It's important to note that you don't actually buy e-books from Amazon, you license the right to read, and when that license is revoked/cancelled, those books are no longer available to you.
I wonder if some large organisation (EU?) could force a change in this idea? It does seem like an end-run around so much in the way of consumer rights.
I've been thinking for some time now that legislation is needed for the cloud and "online accounts".
Being banned from Google, Amazon & others for sometimes very fuzzy reasons can be major inconvenient. Sure, it's not a human right or a life or death situation, but they occupy dominant space on their markets and on some people life.
EU seems likely, the European Court of Justice recently ruled that customers have the right to resale on licensed Steam games. The reasoning was basically that a perpetual license equals ownership, and that normal ownership right cannot be limited by the license after the transaction.
Makes me wonder. What happens if you just don't connect your kindle to the net? I have a wifi only kindle which I never connect to the internet because I don't have a wifi connection anymore so I usually keep a local repository of my ebooks which I just drop on my kindle when I want to read them. Is the DRM contained in the azw and mobi files eventually going to stop me from opening them unless I connect to a wireless network?
I expect that some of the time constrained licenses (aka "Book Rentals") will expire even if you aren't connected to the network. The longer term books should be yours permanently, even if Amazon issues a "kill order" - unless you connect to the 'net.
I guess I never really considered that. Under what terms might that license be revoked/cancelled? It appears Amazon also lets you "rent" e-books for a certain amount of time. I suspect most people would assume that the high cost alternative to "renting" would be "buy to own". Especially considering the fact that the Kindle books typically cost the same (occasionally even a little bit more) than the physical books.
I wonder whether this is related to Linn living in Norway, purchasing from Amazon.com and somehow Amazon.co.uk are getting in the middle, perhaps because they run Europe from there.
It's the game that many people play - trying to find the best Amazon (or Apple) store when they live and travel between countries. This means a constant struggle to find a combination of credit card, store with enough content (The US is best) and a local address (virtual and actual) to satisfy arcane internal rules.
Please Amazon - please move to one global store where any credit card from any country can purchase any edition of any book. Please Amazon and Apple, let us combine content from multiple stores into one account, and let us have a global price based on the best market. Yo usell more stuff, we but more as well.
Meanwhile take the chance to collect, and pay to the local authorities, consumption/sales tax based on the location of the IP address, not the credit card or address of the buyer. That way if someone is standing in the UK, buying content from the USA, then they pay UK tax (VAT), making it fairer versus the physical and local virtual alternatives.
I assume for tax and logistics reasons. A search for "Amazon Europe" delivers an http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/gateway-eu. I'm making assumptions after that.
all international kindles are shipped from the US. ebooks must be bought from US too. the UK ebooks rights are ONLY for the UK, same with FR and DE. the US store handles american and international rights. other markets not quite big enough yet.
if you're thinking about physical books, that's wrong too. a book sold in both the US and UK shop will usually have a different publisher, so which one you get depends on where you ordered it, not where you live.
Seconded. I have a Kindle, I'm in Ireland. I have to use Amazon.com, not Amazon.co.uk. Amazon don't let you choose (unless you were to do fradulent things like use a fake address / credit card with other address etc.)
I live in Norway, and I've always ordered books from Amazon.com with my Norwegian address and credit card. I bought my Kindle the same way and have been buying Kindle e-books without any problems. Thus it appears that Amazon.com is fully willing and able to handle Norwegian customers.
> Please Amazon - please move to one global store where any credit card from any country can purchase any edition of any book.
Not gonna happen without a huge change in international copyright law, probably only possible if the Pirate Party gets constitution-changing majority in all of the key countries at the same time :)
Currently, for the most books there is no such thing as the right to publish a book globally, the existing deals are limited to geographic regions.
Looking at your comment history, you don't seem to be a spammer or a troll, I think it is more that your second comment didn't fit the guidelines and because you didn't have enough karma your account went under water, never to be seen again.
I don't know if it was by a mod, or by a robot, but to keep commenting with our PhantomLobe account is an effort in futility and a waste of your time.
I recommend that you review the guidelines doc above and avoid making comments that may be seen as not adding to the discussion. Also, start spelling words correctly. Wot is not a word and won't win you friends here.
On a related note: I wish HN would would stop hellbanning users for making comments that are not constructive. That's what downvotes are for! I have been seeing far too many people wasting so much time because they don't know they are hellbanned. Hellbanning should be reserved to obvious trolls and spammers, not people getting used to the standards of these discussions.
I think it's the computers. Most of the ghosts I see weren't trolls, just young accounts going far enough against the grain to get downvotes. If it's humans doing it, they are absurdly harsh.
That certainly fits the bill for PhantomLobe. Her/his second comment wasn't flamebait or spam, more just an slang laden "me too" style comment. With no karma the account submerged and now PhantomLobe is commenting into the ether with no one listening. I just can't stand to see people was their time like that (unless they are trolls/spammers).
In my experience the Kindle store is typically only available at Amazon.com when buying from most other countries.
For instance in South Africa while I can buy physical items from both Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, if I try to buy anything from the Kindle store on Amazon.co.uk I get told to go to Amazon.com instead.
And it's more complicated than just which store you use. I'm an Australian and I have to use the amazon.com store. But even though I use that store, I can't buy "active content"/applications, which AFAIK is limited to US customers only.
At least there's the book depository for paper books!
I discovered when I was in China that Amazon will not sell music to you there (interestingly, iTunes will). I don't remember whether or not I had the same problem with ebooks. However, solving the problem was as simple as visiting them from a US-based IP address. (Granted, my credit card was based in the US, so that's a hurdle I cleared implicitly.)
Odd - I just get redirected to coinreads - no chance to view the legalreads page, which I then mistook for a domain squatters site. I see that it does infact work - though from the content it doesn't seem exactly 'legal'.
See the search bar at top of page that says "Search Books" thats a sample of the underlying database, you dont need to login to download books from this site, tho loging in gives more choice, use a disposable account anyways not your primary its a good security precaution anyways
Warning: Neither legalreads.com nor coinread.com are legal free ebook sources, they are standard search engines for illegitimate downloads. js951534 repeatedly links to these sites.
I treat all E-books purchased with DRM as rentals.
When making a decision whether to buy or not, I look at the price and consider whether I'm willing to pay this much to rent the book for an indeterminate amount of time, possibly as little as 3 months. Quite often it turns out that the price is too high. But I never delude myself that I actually "own" any of the DRM-restricted content that I paid for.
I treat all digital (-ly distributed) content as "rental."
Most of the people I know do too... more or less.
I treat all digital (-ly distributed) content as "rental." The reality is that "ownership" of digital property is different from ownership of physical property emotionally, legally and practically.
You still don't necessarily own a DRM-free copy of something.
DRM is simply a technical method of enforcing a legal license.
Just because you can use a DRM free file in more ways (for example copy and share it) doesn't mean that the license grants you the rights to do so.
One example I remember from the early 90s was "shareware" where you could send off for a free or low cost copy of a software program. These programs were sometimes just demo versions but often actually provided the entire program for free.
However the license stated that you must either delete the program from your computer after some period (usually 30 days) or you must pay a "registration fee" to the developer. Of course without DRM they had no actual way of enforcing this so plenty of people kept shareware versions of programs long after the 30 days which lead to developers releasing only versions with limited functionality for free.
Sme shareware would stop working after the trial period, and if you played it by the book or didn't know the workarounds, you would have to make the purchase.
I'm talking about the feeling more than anything else. Having a song or a book on my computer/device doesn't feel like ownership to me so I don't treat it like ownership. A book on my kobo feels no different to a podcast on my phone. I don't think about my relationship with it.
Part of that is probably because I already treat physical copies of music/books as temporary things. I abandoned all my CDs & books during my last move. I don't really care about owning this stuff. I just want to listen to music read books and watch shows.
Another part is probably because I think whatever the system is now for owning, distributing & acculating digital property will be moot anyway within the next 10-20 years.
Basically, I don't expect my grandchildren to inherit my "cloud." They'll have access to all that stuff one way or another anyway.
> I treat all E-books purchased with DRM as rentals.
I don't buy e-books. It would annoy me to be locked out of e.g. a steam account or a Google Play account or an AppStore account or whatever, but I'd manage. Not having access to my books, that is something which wouldn't fly, books have been close friends for all my life, so I will remain physical-only until and unless DRMs are dropped from ebooks, as I did with music. I just don't see the benefits as worth the risk.
Seeing DRM'd ebooks as short-term rental is an interesting idea though. I would see myself "renting" an ebook for a buck. For the same price as the mass-market paperback it still makes no sense.
Fine let's say it's not a rental, and forget about the DRM issue for a second.
But what's your cost in keeping the data "alive"? I could copy it from machine to machine, maybe backup it on S3 (or similars), but all that has a cost (time, money, new reading devices, etc).
A physical book has a cost as well: space, weight, etc.
At some point, abandoning the book may be more cost effective, and even if digital books have a 'expire date' it looks like they may be cheaper in the long term
> > I treat all E-books purchased with DRM as rentals.
>Good for you. Nobody else outside of HN does.
Lawyers and librarians also do. There are big discussions in those circles about the meaning of the verbs "to buy" and "to possess" as used by Amazon, Apple and other big DRM "retailers". It is not only about DRM. Libraries are realising that paying for access to a website of a publishing house is not exactly like paying to receive a copy of a published journal or magazine. Have a look at all the dark archives and to who is financing them.
First it was an hacker problem, now it has spread to humanities, in five years the DRM will finally become a layperson problem. The first signs surfaced some years ago, when kids started complaining about the fact that their iPod could not be used to pass or share music while a cheaper Creative MP3 player could without a problem.
So, what is a dark archive? It is, simply put, an archive of information that is not used for public access. Most often it serves as a failsafe copy of a light archive, i.e. a publicly available version of the information, for use in disaster recovery operations. Dark archives need not be a fully operational copy of an information system, rather just the content behind the information system.
A dark archive is an archive that is not meant to be publicly accessible. As you said it is used to store information that must survive in case of disaster.
But what is a disaster for a library? Yesterday it was a fire, today is a publisher going bankrupt and dismissing its online (paywalled) archive. A dark archive pays the fee to access various online resources and store them indefinitely, but without letting anyone access that information (well, except the archive admins). The legality of this? Dubious. The usefulness of this? High.
As Portico.com puts it, «We chose to create a “dark” archive to focus our efforts on securing and preserving large volumes of content important to libraries and their users; however, it is not exclusively dark. Participating libraries experience the archive as a “light” or accessible archive in two ways: auditing the archive to ensure we are prepared to support eventual use and accessing of content that has been made available as the result of a “trigger event” or post-cancellation access claim. Unlike many ongoing preservation initiatives, Portico participants and their users experience direct customer support, should they ever need it.»
But the devil is in the details. Who pays the fee for these dark archives? Do we trust them? Who is auditing what is happening behind the doors of the dark archives? Luckily there are FLOSS systems like LOCKSS and CLOCKSS that allow you to create your own dark archive.
You should talk to more librarians. They're acutely aware of the problem and a number of people view public education on the subject as a professional obligation.
Nobody else outside of HN [treats DRM'd e-book purchases as rentals].
Which is why the court hearing in cases like this should be short, and brutal to Amazon.
Of course, they know that by being based in a different jurisdiction from the person they're screwing, such a case is unlikely to materialise. This is a problem with legal systems generally: low-value cases are rarely worth pushing through if you're not a lawyer, because it takes so long to figure out how to do it without that legal education that you've lost more than you ever stood to recover anyway. This is why consumer protection organisations with the weight of national governments behind them are necessary, but the idea hasn't caught up with the Internet yet.
I agree with this, provided that we adopt Joel Spolsky's definition of "Nobody:"
Please understand that I'm talking about large trends
here, and therefore when I say things like "nobody" I
really mean "fewer than 10,000,000 people," and so on
and so forth.
That's the meaningful definition of nobody, and while it's entertaining for me to quibble that my ex-mother-in-law only "buys" light novels that she doesn't plan to re-read, your point is cogent.
May be you consider it a rental, but most consider it a purchase. That's why throwing out DRM and making a backup should be expected the moment you buy some ebook.
(I used to think this didn't matter, either. Turns out that I'm far more pleasant to be around if I don't have a beard. So I haven't had one in 20 years).
Welcome to the world of effective interpersonal interaction. We're primates, get used to it :-)
No. Well dressed and much more groomed people has warned about obvious threat in similar areas, and has also been equally ignored.
Its the problem of the frog and the slowly heating pot. The changes a just slow enough that one can get used to the abuse. It will get worse. There is a ton of stuff companies could be doing to increase revenue by abusing their customers. When companies can view sold units as "theirs" to control, there is little limit.
Car manufacturers really are the next area where I expect to see some heavy changes really soon. Insurance companies really want data, and the manufactures can easy supply it like how fast someone drives, and where they go. In Sweden, this already almost happen in the form of an "voluntary" app. Driving in privacy mode will soon include a heavty cost depending on which insurance company you buy from. On the monopolistic side, there is nothing really stopping car manufacturers to put DRM into the gas tank, so to only "approved" gas sellers (those that pay the car manufacture) that has the right to sell gas. DRM is already in place for parts, so its not that a big step.
The U.S. has pretty decent laws surrounding car parts. The manufacturers are adding custom data to their vehicles, but the whole right to repair battle was already fought back in the 90s, the independents won (with odb ii coming out of it).
The main reason Stallman isn't mainstream is not his physical appearance, but his refusal to compromise with potential allies on even minor details. Not to mention a truckload of NIH on the part of the FSF, although you could argue this is another side of the same coin.
If I look at the sky and it's blue and I tell you that it's blue but you're convinced that it's yellow, should I compromise and agree henceforth to tell people that the sky is green or some shade of yellow?
If the cost of winning certain potential allies to your cause would amount to the complete subversion and hollowing out of your cause, maybe it's better to forge ahead without those allies. If your vision is correct, some of them may come around to the correct position, your position, as time goes on. Or maybe not.
Replacing Amazon as gatekeeper with Apple is something of a frying-pan-to-fire move. Amazon's device really only does e-books; most people depend on Apple devices for an awful lot more, and consequently losing access to your Apple device would be vastly more painful.
Where is Apple the gatekeeper? I couldn't care less about the iBookstore, but I love iBooks - I can drop any PDF or epub from the internet on iTunes and it'll be on my iPad after the next sync. If anything, Apple has the advantage that an iTunes library is dead-easy to back up.
Android tablet, iPad, PlayBook- they'll all do the trick.
Is there a DRM removal tool that works on Kindle books?
I have a lot of unread Kindle books (I buy a lot at once), and would now like enough of a backup in a form that I could use such that I can be sure I could at least read the books.
First, it's important to note that we don't have very much information yet. Given what I've read so far, I assume stupidity on the part of Amazon.
Before everyone starts hating on Amazon specifically, remember that this same thing would happen with Apple, Xbox Live, or Barnes & Noble accounts. It's not that all these companies want to have DRM. It's the content owners who dictate the terms of licensing.
Assuming the story as presented is accurate, it's perfectly legitimate to criticize Amazon's heavy-handedness, arrogance and opacity. AFAIK, the content owners don't mandate specific customer service policies.
Oh I'm almost certain that this is stupidity, and not malice. (Why would amazon shut down an account of some regular person?)
However, the big problem is that "all the books you own" should be dependent on a massive company never acting stupid. The problem isn't stupidity/malice, the problem is that stupidity can have such a massive massive effect.
Well, the same thing could happen with physical books and a moving company acting stupid - may even be more likely. The difference is that you can sue them for damages in that case
Even if Amazon is completely justified in the actions they took, their complete lack of transparency or accountability to the customer is worrying to me.
There are other ways to load books on to a kindle (Calibre, IIRC, is a piece of software that can do this). This allows you to load epubs and other files.
I believe there are legal (non-pirate) ways to buy these, but I've really no idea how good the vendors are or how wide the catalogues are.
I use my DX exclusively for reading scientific papers and stuff from Project Gutenberg, I just connect it over USB and copy PDFs/epubs/txt/html on there and everything works just fine.
So yes, it works just fine without an Amazon account. Granted I bought mine without any expectation to buy ebooks, so I can imagine this being unsatisfying for people the expect to actually purchase DRM books...
A sentence like "We wish you luck in locating a retailer better able to meet your needs and will not be able to offer any additional insight or action on these matters" is the best explanation of the evil of monopoly.
Monopolies tend to die. Sure, there might not be any competition from other companies, but their biggest competition is in the mass distributed and downloaded pirated book market.
As an example, I only buy non-DRM PDFs, but I never distribute them. Ever. And I never will, because those who use non-DRM PDFs get my hard earned money as I will then get to enjoy and profit from their works on any device that I so desire to use.
Now if, for example, I got a DRM encoded book and it was taken away from me due to some ridiculous arbitrary decision, I would be sorely tempted to get a non-DRM encoded copy of the book that I purchased. I think, in fact I know, I would be justified.
But given that I don't buy DRM encoded books, this will never be an ethical dilemna for me. And I'm no dirty hippy :-)
I own 2 kindles. Got one more for Mum also. I need to get my books out ASAP. Somehow, feel very cheated. Nobody can walk into your house and take away your paperbook. This is theft! And then the arrogance of no explanations.
You did read the Terms and Conditions before you "bought" the books, didn't you?
If you bought the books, you agreed [in the eyes of the law] to this kind of eventuality..
I'm as guilty of this kind of thing as well. We tend to assume an imaginary T&C that conforms to we think is fair when we buy things online - and we have to learn the hard way that the real T&C's are very much more dubious.
Here's the relevant bit in the T&C's:
"Upon your download of Digital 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 Digital Content an unlimited number of times"
"Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement."
The key points is that this is a "license agreement" that grants you rights on the payment of applicable fees.
TL;DR: You don't own any content you licensed to read on your kindle.
Laws trump contracts. You cannot sign away what the law says happened. It's just a matter of convincing a judge that you bought the book. They Amazon's T&Cs are irrelevant.
And, how, pray tell, will you convince the judge of that? You didn't purchase a book, as the T&C's make clear - the contents of which you agreed to by entering into the said agreement.
You paid applicable fees to enter into an agreement to view digital content. Nothing more. There was no purchase of a book.
Oh, I don't know. Maybe when he visited the website of one of the largest retailers in the world, broke out his saved credit card like usual, and clicked the gigantic "Buy now with 1-Click" button?
I would love for this to get tested in court. Has it? My understanding (I'm not a lawyer, but heard this from a lawyer) is that the purpose of, say, signing a release form before playing paintball is not because it provides any real protection to the paintball company, but because it makes the signer less likely to sue.
I feel like maybe this is a similar situation? It seems very much like Amazon is "tricking" you into signing away the fact that you "bought" something since the whole experience of the site is devoted to making you think you're buying it. Throwing in a hidden paragraph at the end doesn't change everything.
It might vary by country and other factors... When logged in to Amazon.co.uk, with one-click turned on, there's no obvious link anywhere near where the product is presented that I can see. A search for "terms" also revealed nothing. A search for "license" revealed nothing. There's a small link saying "Conditions of Use & Sale" all the way at the bottom of the page.
Clicking on that links takes me to a page that provides a very long list of conditions broken out by use and sale. However, searching for "Kindle" or "book" to find out where they are covered, yield nothing. A customer who has been led by the product page to believe the "Buy" button means what it said, could very reasonably assume they were covered by the terms in the "Sale" section.
I think Amazon is threading a fine line here between having courts (at least in Europe) find that even if it might not constitute a sale, terms that deviate too much from the rights a customer would expect under the sale might be null and void, vs. alternatively find that the prominent language indicating a purchase might be illegally misleading advertising if such terms are allowed to stand...
Then again I might just be too hopeful. In the meantime I won't be "buying" any Kindle books.
It wasn't the "1-click" part of the button that was the defense, it was the "Buy with" part. That is, when you actually click the button, it's telling you that are buying it.
Trouble is, you are bound by the license agreement, not by the text on the buttons, as the Conditions of Use and Sale makes clear, which is linked to on every page of Amazon's site.
Unless a judge decides that due to the manner in which it's sold, that it constitutes a sale under the law, and hence all your normal "I've bought a thing" rights come into play. Anything in the T&Cs that takes away the rights the law gives is hence null and invalid.
Agreed. But, we've yet to establish if indeed they do take away rights that the law provides. I would have thought HN would have uncovered such a law by now.
A cursory glance at the Wikipedia article on DRM suggests the law is favourable torwards DRM and all that that entails.
It probably wouldn't be a "law" per se in terms of statutes, it would be down to case law. In other words we won't know until this (or something very similar) goes to court.
It's not so much about DRM per se but rather about what rights you can expect when "buying" an e-book.
At least as far as the US is concerned, shrink wrap licenses restricting your fair use rights were not received favorably by courts up until the late 90s. This has changed somewhat in the past decade and change. It'll be interesting to see what comes out of the supreme court on the 'first sale' case, which is a closely related topic.
If you read and actually considered the worst case in every contract/website terms and conditions/software licence that you come across it would probably take about a day a week and you would never actually agree to anything that wasn't a GPL/BSD/MIT... software licence. For one thing most give the party offering the agreement rights to change it which should be an absolute no-way.
For most things such as online purchases I tend to rely on law and reasonableness of people and take the chance without reading expecting the maximum downside to be tens of pounds related to that purchase. I am a little more careful when locked into eco-systems (Kindle/app-stores) but still go a fair bit on taking the risk with the reputation of the provider and the size of the risk and the cost of getting the content another way.
I've had some friends caution me over the fact that I have a "license to read" my Amazon purchased books as opposed to "own" them, however that really never hit home until now. I understand this is the way the business model works, but the customer service presented here is terrible, no indication whatsoever as to what the real problem is and no way to find out, which is sad because usually Amazon has pretty good customer service (well in my experience, I've been using Amazon for about a decade now, and customer service sucked until around 2004 or so I think when it seemed to get better).
The worst part is, that when combating people who really are trying to behave fraudulently, giving them information about what specifically triggered the ban can help them evade future ones -- much like how forum bans don't give a reason why. It must be hard for Amazon (or anyone else) to separate the wheat from the chaff of customers.
Not that this makes the events in this story any less terrible.
The worst part is the blatant arrogance of Mr. Michael Murphy, who does not at all consider the possibility of it all being a misunderstanding or some error on Amazon's behalf, and giving the customer no option to rectify the issue.
Fair point. However, it doesn't bring anything to the discussion, other than giving the temptation to 4chan fans to start a harassment campaign, so what the hell is it doing here?
I think 4chan is perfectly capable of going to Google, typing in "michael murphy linkedin amazon" and harassing the first two results on the page without HN tempting them.
"Michael Murphy" may actually be a fictional identity though. Companies sometimes do that to give people the feeling of dealing with a real person while in reality it's just whoever is free in the department that deals with it. Certainly if my job was to tell people that we weren't giving them their account of any of their purchases back, I wouldn't want them to have any of my personal details.
The lack of transparency from Amazon here is worrying.
Because it appears to be Amazon UK dealing with the account holder
I'd be interested to know if she would get anywhere by submitting a Subject Information Request [1].
Under the Data Protection Act 1998 an individual can submit a request for personal information held by an organization and they must comply within 40 days.
Whether she would get the information she is interested in, i.e. which account she is linked to, is another question.
Unfortunately there are a number of circumstances where they are within their rights to withhold information. One of these situations is where the information relates to another individual.
If information is withheld she my be able to infer that the offending account to which she is linked is held by someone else - though the identity of the account holder would understandably not be given.
This logic doesn't hold. Either Amazon is certain her account is operated by the same character guilty of whatever violations of policy behind the "linked account", in which case they're not disclosing any additional information, or they're not, in which case they know they might be punishing somebody innocent (the "Let God sort'em out" customer policy).
In any case, it sounds straight out of Kafka: you're punished, but you don't know what crime you are supposed to have committed.
And that's exactly what drives me bonkers about the current wave of "too big to care" web services, like GMail, Amazon or perhaps even Steam. Average consumer has absolutely no way of pushing back or even getting any information. It really feels like there needs to be some kind of law in place that requires some form of repayment if an account is closed. The problem there, I suppose, is potential for abuse -- buy a thousand books over a decade, then at the end "sacrifice" the account to get it closed, and try to get the money back.
There's irony: Amazon would try to stop information that would prove that her account is linked to another account by arguing that it would infringe a completely different person's privacy if it disclosed any information about the linked account that caused the original notification.
That's quite an interesting legal tactic they've got going there!
I have a Kindle (wi-fi, w/ keyboard so 3rd gen, I think) for a little over two years, read tons on it, use the wireless delivery for Instapaper and such-like and have never bought an e-book from Amazon.
Managing side-loaded content is quite simple with Calibre, but if you don't want to muck around too much with software, you can also just drag and drop books onto the Kindle as a mass storage device (but you would have to take care that they're in 'acceptable' formats..)
What else are you trying to do that would require custom firmware?
I just don't like the possibility of being locked out of the own device.
I also like how the publicly developed software improves over time. I haven't seen any improvements for my Kindle (most likely same model as yours, but gsm) from Amazon.
Can they lock you out of physical usage of the Kindle, like a remote kill-switch of sorts? Scary, if true..
Fair point on the software improvement though -- you might want to look into Duokan, it seems to be really popular and adds native ePub support: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=150175 (bonus if you like some aspects of the original OS: there's a tool that let's you switch between the two firmwares.)
Can they lock you out of physical usage of the Kindle, like a remote kill-switch of sorts? Scary, if true..
I don't think they can lock you out of the device. The only thing I've ever heard of them doing (and what they did in this case) is remote deletion of books you've purchased from them.
I have a Kindle and never read nor use any DRM books. You don't need to use Amazon's software or service or anything. You can convert files into .mobi format using open source tools and use a programme like Calibre or just put the files in the "documents" folder of the Kindle to load them.
Using a Kindle without DRM is very possible.
If you turn off wireless, then it will never try to do any software updating.
What is the point of buying a Kindle then? You could have bought one of the many ebook readers available out there. What about a Kobo? Or a stylish Sony PRS? A small Booken? A feature-packed Onyx? An hackable iRiver Story?
Why giving money to Amazon in the first place if you do not agree with their core business practice?
I keep buying from Amazon, but I compulsively save a DRM-stripped version of every book I buy. If at any point it became impossible to do so, I'd switch to another book provider, be it the pirate bay if necessary.
It's a necessity, not only for ideological reasons, nor only to protect myself against such abuse from Amazon: it keeps me able to move my virtual library to another platform, should I want to.
an increased number of stories like this will make the book pirating underground a lot more attractive to a wider audience. it exists, it's not quite napster-like yet but it's getting there. no DRM, a potentially wider catalog, etc.
this is a risk for publishers and loss-leaders (like amazon) alike.
There's something to what you sad. Isn't it ironic to see a situation that so closely mirrors piracy?
- with DRMed books, Amazon says "yes, you >>have<< these ebooks, you paid for them [wink]", but Amazon actually can take them away from you and you can do nothing about it. You paid [for ebook copies] and are left with nothing
- in piracy, a person who gets pirated copies of a book says "yes, if I want to read your books, dear authors/publishers, I'll pay for them [wink]", but that person can actually get any number of books from you for free. You paid [for publishing/marketing] and are left with nothing
The irony is, all that you have to do is get your entire book list, then hunt down the books you already paid for and then you can get them DRM free.
Then you never pay Amazon another cent. After all, they didn't want your money! If they have refused to let you buy content that you require, then I can see why some people feel a moral justification to pirate the books.
It's really quite simple. If this happened in the U.S. then they could take court action against Amazon. If you are from overseas, you really have no recourse. Therefore, merely because of where you live, you are restricted from material that may enrich your life. That's discrimination, and I can well understand that someone might feel justified in breaking the law to download pirated books.
Amazon... hurting themselves as only a greedy corporation can.
Piracy for books is quite interesting. There is already a lot of infastructure for sharing files (torrent sites et al.), but the new thing is how small books are. 1,000 books could be about the size of one standard def film (~ 1 GB). A lot of people are going to have a lot of books.
I am quite surprised the pirating of eBooks has not taken off. The infrastructure certainly exists, but I'm not aware of any exclusive, prolific communities in a similar vein to music and tv shows/movies.
"For some, however, the study may inspire more questions than answers. Who are the people downloading these books? How are they doing it and where is it happening? And, perhaps most critical for the publishing industry, why are people deciding to download books and why now? I decided to find out, and after a few hours of searching – stalled by a number dead links and password protected sites – I found, on an online forum focused on sharing books via BitTorrent, someone willing to talk."
pretty neat insight into the book piracy underground.
Surely this is what a small claims court could be used for?
I haven't read the Amazon TOS but is it really as simple as "you rent this book for as long as we feel like and we can revoke it for no reason"?
In which case I would be somewhat surprised if this really held up in a court, for example what happens if you buy a book and they immediately decide to revoke the license 1 second after purchase?
Surely this is what a small claims court could be used for?
In principle, possibly. It's a bit difficult to sue if you live in Norway & have been buying from Amazon US though: your costs will exceed any potential return very quickly!
(I'm assuming that filing a small claims suit remotely is either not possible or not effective here of course.)
That presents a bit of a problem. As digital stuff is being increasingly sold across geopolitical lines you get a situation where you have little practical recourse if you have an issue with anything you have bought.
A consumer may bring proceedings against the other party to a contract either in the courts of the Contracting State in which that party is domiciled or in the courts of the Contracting State in which he is himself domiciled.
And no, companies can't escape it by putting a jurisdiction clause in a consumer contract. Consumer protection law trump contract terms. If Amazon want to do business in a country, they have to abide by the consumer laws of that country.
I was recently interested in purchasing eBooks from Morgan Kaufmann. "The UX Book: Process and Guidelines for Ensuring a Quality User Experience" costs $89.95 USD; surely for that insane price your eBook would be DRM-free, right? Wrong. Both ePub and PDF use Adobe Adept (Inept) DRM.
You can try to find the Kindle/iBook version, but as this article points out "its a license to read" ... and very often, the quality of the digital conversion is very poor, especially for literature with illustrations.
This sounds disturbing to me since I too live far away from Amazon's jurisdiction and I clearly know I would be even more helpless in a case like this.
Amazon's service was so sweet I didn't mind the DRM, the metaphorical diabetes. It seems now is the time to open my eyes and (again) realize 'RMS is always right'. I think I will stop buying any amazon e-book at least until I hear something good regarding this issue.
Tangentially related, I am getting very, very tired of "customer service" departments using phrases like:
"While we are unable to provide detailed information on how we link related accounts, please know that we have reviewed your account on the basis of the information provided and regret to inform you that it will not be reopened."
This happens more frequently: Google says this all the time, based on posts here; Amazon now does the same thing; even apartment rental companies will say "you've been turned down on the basis of this report that we don't know the contents of."
If your company can't reveal specific reasons or steps behind why an action was taken, DON'T TAKE THAT ACTION. Even my credit card issuer will tell me exactly why my card was flagged and they deal with ACTUAL MONEY. All these statements do is infuriate customers, create bad press, and drive away other customers. Scammers will just back up, look at their entire operation, and hammer away again with 300 new accounts so all you've accomplished is pissing off customers who want to do business with you.
"While we are unable to provide detailed information on how we link related accounts"
I don't think it means they don't know, I think it means they can't[1] "detail", i.e. tell you.
That's exactly my point: They don't want to tell you.
If a company has such rigid internal processes that it can't come up with a way to reveal at least some information to allow a paying[0] customer to successfully defend an allegation of fraud, then that process is broken.
0 - I leave as an exercise to the reader the question of what should be done for free services.
Companies have privacy obligations. If they inaccurately link you to a fraudulent user and then tell you all the activity of that fraudulent user, they've probably just broken the law.
That's a specific example where it might not be legal but I agree that this is widespread and there are lots of things in the real world where it would be fine to tell you, but they choose not to. In my experience this is to protect internal process (so you can't cite why they're idiots) or so that they can sell you another product (credit score improvement, etc).
But I do agree, the withholding of detail is widespread to a point where it suggests people just plain don't want to tell you anything.
A bit of catch 22 really. If they have inaccurately linked you with a fraudulent user and they accuse you of having committed fraud, they've just defamed your character.
If they were in the U.S. I'd be suggesting they lawyer up.
I have used Wikipedia for the definition of how one proves libel:
There are several ways a person must go about proving that libel has taken place. For example, in the United States, first, the person must prove that the statement was false. Second, the person must prove that the statement caused harm. Third, the person must prove that the statement was made without adequate research into the truthfulness of the statement. These steps are for an ordinary citizen.
Of course, there is no citation. I just added the {{fact}} tag. But does anyone know if this is true or not?
1:00 PM -- fraud system links her account to another banned account
1:00 PM -- her account is closed
2:00 PM -- she asks Amazon why her account is closed
3:00 PM -- Amazon makes the statement you claim is libelous
The loss occurred before the statement, so you cannot claim the statement caused that loss. The alleged libel did not result in the damages you're claiming.
Libel would be if Amazon falsely accused her of fraud in public, then her employer terminating her employment as a result of that statement. That is a harm resulting from the statement.
Pretty sure the actual law clarifies that the speaker must have a reason to believe the claim even after engaging in some research. And that reason to disbelieve the claim is not a defense.
On the same page, "it is usually a requirement that this claim be false and that the publication is communicated to someone other than the person defamed".
If I tell you I think you're lazy, that's rude but it isn't defamy. If I write you a letter and you publish it, it's still not defamy.
If I talk to your boss and tell him I think you're lazy (without evidence) that may be defamy. If I publish a letter to you telling you you're lazy, that may be defamy.
And no, this has nothing to do with the rest of the issue.
Depends. In the EU, companies are legally required to store personal data accurately. It doesn't matter if they don't tell anyone (in fact often they cannot tell people, privacy and all that). If you tell them that personal data they have one you is incorrect, they are legally required to correct it. So yes, if the data is wrong, they might be breaking the law.
Not just in Europe - Australia has similar privacy legislation also. If a company is storing incorrect information about you, you can request to see your record and then have them correct that record. If they won't, the Privacy Commissioner can investigate and order them to do so.
I don't know... Even in records, Amazon are allowed to inaccurately call you a filthy good-for-nothing and these would not be subject to EU Privacy requests. They're not FOIA requests. You don't get to request a copy of your whole file like you can with the FBI. Amazon is not a public body.
Its privacy requirements are limited to giving you a copy of your personal information. Name. Address. Phone number.
Anything else (including the marker labelling you as a pillaging hobo) is their proprietary business intelligence and good luck convincing them otherwise.
I'm not sure privacy obligations are really at play here. I can think of two reasons they're taking the approach they're taking:
1) They don't want to get into a discussion which is likely to be time consuming. It's not just innocent people who appeal these things, often the most guilty are those who will most actively and vocally profess their innocence (in some cases up to and including going to court over it - c.f. the UK politician Jonathan Atkin).
The minute Amazon became willing to talk about this stuff they'd need a who bunch more people to start looking into each one in detail, review every claim and counter claim and so on, and they clearly don't think that that's a good use of their money.
2) The sorts of things they'd likely have to reveal are going to be the sorts of things people who are abusing the system want to know to get round it. Doing this would make their job harder.
Not saying that it's right that they take this approach, just I can see the reasons they do.
The minute Amazon became willing to talk about this stuff they'd need a who bunch more people to start looking into each one in detail, review every claim and counter claim and so on, and they clearly don't think that that's a good use of their money.
I for one would like them to start talking about this sort of thing, and review these cases more thoroughly. After all, people paid good money to them to read books. Books which they stole away from them. It seems unlikely that Amazon provided a refund to the lady in question.
I'm sure you would, but that's not much of a reason for Amazon to do so.
It's far easier and cheaper for them to ignore most cases and instead wait for the few that blow up like this one and then look into them at that point. In those cases if they think that they're even remotely in the wrong I suspect that they'll reinstate the account, send their apologies, send the person in question a gift voucher and get on with doing exactly what they were doing before.
It's very easy to think that the sort of outcry that happens on HN, or even on Twitter, reflects public opinion, but the reality is that this audience is both far more aware of these events, and far more considered in their reaction. The sad reality is that Amazon can get away with this sort of thing because most Kindle users won't ever learn about it and even if they do won't really understand what it means or change their behaviour.
If they are not confident enough that they've accurately linked you to a fraudulent user to tell you the details of that account, they should not feel confident enough to CLOSE YOUR ACCOUNT on that basis.
Any time anyone makes a credit decision, you receive a notice in the mail informing you of this fact, and that you have the right to a free copy of the credit report they pulled on you.
Agreed. When the first DVD burners came out HP had an exclusive period for sales of them. I really wanted one, so I ordered it online and got an email a few minutes later saying my order had been canceled. I called and ask why. The usual "we can't tell you, sorry" answer. I wouldn't let go. I asked for a manager and then spent a hour on the phone--I just wouldn't hang up--telling her I had made thousands of transactions online over the last 10 years with that credit card and this was the first problem. I hammered her for details and she never gave me one, but she did do something else: she decided to verify me via other means (I have no idea what those were) by asking me a series of questions. After which she took my order manually and I got the device I wanted.
Normally, I would have voted with my pocket book, but in this case they had the sole source of the item (for a time). I also wanted to cost them a huge amount of time for their error.
>in this case they had the sole source of the item (for a time)
And this my friends is why artificial monopolies (created by vendor lock-in, proprietary devices, patents, or other perversions of the legal system) are inherently detrimental. Adam Smith, in his foundational work on Capitalism: The Wealth of Nations, rails against the practices that make monopolies possible. This market is not a free market.
Oh, it's a free market for those small companies - if they fail, so what? But all of a sudden, you start doing $10+ million dollars in sales, you figure you need some backing by politicians...
People love the upside of capitalism. But when it comes to the self-correcting measures it brings... not so much.
As soon as you give people a reason, they will argue with the specifics. The only way to get people to accept "no" and go away is to refuse to provide any additional information that they could take issue with.
That might work until a judge decides that the contract was unconscionable, or contrary to public policy, or that there was no true "meeting of the minds" because the purchaser did not understand the terms of the contract, or ...
This is very true. I used to work in a call centre for a large company which had all manor of silly policies.
Since we were on the "front line" we were usually the ones informing the customers of these policies. We were usually given very limited information about the hows/whys of these policies so when the customers started getting annoyed and asking questions all we could reply with was "I don't know, that is just our policy" and "I don't have the authority to do that".
Looking back on it I'm guessing we were kept in the dark on purpose since after a couple of minutes about 90% of the customers would just give up and accept it. Some asked to speak to a manager but of course we were instructed never to put a manager on the line and always to claim that the manager was unavailable or to just transfer the call to another agent who would give the same answer.
If they had given us more information about these policies then we would have ended up spending hours in discussion with the customer which is of course what the call centre managers specifically didn't want.
Excellent idea. Though I fear that this will be essentially ignored too (as the recent precedent with Facebook shows).
It is very unfortunate that apparently the only way to resolve such cases is to bring them to enough media spotlight, that the corporation involved has to do something to avoid damages to its image.
Since media shaming only solves the problem for one person, I think it makes things worse in the long term. For every customer who gets un-screwed by Amazon, how many screwed customers do we not know about?
I wouldn't say it makes things worse in the long term, but it certainly helps. I do not think that it is good that it has to be done this way, but it seems that at the moment this is often the only way to make something happen at all.
Does it? They still haven't answered my request from at least a year ago (they do offer some partial data download that includes a bit more stuff than previously, but it's essentially just the stuff on your profile -- none of the interesting stuff they collect on you).
I've come to the conclusion that a big problem with todays extremely anonymized and impersonal customer service of large corporations is that there is nobody (or at least nobody with the competence to do anything), that you can shout at till things get fixed...
Essentially, as a customer one is often limited to submitting requests through web forms and receiving boilerplate answers (if at all) that lead nowhere if the case at hand is somewhat nonstandard, or to spend endless hours circulating through similarly scripted phone support hotlines, without ever reaching somebody that can actually fix the problem.
Kafka would be hard pressed to top some of those customer support experiences.
Well, my credit card issuer (wells fargo) actually cant' tell me. They say its flagged, for a reason they don't know. (ofc, they do, they just wont tell).
Then they just unflag it after I answer 10 security questions and that's it.
So even if we assume that Amazon was correct and that this account was closed because it was linked to another account that was closed because of 'abuse'.
I don't understand how that would justify or require revoking access to stuff that was already bought/licensed? You could simply deny the offending user access to buying new stuff instead.
The "abuse" was probably related to stripping DRM off the titles, and uploading them for anyone to download free-of-charge. Then that would make sense.
Its getting to the point where I am seriously considering closing my Amazon account. I just don't like the way it does business any more. Can anyone recommend a good online bookseller in the UK? Is Waterstones any good?
The Guardian is running a story [1] today about how Amazon forces publishers to cover the cost of 20% VAT (sales tax) on ebook sales, even though it only pays 3% to the Luxembourg government (where it is based for tax purposes). It also insists that if a publisher offers a better price to another retailer then it must offer the same price to Amazon.
They also pay no corporation tax in the UK, despite sales of more than £3.3bn/yr [2], through being based in Luxembourg.
I was going to jump ship to The Book Depository, but Amazon bought them last year. Its hard to understand why this was allowed by the competition regulator, and it doesn't give me much confidence that the UK government has much interest in limiting their control of multiple markets.
Waterstones used to use Amazon to sell books (presumably they couldn't make any money any other way). Not sure if they still do.
http://www.abebooks.co.uk/ is pretty good, particularly for difficult to find and second hand books. I've found more and more recently that play.com does almost as well as (and often better than) Amazon in terms of price, although I don't know much about their business tactics.
AbeBooks Inc. is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. AbeBooks, an online bookselling pioneer, was acquired in December 2008 and remains a stand-alone operation with headquarters in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, and a European office in Dusseldorf, Germany.
There's a twist in asking customers to pay 20%, and taking that from the authors, and then (according to GP) not paying the 20% in England but paying just 3% in some other country.
You can be quite sure that the contract is not phrased in such a way that Amazon is required to pay 20% VAT on the ebooks in question to the UK government.
Is it sleazy as all getout? Yup, absolutely: but it's not illegal. Companies pull this kind of bait and switch all the time when they think they can get away with it. Remember when Microsoft bought the original Internet Explorer codebase in return for the company in question receiving a cut of the profits and then gave it away for free? How they must have laughed about that one back at MS HQ...
In reality, the publishers handed Amazon a near monopoly on ebook sales by their own short-sightedness and now Amazon is turning the thumbscrews to see how much they're actually prepared to cough up. The games with VAT in the contract are just part and parcel of that.
It's funny that then people give out about small countries that have lower coporation tax (e.g. Ireland). If companies in "non-low-tax" countries like UK don't pay any tax, why give out to low-tax countries?
These schemes are relevant to corporate income tax, which can be manipulated and avoided. VAT applies to pretty much all revenue regardless of how you structure your company ownership structure.
They have certainly lost me as a potential Kindle user. I was considering buying myself a Kindle for Christmas, but that's not going to happen now. I thought Amazon could be trusted with my money, but it's clear that it's too risky.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone higher up sees her issues and activates her account. But I can't trust my money to a company where you could lose access to books worth thousands if you talk with the wrong person.
It's not like they don't have form. In 2009 they erased all the versions of 1984 from all Kindles, to massive uproar.
Back then, they said "We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers' devices in these circumstances". Looks like 3 years later they've decided to go back to what they were doing and promised not to do.
Thanks for the suggestion! I'll do some price/terms comparisons. I don't mind paying a small premium to support an independent. Or I may try just ordering books at the Waterstones near where I work, and having them delivered there. The current owner of Waterstones seems to actually like and value books [1].
"Better World Books is a self-sustaining, for-profit social venture whose mission is to capitalize on the value of the book to fund literacy initiatives locally, nationally and around the world. We partner with nearly 1400 libraries and over 1800 college campuses across the U.S. and Canada, collecting unwanted textbooks and library discards in support of non-profit literacy programs. We have raised millions of dollars for literacy, saved millions of books from landfills, created jobs for hundreds of people, and provided wonderful books to millions of readers worldwide."
Never ever buy e-books from Amazon, only physical books and things. Especially because all e-stuff on your Amazon account can be permanently deleted without any option to restore (except to buy it again).
493 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 257 ms ] threadBeing banned from Google, Amazon & others for sometimes very fuzzy reasons can be major inconvenient. Sure, it's not a human right or a life or death situation, but they occupy dominant space on their markets and on some people life.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-07-03-eu-rules-publis...
It's the game that many people play - trying to find the best Amazon (or Apple) store when they live and travel between countries. This means a constant struggle to find a combination of credit card, store with enough content (The US is best) and a local address (virtual and actual) to satisfy arcane internal rules.
Please Amazon - please move to one global store where any credit card from any country can purchase any edition of any book. Please Amazon and Apple, let us combine content from multiple stores into one account, and let us have a global price based on the best market. Yo usell more stuff, we but more as well.
Meanwhile take the chance to collect, and pay to the local authorities, consumption/sales tax based on the location of the IP address, not the credit card or address of the buyer. That way if someone is standing in the UK, buying content from the USA, then they pay UK tax (VAT), making it fairer versus the physical and local virtual alternatives.
if you're thinking about physical books, that's wrong too. a book sold in both the US and UK shop will usually have a different publisher, so which one you get depends on where you ordered it, not where you live.
Not gonna happen without a huge change in international copyright law, probably only possible if the Pirate Party gets constitution-changing majority in all of the key countries at the same time :)
Currently, for the most books there is no such thing as the right to publish a book globally, the existing deals are limited to geographic regions.
Wat? I've bought in .com, .ca, .co.uk, .fr and .es with (both) France and Spain based credit cards with no problems whatsoever.
PhantomLobe, you were hellbanned* for making a comment that didn't fit the the community guidelines:
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Looking at your comment history, you don't seem to be a spammer or a troll, I think it is more that your second comment didn't fit the guidelines and because you didn't have enough karma your account went under water, never to be seen again.
I don't know if it was by a mod, or by a robot, but to keep commenting with our PhantomLobe account is an effort in futility and a waste of your time.
I recommend that you review the guidelines doc above and avoid making comments that may be seen as not adding to the discussion. Also, start spelling words correctly. Wot is not a word and won't win you friends here.
On a related note: I wish HN would would stop hellbanning users for making comments that are not constructive. That's what downvotes are for! I have been seeing far too many people wasting so much time because they don't know they are hellbanned. Hellbanning should be reserved to obvious trolls and spammers, not people getting used to the standards of these discussions.
*http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-h...
Maybe there should be a stage before hell-banning?
For instance in South Africa while I can buy physical items from both Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, if I try to buy anything from the Kindle store on Amazon.co.uk I get told to go to Amazon.com instead.
At least there's the book depository for paper books!
Aren't they stuck by territorial rights deals? It's weird that books have region lock out.
When making a decision whether to buy or not, I look at the price and consider whether I'm willing to pay this much to rent the book for an indeterminate amount of time, possibly as little as 3 months. Quite often it turns out that the price is too high. But I never delude myself that I actually "own" any of the DRM-restricted content that I paid for.
Most of the people I know do too... more or less. I treat all digital (-ly distributed) content as "rental." The reality is that "ownership" of digital property is different from ownership of physical property emotionally, legally and practically.
I agree on the DRM content though.. The problem is that most people will probably not.
Just because you can use a DRM free file in more ways (for example copy and share it) doesn't mean that the license grants you the rights to do so.
One example I remember from the early 90s was "shareware" where you could send off for a free or low cost copy of a software program. These programs were sometimes just demo versions but often actually provided the entire program for free.
However the license stated that you must either delete the program from your computer after some period (usually 30 days) or you must pay a "registration fee" to the developer. Of course without DRM they had no actual way of enforcing this so plenty of people kept shareware versions of programs long after the 30 days which lead to developers releasing only versions with limited functionality for free.
mIRC is one program that was free to use for a long time.
Part of that is probably because I already treat physical copies of music/books as temporary things. I abandoned all my CDs & books during my last move. I don't really care about owning this stuff. I just want to listen to music read books and watch shows.
Another part is probably because I think whatever the system is now for owning, distributing & acculating digital property will be moot anyway within the next 10-20 years.
Basically, I don't expect my grandchildren to inherit my "cloud." They'll have access to all that stuff one way or another anyway.
I don't buy e-books. It would annoy me to be locked out of e.g. a steam account or a Google Play account or an AppStore account or whatever, but I'd manage. Not having access to my books, that is something which wouldn't fly, books have been close friends for all my life, so I will remain physical-only until and unless DRMs are dropped from ebooks, as I did with music. I just don't see the benefits as worth the risk.
Seeing DRM'd ebooks as short-term rental is an interesting idea though. I would see myself "renting" an ebook for a buck. For the same price as the mass-market paperback it still makes no sense.
Good for you. Nobody else outside of HN does.
Fine let's say it's not a rental, and forget about the DRM issue for a second.
But what's your cost in keeping the data "alive"? I could copy it from machine to machine, maybe backup it on S3 (or similars), but all that has a cost (time, money, new reading devices, etc).
A physical book has a cost as well: space, weight, etc.
At some point, abandoning the book may be more cost effective, and even if digital books have a 'expire date' it looks like they may be cheaper in the long term
>Good for you. Nobody else outside of HN does.
Lawyers and librarians also do. There are big discussions in those circles about the meaning of the verbs "to buy" and "to possess" as used by Amazon, Apple and other big DRM "retailers". It is not only about DRM. Libraries are realising that paying for access to a website of a publishing house is not exactly like paying to receive a copy of a published journal or magazine. Have a look at all the dark archives and to who is financing them.
First it was an hacker problem, now it has spread to humanities, in five years the DRM will finally become a layperson problem. The first signs surfaced some years ago, when kids started complaining about the fact that their iPod could not be used to pass or share music while a cheaper Creative MP3 player could without a problem.
(from: http://www.osti.gov/ostiblog/dark-archives)
So, what is a dark archive? It is, simply put, an archive of information that is not used for public access. Most often it serves as a failsafe copy of a light archive, i.e. a publicly available version of the information, for use in disaster recovery operations. Dark archives need not be a fully operational copy of an information system, rather just the content behind the information system.
But what is a disaster for a library? Yesterday it was a fire, today is a publisher going bankrupt and dismissing its online (paywalled) archive. A dark archive pays the fee to access various online resources and store them indefinitely, but without letting anyone access that information (well, except the archive admins). The legality of this? Dubious. The usefulness of this? High.
As Portico.com puts it, «We chose to create a “dark” archive to focus our efforts on securing and preserving large volumes of content important to libraries and their users; however, it is not exclusively dark. Participating libraries experience the archive as a “light” or accessible archive in two ways: auditing the archive to ensure we are prepared to support eventual use and accessing of content that has been made available as the result of a “trigger event” or post-cancellation access claim. Unlike many ongoing preservation initiatives, Portico participants and their users experience direct customer support, should they ever need it.»
But the devil is in the details. Who pays the fee for these dark archives? Do we trust them? Who is auditing what is happening behind the doors of the dark archives? Luckily there are FLOSS systems like LOCKSS and CLOCKSS that allow you to create your own dark archive.
Few links:
* http://news.jstor.org/news/2004.12/repositories.html
* http://hul.harvard.edu/publications/ln1356/03.html
* http://www.clockss.org/clockss/FAQ
* http://www.clockss.org/clockss/How_CLOCKSS_Works
* http://www.portico.org/digital-preservation/the-archive-cont...
Which is why the court hearing in cases like this should be short, and brutal to Amazon.
Of course, they know that by being based in a different jurisdiction from the person they're screwing, such a case is unlikely to materialise. This is a problem with legal systems generally: low-value cases are rarely worth pushing through if you're not a lawyer, because it takes so long to figure out how to do it without that legal education that you've lost more than you ever stood to recover anyway. This is why consumer protection organisations with the weight of national governments behind them are necessary, but the idea hasn't caught up with the Internet yet.
I agree with this, provided that we adopt Joel Spolsky's definition of "Nobody:"
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.htmlThat's the meaningful definition of nobody, and while it's entertaining for me to quibble that my ex-mother-in-law only "buys" light novels that she doesn't plan to re-read, your point is cogent.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I very much agree with his ideals, but his insistence on living completely outside the system diminishes his effectiveness in changing it.
(I used to think this didn't matter, either. Turns out that I'm far more pleasant to be around if I don't have a beard. So I haven't had one in 20 years).
Welcome to the world of effective interpersonal interaction. We're primates, get used to it :-)
Its the problem of the frog and the slowly heating pot. The changes a just slow enough that one can get used to the abuse. It will get worse. There is a ton of stuff companies could be doing to increase revenue by abusing their customers. When companies can view sold units as "theirs" to control, there is little limit.
Car manufacturers really are the next area where I expect to see some heavy changes really soon. Insurance companies really want data, and the manufactures can easy supply it like how fast someone drives, and where they go. In Sweden, this already almost happen in the form of an "voluntary" app. Driving in privacy mode will soon include a heavty cost depending on which insurance company you buy from. On the monopolistic side, there is nothing really stopping car manufacturers to put DRM into the gas tank, so to only "approved" gas sellers (those that pay the car manufacture) that has the right to sell gas. DRM is already in place for parts, so its not that a big step.
If the cost of winning certain potential allies to your cause would amount to the complete subversion and hollowing out of your cause, maybe it's better to forge ahead without those allies. If your vision is correct, some of them may come around to the correct position, your position, as time goes on. Or maybe not.
Android tablet, iPad, PlayBook- they'll all do the trick.
I have a lot of unread Kindle books (I buy a lot at once), and would now like enough of a backup in a form that I could use such that I can be sure I could at least read the books.
http://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/drm-removal-to...
http://www.cultofmac.com/173945/how-to-read-kindle-books-in-...
I still read a mix of kindle stuff and paper books, but the kindle is invaluable for travelling light. This is disappointing to hear about.
Before everyone starts hating on Amazon specifically, remember that this same thing would happen with Apple, Xbox Live, or Barnes & Noble accounts. It's not that all these companies want to have DRM. It's the content owners who dictate the terms of licensing.
Oh I'm almost certain that this is stupidity, and not malice. (Why would amazon shut down an account of some regular person?)
However, the big problem is that "all the books you own" should be dependent on a massive company never acting stupid. The problem isn't stupidity/malice, the problem is that stupidity can have such a massive massive effect.
It also allows you to tidy up meta-data and stuff to make things look better.
It's definitely a "required" component as far as my Kindle is concerned.
I believe there are legal (non-pirate) ways to buy these, but I've really no idea how good the vendors are or how wide the catalogues are.
So yes, it works just fine without an Amazon account. Granted I bought mine without any expectation to buy ebooks, so I can imagine this being unsatisfying for people the expect to actually purchase DRM books...
As an example, I only buy non-DRM PDFs, but I never distribute them. Ever. And I never will, because those who use non-DRM PDFs get my hard earned money as I will then get to enjoy and profit from their works on any device that I so desire to use.
Now if, for example, I got a DRM encoded book and it was taken away from me due to some ridiculous arbitrary decision, I would be sorely tempted to get a non-DRM encoded copy of the book that I purchased. I think, in fact I know, I would be justified.
But given that I don't buy DRM encoded books, this will never be an ethical dilemna for me. And I'm no dirty hippy :-)
If you bought the books, you agreed [in the eyes of the law] to this kind of eventuality..
I'm as guilty of this kind of thing as well. We tend to assume an imaginary T&C that conforms to we think is fair when we buy things online - and we have to learn the hard way that the real T&C's are very much more dubious.
Here's the relevant bit in the T&C's:
"Upon your download of Digital 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 Digital Content an unlimited number of times"
"Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement."
The key points is that this is a "license agreement" that grants you rights on the payment of applicable fees.
TL;DR: You don't own any content you licensed to read on your kindle.
You paid applicable fees to enter into an agreement to view digital content. Nothing more. There was no purchase of a book.
Where's your evidence to the contrary?
Oh, I don't know. Maybe when he visited the website of one of the largest retailers in the world, broke out his saved credit card like usual, and clicked the gigantic "Buy now with 1-Click" button?
I would love for this to get tested in court. Has it? My understanding (I'm not a lawyer, but heard this from a lawyer) is that the purpose of, say, signing a release form before playing paintball is not because it provides any real protection to the paintball company, but because it makes the signer less likely to sue.
I feel like maybe this is a similar situation? It seems very much like Amazon is "tricking" you into signing away the fact that you "bought" something since the whole experience of the site is devoted to making you think you're buying it. Throwing in a hidden paragraph at the end doesn't change everything.
I agree that Amazon could be a LOT more open and clear about what it is that changes hands (ie some "rights") when we pay "applicable fees".
But, it took me the best part of 10 seconds to find the license agreement. And, once found, couldn't be clearer.
Clicking on that links takes me to a page that provides a very long list of conditions broken out by use and sale. However, searching for "Kindle" or "book" to find out where they are covered, yield nothing. A customer who has been led by the product page to believe the "Buy" button means what it said, could very reasonably assume they were covered by the terms in the "Sale" section.
I think Amazon is threading a fine line here between having courts (at least in Europe) find that even if it might not constitute a sale, terms that deviate too much from the rights a customer would expect under the sale might be null and void, vs. alternatively find that the prominent language indicating a purchase might be illegally misleading advertising if such terms are allowed to stand...
Then again I might just be too hopeful. In the meantime I won't be "buying" any Kindle books.
Amazon: "Would you like to Buy this book for your Kindle?"
Customer: "Yes" click
Looks like a sale to me. They don't use the word "Rent" or "Borrow". You "buy" it.
A cursory glance at the Wikipedia article on DRM suggests the law is favourable torwards DRM and all that that entails.
It's not so much about DRM per se but rather about what rights you can expect when "buying" an e-book.
For most things such as online purchases I tend to rely on law and reasonableness of people and take the chance without reading expecting the maximum downside to be tens of pounds related to that purchase. I am a little more careful when locked into eco-systems (Kindle/app-stores) but still go a fair bit on taking the risk with the reputation of the provider and the size of the risk and the cost of getting the content another way.
The moral of this story is: if you give a website some money, find out what you are getting for your money.
Not that this makes the events in this story any less terrible.
These are two options for who Michael Murphy is:
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/michael-murphy/17/b72/231
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/michael-murphy/0/b84/9b5
Because it appears to be Amazon UK dealing with the account holder I'd be interested to know if she would get anywhere by submitting a Subject Information Request [1].
Under the Data Protection Act 1998 an individual can submit a request for personal information held by an organization and they must comply within 40 days.
Whether she would get the information she is interested in, i.e. which account she is linked to, is another question.
[1] http://www.ico.gov.uk/for_the_public/personal_information/ho...
Whether she would get the information she is interested in, i.e. which account she is linked to, is another question.
Well if they don't provide it, they are breaking the law, so you can complain about them again that way.
If information is withheld she my be able to infer that the offending account to which she is linked is held by someone else - though the identity of the account holder would understandably not be given.
In any case, it sounds straight out of Kafka: you're punished, but you don't know what crime you are supposed to have committed.
That's quite an interesting legal tactic they've got going there!
I'd like to retain ability to send documents from my computer to my Kindle over the internet.
Managing side-loaded content is quite simple with Calibre, but if you don't want to muck around too much with software, you can also just drag and drop books onto the Kindle as a mass storage device (but you would have to take care that they're in 'acceptable' formats..)
What else are you trying to do that would require custom firmware?
I just don't like the possibility of being locked out of the own device.
I also like how the publicly developed software improves over time. I haven't seen any improvements for my Kindle (most likely same model as yours, but gsm) from Amazon.
Fair point on the software improvement though -- you might want to look into Duokan, it seems to be really popular and adds native ePub support: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=150175 (bonus if you like some aspects of the original OS: there's a tool that let's you switch between the two firmwares.)
I don't think they can lock you out of the device. The only thing I've ever heard of them doing (and what they did in this case) is remote deletion of books you've purchased from them.
Using a Kindle without DRM is very possible.
If you turn off wireless, then it will never try to do any software updating.
Why giving money to Amazon in the first place if you do not agree with their core business practice?
Also, not all books on Amazon's Kindle store have DRM. I can buy them.
It's a necessity, not only for ideological reasons, nor only to protect myself against such abuse from Amazon: it keeps me able to move my virtual library to another platform, should I want to.
this is a risk for publishers and loss-leaders (like amazon) alike.
- with DRMed books, Amazon says "yes, you >>have<< these ebooks, you paid for them [wink]", but Amazon actually can take them away from you and you can do nothing about it. You paid [for ebook copies] and are left with nothing
- in piracy, a person who gets pirated copies of a book says "yes, if I want to read your books, dear authors/publishers, I'll pay for them [wink]", but that person can actually get any number of books from you for free. You paid [for publishing/marketing] and are left with nothing
Then you never pay Amazon another cent. After all, they didn't want your money! If they have refused to let you buy content that you require, then I can see why some people feel a moral justification to pirate the books.
It's really quite simple. If this happened in the U.S. then they could take court action against Amazon. If you are from overseas, you really have no recourse. Therefore, merely because of where you live, you are restricted from material that may enrich your life. That's discrimination, and I can well understand that someone might feel justified in breaking the law to download pirated books.
Amazon... hurting themselves as only a greedy corporation can.
http://www.themillions.com/2010/01/confessions-of-a-book-pir...
"For some, however, the study may inspire more questions than answers. Who are the people downloading these books? How are they doing it and where is it happening? And, perhaps most critical for the publishing industry, why are people deciding to download books and why now? I decided to find out, and after a few hours of searching – stalled by a number dead links and password protected sites – I found, on an online forum focused on sharing books via BitTorrent, someone willing to talk."
pretty neat insight into the book piracy underground.
I haven't read the Amazon TOS but is it really as simple as "you rent this book for as long as we feel like and we can revoke it for no reason"?
In which case I would be somewhat surprised if this really held up in a court, for example what happens if you buy a book and they immediately decide to revoke the license 1 second after purchase?
In principle, possibly. It's a bit difficult to sue if you live in Norway & have been buying from Amazon US though: your costs will exceed any potential return very quickly!
(I'm assuming that filing a small claims suit remotely is either not possible or not effective here of course.)
More specifically: Norway is part of the Brussels regime for determining jurisdiction to sue ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_Regime ). So this applies:
A consumer may bring proceedings against the other party to a contract either in the courts of the Contracting State in which that party is domiciled or in the courts of the Contracting State in which he is himself domiciled.
And no, companies can't escape it by putting a jurisdiction clause in a consumer contract. Consumer protection law trump contract terms. If Amazon want to do business in a country, they have to abide by the consumer laws of that country.
(I am not a lawyer).
You can try to find the Kindle/iBook version, but as this article points out "its a license to read" ... and very often, the quality of the digital conversion is very poor, especially for literature with illustrations.
DRM-free PDF is the only way for me.
Amazon's service was so sweet I didn't mind the DRM, the metaphorical diabetes. It seems now is the time to open my eyes and (again) realize 'RMS is always right'. I think I will stop buying any amazon e-book at least until I hear something good regarding this issue.
"While we are unable to provide detailed information on how we link related accounts, please know that we have reviewed your account on the basis of the information provided and regret to inform you that it will not be reopened."
This happens more frequently: Google says this all the time, based on posts here; Amazon now does the same thing; even apartment rental companies will say "you've been turned down on the basis of this report that we don't know the contents of."
If your company can't reveal specific reasons or steps behind why an action was taken, DON'T TAKE THAT ACTION. Even my credit card issuer will tell me exactly why my card was flagged and they deal with ACTUAL MONEY. All these statements do is infuriate customers, create bad press, and drive away other customers. Scammers will just back up, look at their entire operation, and hammer away again with 300 new accounts so all you've accomplished is pissing off customers who want to do business with you.
[1] Won't, of course.
If a company has such rigid internal processes that it can't come up with a way to reveal at least some information to allow a paying[0] customer to successfully defend an allegation of fraud, then that process is broken.
0 - I leave as an exercise to the reader the question of what should be done for free services.
That's a specific example where it might not be legal but I agree that this is widespread and there are lots of things in the real world where it would be fine to tell you, but they choose not to. In my experience this is to protect internal process (so you can't cite why they're idiots) or so that they can sell you another product (credit score improvement, etc).
But I do agree, the withholding of detail is widespread to a point where it suggests people just plain don't want to tell you anything.
If they were in the U.S. I'd be suggesting they lawyer up.
They're not broadcasting to the world that they think you're a con, they're just telling you... Which is fine.
I have used Wikipedia for the definition of how one proves libel:
There are several ways a person must go about proving that libel has taken place. For example, in the United States, first, the person must prove that the statement was false. Second, the person must prove that the statement caused harm. Third, the person must prove that the statement was made without adequate research into the truthfulness of the statement. These steps are for an ordinary citizen.
Of course, there is no citation. I just added the {{fact}} tag. But does anyone know if this is true or not?
Only if they published it to the world, she could claim her reputation has been harmed.
1:00 PM -- her account is closed
2:00 PM -- she asks Amazon why her account is closed
3:00 PM -- Amazon makes the statement you claim is libelous
The loss occurred before the statement, so you cannot claim the statement caused that loss. The alleged libel did not result in the damages you're claiming.
Libel would be if Amazon falsely accused her of fraud in public, then her employer terminating her employment as a result of that statement. That is a harm resulting from the statement.
What is to stop somebody extensively researching something but then just deciding to lie anyway?
If I tell you I think you're lazy, that's rude but it isn't defamy. If I write you a letter and you publish it, it's still not defamy.
If I talk to your boss and tell him I think you're lazy (without evidence) that may be defamy. If I publish a letter to you telling you you're lazy, that may be defamy.
And no, this has nothing to do with the rest of the issue.
Its privacy requirements are limited to giving you a copy of your personal information. Name. Address. Phone number.
Anything else (including the marker labelling you as a pillaging hobo) is their proprietary business intelligence and good luck convincing them otherwise.
1) They don't want to get into a discussion which is likely to be time consuming. It's not just innocent people who appeal these things, often the most guilty are those who will most actively and vocally profess their innocence (in some cases up to and including going to court over it - c.f. the UK politician Jonathan Atkin).
The minute Amazon became willing to talk about this stuff they'd need a who bunch more people to start looking into each one in detail, review every claim and counter claim and so on, and they clearly don't think that that's a good use of their money.
2) The sorts of things they'd likely have to reveal are going to be the sorts of things people who are abusing the system want to know to get round it. Doing this would make their job harder.
Not saying that it's right that they take this approach, just I can see the reasons they do.
I for one would like them to start talking about this sort of thing, and review these cases more thoroughly. After all, people paid good money to them to read books. Books which they stole away from them. It seems unlikely that Amazon provided a refund to the lady in question.
It's far easier and cheaper for them to ignore most cases and instead wait for the few that blow up like this one and then look into them at that point. In those cases if they think that they're even remotely in the wrong I suspect that they'll reinstate the account, send their apologies, send the person in question a gift voucher and get on with doing exactly what they were doing before.
It's very easy to think that the sort of outcry that happens on HN, or even on Twitter, reflects public opinion, but the reality is that this audience is both far more aware of these events, and far more considered in their reaction. The sad reality is that Amazon can get away with this sort of thing because most Kindle users won't ever learn about it and even if they do won't really understand what it means or change their behaviour.
Normally, I would have voted with my pocket book, but in this case they had the sole source of the item (for a time). I also wanted to cost them a huge amount of time for their error.
And this my friends is why artificial monopolies (created by vendor lock-in, proprietary devices, patents, or other perversions of the legal system) are inherently detrimental. Adam Smith, in his foundational work on Capitalism: The Wealth of Nations, rails against the practices that make monopolies possible. This market is not a free market.
People love the upside of capitalism. But when it comes to the self-correcting measures it brings... not so much.
Since we were on the "front line" we were usually the ones informing the customers of these policies. We were usually given very limited information about the hows/whys of these policies so when the customers started getting annoyed and asking questions all we could reply with was "I don't know, that is just our policy" and "I don't have the authority to do that".
Looking back on it I'm guessing we were kept in the dark on purpose since after a couple of minutes about 90% of the customers would just give up and accept it. Some asked to speak to a manager but of course we were instructed never to put a manager on the line and always to claim that the manager was unavailable or to just transfer the call to another agent who would give the same answer.
If they had given us more information about these policies then we would have ended up spending hours in discussion with the customer which is of course what the call centre managers specifically didn't want.
It is very unfortunate that apparently the only way to resolve such cases is to bring them to enough media spotlight, that the corporation involved has to do something to avoid damages to its image.
Essentially, as a customer one is often limited to submitting requests through web forms and receiving boilerplate answers (if at all) that lead nowhere if the case at hand is somewhat nonstandard, or to spend endless hours circulating through similarly scripted phone support hotlines, without ever reaching somebody that can actually fix the problem.
Kafka would be hard pressed to top some of those customer support experiences.
Then they just unflag it after I answer 10 security questions and that's it.
Pisses me off every time.
I don't understand how that would justify or require revoking access to stuff that was already bought/licensed? You could simply deny the offending user access to buying new stuff instead.
The Guardian is running a story [1] today about how Amazon forces publishers to cover the cost of 20% VAT (sales tax) on ebook sales, even though it only pays 3% to the Luxembourg government (where it is based for tax purposes). It also insists that if a publisher offers a better price to another retailer then it must offer the same price to Amazon.
They also pay no corporation tax in the UK, despite sales of more than £3.3bn/yr [2], through being based in Luxembourg.
I was going to jump ship to The Book Depository, but Amazon bought them last year. Its hard to understand why this was allowed by the competition regulator, and it doesn't give me much confidence that the UK government has much interest in limiting their control of multiple markets.
[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/oct/21/amazon-forc...
[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/04/amazon-brit...
http://www.abebooks.co.uk/ is pretty good, particularly for difficult to find and second hand books. I've found more and more recently that play.com does almost as well as (and often better than) Amazon in terms of price, although I don't know much about their business tactics.
AbeBooks Inc. is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. AbeBooks, an online bookselling pioneer, was acquired in December 2008 and remains a stand-alone operation with headquarters in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, and a European office in Dusseldorf, Germany.
http://www.abebooks.com/books/CompanyInformation
Vodafone, Amazon, Starbucks, Google, Apple, ...
Is it sleazy as all getout? Yup, absolutely: but it's not illegal. Companies pull this kind of bait and switch all the time when they think they can get away with it. Remember when Microsoft bought the original Internet Explorer codebase in return for the company in question receiving a cut of the profits and then gave it away for free? How they must have laughed about that one back at MS HQ...
In reality, the publishers handed Amazon a near monopoly on ebook sales by their own short-sightedness and now Amazon is turning the thumbscrews to see how much they're actually prepared to cough up. The games with VAT in the contract are just part and parcel of that.
Until they lost the lawsuit...
http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/news2/microsoft-and-spyg...
In the UK, Amazon is being accused of not paying the full amount of corporation tax they ought to be paying.
I like my women like I like my coffee - paying tax on their income in the UK.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone higher up sees her issues and activates her account. But I can't trust my money to a company where you could lose access to books worth thousands if you talk with the wrong person.
Back then, they said "We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers' devices in these circumstances". Looks like 3 years later they've decided to go back to what they were doing and promised not to do.
And THIS is why I won't buy a Kindle.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18ama...
You can still treat yourself with one of the many currently sold ebook readers out there: http://www.the-ebook-reader.com/ebook-reader-comparison.html . There is a world out there of (electronic) books that is not controlled by Amazon.
[1]http://www.foyles.co.uk/
[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/james-daun...
"Better World Books is a self-sustaining, for-profit social venture whose mission is to capitalize on the value of the book to fund literacy initiatives locally, nationally and around the world. We partner with nearly 1400 libraries and over 1800 college campuses across the U.S. and Canada, collecting unwanted textbooks and library discards in support of non-profit literacy programs. We have raised millions of dollars for literacy, saved millions of books from landfills, created jobs for hundreds of people, and provided wonderful books to millions of readers worldwide."