species collectively sacrifice its well being for the benefit of one man I wouldn't attribute this phenomenon to biology. But in a healthy world, there would have been an intervention by now—at the very least with pitchforks, but ideally through institutional channels. I'm curious to see if that will still happen, or if we'll simply hand the world over to our new feudal overlords without putting up a fight.
- subarctic 4mo agoNever been happier that i bought a kobo instead of a kindle years ago
- ChicagoDave 4mo agoI extracted my books from my kindle over a year ago. Never buying books from Amazon again. EPUB on iOS works great.
- cryo32 4mo agoI’m the worst of the worst. I only buy second hand paper books. Then I give them to someone when I’ve read them! This is incidentally after a kindle phase terminated by Amazon after I returned too much of their third rate junk that didn’t work for me to remain a profitable customer. Fuck ‘em.
- trencedamp 4mo agoFor those of you who don't want to pirate, there are legal means to do this. 1. But the book on kobo or ebooks 2. Convert it to mobi and transfer it Kindle using calibre
- nickpinkston 4mo agoShoutout to https://libro.fm/ https://libro.fm/ which is a non-Amazon Audible that lets you: - Buy nearly any audiobook that's on Audible or other services - Donate to your favorite local bookstore - Get the downloadable audio file without DRM
- rickdeckard 4mo agoEverybody, get up, we're leaving. Jailbreak your kindles and move to epub. It's not that difficult. Buy books at Kobo or bookshop.org There are so many functional kindles out there, this could be the event that changes the power dynamic and puts the author-reader relationship back in the center instead of the publisher/distributor. It's what's slowly happening in the Movie industry now: The studios learn that they can't create sustainable value by just spending money and adding stars to a production. But directors create value. So they are suddenly put front and center and actively promoted.
- cmiles74 4mo agoI’d be curious to see the financials on the Kindle readers, my suspicion is that they very quickly make the cost back through book sales. If retaining customers was a concern they could simply ship people the cheapest reader before cutting service. It’s straight up greed, IMHO.
- notatoad 4mo agoAmazon doesn’t care what you do, piracy isn’t a threat to Amazon, they just want to deliver the drm that the publishers demand in the easiest way possible. And they’ve made a fairly reasonable business decision that a customer who hasn’t bought a new kindle in ~15 years isn’t an important source of revenue worth supporting old devices for. And yeah, it sucks. But it’s the ecosystem you bought into when you bought a kindle. This is what drm does. If you care about open systems, support them.
- swframe2 4mo agoIt's my understanding that when you purchase content you get a license that is limited to terms the seller defines (i.e. only if the content is delivered from seller's approved data sources, only if the content is viewed on a seller approved device, only if the content has a seller approved drm, etc).