This is not an anti-Kindle rant. I have purchased (rented?) several Kindle titles myself.

However, YSK that you are only licensing access to the book from Amazon, you don’t own it like a physical book.

There have been cases where Amazon deletes a title from all devices. (Ironically, one version of “1984” was one such title).

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html

There have also been cases where a customer violated Amazon’s terms of service and lost access to all of their Kindle e-books. Amazon has all the power in this relationship. They can and do change the rules on us lowly peasants from time to time.

Here are the terms of use:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201014950

Note, there are indeed ways to download your books and import them into something like Calibre (and remove the DRM from the books). If you do some web searches (and/or search YouTube) you can probably figure it out.

  • bokster@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 month ago

    Duh. Same goes for Steam games and most of digital content.

    If you want to keep it, there’s usually always an option to sail the high seas.

    • Noobnarski@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Except Steam never deletes games that you already own or takes them away from you for other reasons.

      Yes, they could do that in the future but its the one company where that is unlikely.