Technology

Back when Randall Munroe released his "What if" in eBook format, it essentially was only available with DRM.
When I emailed him about it, asking for a place to buy it without DRM, he responded with DRM unfortunately being mandated by his publisher, and finished his email with a link to this comic of his:
https://xkcd.com/488/

Amazon is making it impossible for me to consider a Kindle.

What does this mean? What prevents me from OCRing the pages on a video that quickly goes through it?

I would recommend people buy their books off ZLibrary instead, where they come with no DRM.

again displaying, that DRM only hurts legitimate users. a pirate has never had the problem of backing up, moving or sharing his library...

Fuck you Jeff!

Switched to kobo.

It annoys me so much that they have convinced anyone that this stuff is for protecting against piracy of something like that, while this is just another tool for them to force you into using their platform and ecosystem. It does nothing against piracy.

We'll soon be back to monks transcribing at this rate.

Don't buy Amazon products. Fairly simple concept.

1. https://www.gutenberg.org/
2. https://openlibrary.org/
3. https://www.planetebook.com/
4. https://archive.org/
5. https://www.smashwords.com/
6. https://books.google.com/
7. https://www.freetechbooks.com/
8. https://www.getfreebooks.com/
9. https://www.openculture.com/free_ebooks
10. https://www.goodreads.com/
11. https://www.oreilly.com/ (trial)
12. https://annas-archive.org/
13. https://pdfcoffee.com/
14. https://singlelogin.re/
15. https://www.ereaderiq.com/freebies/
16. https://www.bookbub.com/ebook-deals/free-ebooks
17. https://digilibraries.com/
18. https://www.overdrive.com/
19. https://manybooks.net/

there’s so many others and of course torrents

I will never, ever purchase a book I can't remove the DRM from.

And there are people out there who are absolutely fanatical about book preservation. They will photograph every single page and run it through OCR and recreate an ebook just so it gets preserved. DRM is absolutely pointless and stupid.

Anna's Archive

I'm shocked at this unforeseeable turn of events.

This entire thing has been made needlessly complicated. Easy fix though.

1. Get whatever ebook you want.
2. Borrow some code from GitHub and teach a raspberry pi with a camera and a few servos to snap pictures of pages, turn the pages, snap again into a PDF.
3. A script then parses all the images and OCRs them for the final PDF.
4. You now own a backup of your DRM book, which you own forever. Pretty sure this is actually legal under DMCA since you are taking a backup of something you allegedly own. The encryption circumvention is irrelevant.
5. now, break the law and throw the PDF on the internet to everyone. Go little bot! Go go go!

Once they started mentioning stuff like this I sold my Kindle and got a moann. Its a little odd to use at times, but I love the size and the fact that I can just throw whatever book on there that I want. I use Anna's archive for whatever book I'm looking for or go through my friend's calibre library and I have over 200 books on my reader. I can also use libby with no issues. Its been fantastic breaking away from being stuck in the kindleverse.

I have a pocketbook instead of a Kindle cause of this lol

I bought a digital movie from Amazon prime in 2015. It fell off and they didnt give me a refund. The music I got from a burnt CD in 2004 is still on the C: drive of my current PC. I don't think it pays to do the right thing in the long run.

I have five published books, all without drm. Amazon better not put that shit ON my books. It's not there for a reason; I want people to share.

amazon: finally we defeated piracy

one kid with a computer: snickers

Why not just remove the Amazon from the ebooks?

This is why I bought some Chinese android ereader than an amazon Kindle.

I love Amazon.

Their website makes it so easy to look up books for Anna's Archive.

There’s no such thing as “impossible” when it comes to piracy.

Kobo is cool Now just fyi. Works well with calibre.

The biggest issue I have is ebooks are almost all excusevly sold on amazon. I would give authors my money and not sail the high seas if it ment no DRM.

I've been slowly filling my wife's Kindle Oasis full of pirated books over the last 2 years. I got it initially because it had internet service everywhere and I could just email her the epubs to simplify loading things.

A couple of weeks ago, even though airplane mode is always on for this thing, (so no wifi either) -- this thing wipes something like 400 books from her library overnight. Granted, they were all pirated, but they're doing some nasty stuff there. It looks like there's renewed effort to combat this.

Sooooo, I sold it and bought her a Kobo Libra Color. Now, I just have her open up https://send.djazz.se/ -- give me the 4 digit code, and I can upload books to her that way. Goodbye Amazon. Don't let the door hit you.

I don't know why people buy an stuff like this and get surprised when this happens.

Plenty of other electronics that you have full control over.

Why are people "buying" DRM infested books? They don't own anything. "Their" books can be taken away at the whim of the seller. Their rights can change with a change to the EULA. There are other legal ways to use e-readers (not Kindles) that let you keep and back up what you buy.

I mean, this is how you get me to stop buying Kindle books.