I’d advise anyone buying e-books on Amazon to think it through carefully. My account was banned recently because, years ago, I ordered two paper books that Amazon said would be split into two shipments. Both books arrived without any issues, but later Amazon refunded me for one of them, claiming that one package never arrived. This happened 4–5 years ago.
Apparently, during a recent review, they decided this counted as fraud and banned my account. As a result, I can no longer log in and lost access to all my Kindle e-books. They also remotely wiped my Kindle, so my entire library is gone. I appealed the decision, but I’ve been waiting for over six months with no resolution.
A friend of mine received a double shipment for a $300 order. Being honest, he contacted customer service to arrange a return. Everything seemed fine until a few days later when he noticed they had also refunded his original payment. He reached out again to let them know, and they said they’d just recharge his card. Apparently, that transaction failed (no clear reason why), and without any warning, they banned his account, wiping out his entire Kindle library in the process. Amazon works wonderfully right up until it fails spectacularly.
I wonder just like retailers are required to account for local sales taxes (I know it is not that clear cut), there should be some enforcement mechanism to settle disputes locally. Setup an agency which "legally" provides support for google, Amazon, and all those unreachable entities. Provides local jobs as well as quick grievance redressal. Maybe something like consumer protection agency but not federal, maybe at least one per county maybe more depending on the population.
Edit - I don't mind paying for the service. Maybe charge everyone $99 to file a case to avoid everyone piling on, but it helps resolve most egregious ones, and fee could be refunded at the agency's discretion.
I can't speak for how effective the process is, but this is the idea behind the EU/UK GPSR's Authorised Representative framework - though not exactly local (that would be excessive, since GPSR also applies to much smaller sellers too)
I never bought any ebooks off Amazon without removing the drm at the time. I did buy a lot of shows and movies, but if they take those away, I'll just pirate them, given I've already paid.
That's the point of DRM-free ebooks though, isn't it? You download them and keep them safe so if the provider decides to cut access to your account, you remain in possession of the goods.
So the correct advice would be to avoid anyone buying DRM-encumbered digital property - the same as RMS has been making for who knows how long!
It's safer to assume that Amazon is always acting in bad faith and search to purchase your DRM free e-books from other vendors. There's plenty of other options out there besides Amazon
Banning long-time customers in otherwise good-standing for a mistake they made years ago, which would already be settled financially and such a minor cost is wild.
I can imagine something like this has happened to almost everyone.
So much for being the world’s most customer-centric company. That mission is dead.
They failed to deliver a Pixel phone to me - they never even tried to deliver it and the status said "permanent delivery failure" so I assumed they'd automatically refund me.
Fast forward a few months, I never received a refund and they claim they have no record any more. I could chargeback my credit card but I imagine I'd also be permanently banned from Amazon - so instead I accept they've just stolen $1000 from me with no recourse...
(if anyone from Amazon is reading this, my email is in my bio!)
It seems wild to me to just accept a loss of $1000 for something that isn't your fault. I'd be persistent in each contact with Amazon and if you're really not getting anywhere I'd go to small claims court or do a chargeback.
Just ask for the refund. If they lock your account you can always make a new one (gonna be a scary day when that isn't possibl cuz they use biometrics or something.....).
But if they just close your account in response to asking for a rightful refund.... Literal thievery
Yeah, I get that Amazon is incredibly convenient, but $1000 is $1000 no matter which company takes it from you. If some local mom and pop shop effectively stole $1000 from me, you can bet your ass I'd never patronize them again.
Much less money lost, but Amazon is notorious for not providing free game codes that are supposed to be included with GPU purchases. The customer rep at first apologized and offered a small refund (less than the cost of the game). A later rep started implying I was trying to defraud Amazon.
Many people online share similar experiences. Wonder how much money this wide-scale fraud saves them.
Something similar happened to me. The delivery company returned two packages, two separate orders, as damaged back to Amazon. They were marked as "delivered". They automatically refunded just one item in one of the returned orders.
I had to call them to get a refund for all the items on all the orders, and even then they had a lot of difficulty figuring out what was happening. Isn't Amazon supposed to be a world leader (maybe after Walmart) in this stuff?
And risk being locked out of the world’s online marketplace and all of Amazon’s other businesses? Maybe a bit hyperbolic but that’s where we are headed for sure.
I saw the writing on the wall when they recently removed the facility to download your own books. I downloaded all of them, removed the DRM with Calibre, and now obtain e-books through other sources.
Unfortunately bad press is likely going to be the only thing to give you your account back.
You should write a blog post and let the internet and the media do its magic
Amazon used to be really customer centric 5-10 years ago, I remember once I ordered a physical book which was late in delivery and I urgently needed that book, so they gave me a free kindle edition till the book got delivered.
Last week I had a vendor tell me that they did warranty service through Amazon, and I should contact Amazon for a replacement, even though I was outside of their return window. It turned out to be a lie. But Amazon refunded me the full amount anyway, without prompting. The handful of times I've contacted Amazon tech support this has been my experience. The previous one was when they replaced a $250 porch pirated delivery, no questions asked.
This behavior genuinely earns them more of my business.
The only reason for a recent review (like with all the recently banned Facebook accounts from 2009) is firing up AI tools that didn't exist 5 years ago.
That’s possible, but I can’t know for sure because Amazon never provided any concrete details. I didn’t receive any warning emails, only a cryptic message after the ban:
> "Amazon.co.uk found that the rate at which refunds were occurring on your account was extraordinary and could not continue."
After looking through my order history, the only refund I could find on this account was the one related to the book I mentioned above. If there was any other activity or misuse, Amazon hasn’t disclosed it to me, which makes it impossible to verify or dispute their conclusion.
Hah, they actually did a slight rollback! When I first heard about them stopping the downloads, I immediately downloaded all the books I purchased from Amazon and went from buying ~1 book per week to 0. Seems a lot of us doing so had some sort of effect.
Unfortunately, it seems like this will be chosen by the publisher, so of course probably most of the books won't be downloadable at all, and Amazon can now point their finger at the publisher instead of taking the blame themselves. Publishers was probably always the reason behind the move, but at least now Amazon have someone else to blame, which I guess is great for them.
I have bought more than 600 books over a decade or so;
But after they decided the ebooks were actually just license to read, I did exactly the same as you, and now rather than happily buying from them, actively discourage everyone in my social circle from using kindle.
I am not going back, whoever they decide to blame.
It’s pretty unusual for Amazon to put any other entity’s interest ahead of it’s own, so they can be presumed to have some business reason for it, like the number of people who’ve decided not to buy from them any more.
But only if the author/publisher explicitly go in and permit it.
This isn't announcing that pdf's and epub's are now available for everything that was drm-free, this is announcing that they will _permit_ pdf's and epub's to be available.
I'm a self-published author. This is the default setting for new books uploaded without DRM. It's gated behind an "I understand" checkbox. I plan to allow my books to be downloaded as PDF and ePUB.
Having the action prominent and potentially with the default reversed would still leave it to the publisher's choice.
We can understand why they do it this way (they only need the option to exist, and can afford to apply dark patterns to it), but we don't need to excuse Amazon. Especially when they don't give a shit about what we think in the first place.
This was unexpected. They lost me as a customer when they stopped allowing me to download books I bought and I'm in the Kobo (+ BookLore) side now and I am not coming back.
I wonder how many books are actually DRM-free and are going to be affected by this change. I suspect relatively few, but I would be happy to be wrong
For me it appears highly genre-correlated. High percentage of science fiction books come with a small statement "this book is drm free on request of publisher / author". Zero of my photography, music, computer science or graphic novels came with such a tag.
Yeah, Tor Books publishes without DRM, and they seem to be one of the bigger SFF publishers these days. John Scalzi, George R.R. Martin (though not the ASoIaF books), Robert Jordan, Annalee Newitz, Charlie Jane Anders, and a bunch of other SFF authors I recognize. I'm sure there are others, but all the once I've noticed have been from Tor.
Recently signed up for Littler Books for the sole reason they offered everything in epub, pdf and Word doc. Sad this is not the standard for paid content.
How many books are actually available DRM-free? This reads a bit like "Amazon will provide free land, construct a paddock and provide feed for life if you order a unicorn, except unicorns don't exist".
Books enter the public domain. Project Gutenberg and others produce DRM-free versions. Many academics and people who wish to share their knowledge also publish works DRM-free, sometimes under permissive (copyleft), licenses.
The fact you see DRM as the norm and non-DRM as “a unicorn” that “doesn’t exist”, is mildly sad. You should explore all of the above a lot more, and much more besides.
I assumed that that was clear from the context, but let me rephrase it then:
"being made available DRM-free on Amazon" (and I'd narrow that down to "primarily/only on Amazon")
Of course public domain books are DRM free but I'm getting those from Gutenberg, not Amazon. Likewise, the copyleft books I'll most likely download from their own homepages, not Amazon.
I'm aware that DRM free media exists, including for currently copyrighted content that Amazon distributes ;)
Mildly sad is also that you seem to fault GP for not “exploring” more, instead of the insane practice of DRMing everything in the first place.
I never have purchased DRM protected media and never will - I’d rather pirate everything digital and but physical hard copies.
I don’t actually think it’s their fault, and if they feel I’m faulting them, that wasn’t the intention.
I think it’s sad that what we thought everyone saw as a nonsense is now so normalised that alternatives are just disappearing from view. Everyone should be encouraged to explore.
Piracy is your preferred option, but when that became more mainstream we actually ended up creating the market for more DRM, in the form of iTunes, Spotify and others. I’m not sure I want the future of digital media to be entirely subscription-based like that.
What might be a better solution is showing that media creators can achieve more of their own objectives through releasing media without DRM. This only works if their objectives are not entirely around making money from media sales, and more aligned to influence, or audience building.
I’m actually surprised at this point that musicians - given they don’t make money from streaming services and see them as tools to build audiences for live tours where they really make their money - don’t just jump over already.
I was just talking about books, but sure for music there are tons of alternative options as well.
I detest streaming platforms and it’s pretty easy to buy music directly from the creators in almost all cases - except maybe the top “superstars” but I would argue that they are probably doing fine anyway…
Also physical records still exist for music as well.
Lots of artists can do just fine with living from media sales.
Look I’m not saying “pirate everything and never pay the artists” - I’m saying “never pay the predatory tech companies that have inserted themselves between us and artists”
...and then they get re-packaged with DRM on Amazon's store, mostly because people uploading public domain books on Amazon have no idea what they're doing.
> Project Gutenberg and others produce DRM-free versions. Many academics and people who wish to share their knowledge also publish works DRM-free, sometimes under permissive (copyleft), licenses.
You can read DRM-free stuff on a Kindle already, so that's not particularly relevant here.
> The fact you see DRM as the norm and non-DRM as “a unicorn” that “doesn’t exist”, is mildly sad.
When every big publisher is doing it, it is the norm. That doesn't mean there doesn't exist any book publisher which doesn't do this, but the vast, vast majority of the books actually sold today contain DRM. We don't have to like that norm, but pretending it isn't one is just denying reality.
While lots public domain books are on Amazon's store, most of those books are not free, both in the sense of "free or charge" and "DRM free". A lot of literature classic are released by a major publishing house with foreword and annotations, which to be fair, are copyrighted works and provide value. And they cost a bit of money. The "real" public domain versions provide by Amazon are barebone. Those versions are often good enough for many people, but you don't need to get them from Amazon in the first place.
In other words, public domain or not does not have much to do with DRM-free or even Amazon.
You'd be surprised. Tor and Solaris both offer DRM free books on Amazon. Also anything self published tends to be DRM free.
I saw the writing on the wall and downloaded my books from Amazon a few months before their announcement. Out of around 1000 books I had 300ish that were DRM free.
Dumb question, but: is there a way to find/filter ones that are? (I can't seem to find anything in the (web) UI that makes it clear which books are downloadable.)
There wasn't when I went through my collection. Reading the announcement from Amazon it looks like the existing DRM free books will not be automatically flagged to be downloadable.
The publisher/author will have to go through a process to have their books be downloadable again.
I assume GP was referring to Tor Books, (which name confused me immensely at first since I've been using the Tor project for many years) but that would have been an absolutely hilarious joke and I think you interpreting it as a joke is totally reasonable given how prominent the onion router project is.
Yep, never again. I tried to take a pragmatic position with the DRM, and it is just not possible. I buy the crap out of DRM free stuff, but if it's not DRM free, it's not for me
I have Kobo, but their decision to enable secure boot in newer models, and consequently pushing out FOSS choices as operating systems makes me think I won't get another Kobo. Yes the Nickel menu works still with secure boot enabled devices. I like to think that devices I buy might have different use-case in future, and secure-boot enabled devices seriously harm that.
Thing is Kindle hardware is significantly better and cheaper. If you don't mind tinkering get a kindle and jailbreak it to remove ads and add koreader.
> Kindle hardware is significantly better and cheaper. If you don't mind tinkering get a kindle and jailbreak it to remove ads and add koreader.
Because Amazon were increasingly locking-down their systems - and also because they are all-round shits - I decided to abandon the ecosystem having been a customer since the days they only sold books.
I have owned two Paperwhites, two Oasis devices, and a Kindle Scribe. I sold all of them last year and bought a Kobo Libra Colour.
I get WAY more joy from reading on the Kobo. I love buying books from the Kobo store (yes I know they also have DRM) - and I'm buying and reading WAY more on the Kobo than I was at the end of my time with Amazon.
Every time I buy yet another book on the Kobo Store I feel the thrill of sticking it to the horrible, anti-user shits at Amazon.
I'll chime in - the Kindle Paperwhite I believe is the superior machine from a physical feeling and aesthetic perspective. The problem (for me) is who makes it. Amazon keeps locking it down so it's harder and harder to load your own DRM free books onto it, in addition to tracking everything you do on it (like sending all your reading statistics whenever you get online).
I have a Kobo Clara BW. It's still a great machine, but the Kindle is definitely superior for feel and visuals, but I use the Kobo 95% of the time. They are way more open with the software and I have mine in "sideload" mode (an official setting), which really just means that it doesn't make me log into anything and it doesn't even attempt to connect to the internet. Also, I can purchase a DRM free ebook on the train, plug a USB cable into my phone and my Kobo, and then load it on like that. Now I own my digital book, have supported the author with a larger margin, and get to read it on my more private machine.
Definitely not a no-brainer for everyone, but I'm happy with my Kobo.
I have both. The Kindle is a better device overall, but the I like Kobo's software better.
What I found disappointing was when I had to swap out the screen on the Kobo and found that it was glued and that the battery was soldered. I managed to do fix it, but I don't like things that are unnecessarily hard to fix.
How do you know anything? You can never know for sure if you can trust another person, and this is why people can get schizophrenia.
Asking people to verify that they are honest will never help you. Dishonest people will of course lie to you and say they are honest. While honest people will be insulted by your question and not want to engage with you.
What you can do is verify. Try a Kobo, try a Kindle. Make up your own mind.
Indeed, and it doesn't take a whole lot of effort to do an internet search to get more opinions. If you think everyone is astroTurfing and shilling, then you have to fall back to the good old-fashioned scientific method of trying things out yourself.
It would be great too to bring that information back to HN and share it with us.
I wonder if this is in response to Bookshop.org's DRM free e-book shop. I buy a lot of e-books and have completely switched over because of that feature.
I’m waiting for Bookshop.org to offer an integration with any hardware reader for most of their books. When they do, I’ll switch to whatever that reader is.
Amazon deserves a lot of criticism in the general sense, but this can only be seen as a positive move. Most importantly, if they set an industry standard, others might follow.
Fundamentally, I prefer a physical book to a digital one. But, the primary reason I'd never even entertain a digital book is the lack of ownership. Ownership is incredibly important, and we need to celebrate victories when they happen.
I agree this is a positive step, but this is like notch 1 on a scale of 0 to 100, 0 being maximum abuse of your customer. I think it's downright evil not to allow this for DRM free books, which they have been doing for many years now. It is positive that they reduced the level of evil by a little bit, and I'll give them credit for that, but this movement is so minor in the scope of things that it does not sway me whatsoever to go back to buying from their Kindle store
So Gutenberg and the internet archive could monetise click through links or an affiliate program? No disrespect intended, if this meant we could fund them with Amazon pitching in some vig I'd think about it. Mind you, they'd probably make more with direct donation per person, but Amazon could drive many multiples more via the store.
As the author of five books (and my most recent one entirely self-published), I haven't yet worked out how I feel about this or how to respond. My current compromise is to charge more on the DRM-free LeanPub.
Genuine questions here, not rhetorical or trying to imply anything with them.
Why charge more on a DRM free site? Do you think people buying from there are doing so that they can share the book illegally?
If someone wants to share the book illegally, I would imagine they'll just download it from one of the pirate mirrors out there and not bother paying you at all. My guess is you're probably just reducing the number of people willing to pay the price. Classic supply and demand curve against price.
Amazon wins by miles, almost to the point of incomparability. For all my issues with Amazon, that’s fine by me: compared to all other platforms, that’s where the reviews and other forms of social proof are.
I like to be able to price shop, but I do want to support the authors. So I use Kobo & Kindle, then buy it wherever it's cheapest usually.
Then I use epubor ultimate to convert to epub and read it on my generic e-ink reader. Some folks object to the licensing or whatever with epubor (unattributed GPL?) but it works, it's easy, and when Amazon tightens up the DRM they always find a way around it eventually.
They're still going to take note of what you're reading and possibly brand you as a non-ultra-capitalist disruptor. Amazon can get fucked.
I still buy physical media from them once a year (November) when availabilty and rest of the world can't compete price-wise. Yes I recognise the hypocrisy of said actions and minimise it as much as possible. Non-US based. Many physical media producers (e.g. Disney) no longer produce stuff for our 'region'.
The current experience of using a Kobo Libre Color, Koreader, any webdav mounted in koreader and pirating everything on annas archive et. al. cannot be beat by any commercial offering. Unsuprisingly my copy of 1984 has never been deleted from my NAS
> pirating everything on annas archive et. al. cannot be beat by any commercial offering
While I understand people pirating movies - there are hundreds of movies I'd happily pay to watch, but which are literally unavailable to me because of some arbitrary 'regional' restriction imposed by the distributors. But I can't think of a single book that isn't available in most parts of the world - certainly they're available wherever a Kobo is for sale.
So how are new books going to be published in the future, if people like you don't pay writers for their work? Would you like your work to be pirated, so you wouldn't be able to even buy another Kobo?
I feel like if the platform is unwilling to give you access to books you posted for, you should be able to download them from arrr without authors or publishers being affected financially - buy first pirate later.
People have been writing for much longer than writing has been a profession. And their work has been published by the means of the day, which pre-Gutenberg in the West meant hand-copying.
It's not immoral in any way to make a living off of your own creations, but - artists gonna art.
Imagine being so good at writing, that people out there are trying to get a copy of it that they can upload to The Pirate Bay. Hell yeh, I'd love that... seems like reaching the big leagues.
Nobody with sane mind cares. You may buy Kindle, but then you jailbreak it right away. You can "buy" Kindle e-books, but then you exfiltrate these right away. When you stand your ground, what can Amazon allow you or not allow?
Sure, if you don't mind playing a stupid cat and mouse game with one of the largest corporations on the planet, go for it. I did it for a bit and got real tired of the drag
I’d advise anyone buying e-books on Amazon to think it through carefully. My account was banned recently because, years ago, I ordered two paper books that Amazon said would be split into two shipments. Both books arrived without any issues, but later Amazon refunded me for one of them, claiming that one package never arrived. This happened 4–5 years ago.
Apparently, during a recent review, they decided this counted as fraud and banned my account. As a result, I can no longer log in and lost access to all my Kindle e-books. They also remotely wiped my Kindle, so my entire library is gone. I appealed the decision, but I’ve been waiting for over six months with no resolution.
A friend of mine received a double shipment for a $300 order. Being honest, he contacted customer service to arrange a return. Everything seemed fine until a few days later when he noticed they had also refunded his original payment. He reached out again to let them know, and they said they’d just recharge his card. Apparently, that transaction failed (no clear reason why), and without any warning, they banned his account, wiping out his entire Kindle library in the process. Amazon works wonderfully right up until it fails spectacularly.
I wonder just like retailers are required to account for local sales taxes (I know it is not that clear cut), there should be some enforcement mechanism to settle disputes locally. Setup an agency which "legally" provides support for google, Amazon, and all those unreachable entities. Provides local jobs as well as quick grievance redressal. Maybe something like consumer protection agency but not federal, maybe at least one per county maybe more depending on the population.
Edit - I don't mind paying for the service. Maybe charge everyone $99 to file a case to avoid everyone piling on, but it helps resolve most egregious ones, and fee could be refunded at the agency's discretion.
I can't speak for how effective the process is, but this is the idea behind the EU/UK GPSR's Authorised Representative framework - though not exactly local (that would be excessive, since GPSR also applies to much smaller sellers too)
I never bought any ebooks off Amazon without removing the drm at the time. I did buy a lot of shows and movies, but if they take those away, I'll just pirate them, given I've already paid.
That's the point of DRM-free ebooks though, isn't it? You download them and keep them safe so if the provider decides to cut access to your account, you remain in possession of the goods.
So the correct advice would be to avoid anyone buying DRM-encumbered digital property - the same as RMS has been making for who knows how long!
It's safer to assume that Amazon is always acting in bad faith and search to purchase your DRM free e-books from other vendors. There's plenty of other options out there besides Amazon
https://bookshop.org/info/ebooks
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bookshoporg-launche...
> There's plenty of other options out there besides Amazon
Often not in my experience. Abe and B&N.
Banning long-time customers in otherwise good-standing for a mistake they made years ago, which would already be settled financially and such a minor cost is wild.
I can imagine something like this has happened to almost everyone.
So much for being the world’s most customer-centric company. That mission is dead.
They failed to deliver a Pixel phone to me - they never even tried to deliver it and the status said "permanent delivery failure" so I assumed they'd automatically refund me.
Fast forward a few months, I never received a refund and they claim they have no record any more. I could chargeback my credit card but I imagine I'd also be permanently banned from Amazon - so instead I accept they've just stolen $1000 from me with no recourse...
(if anyone from Amazon is reading this, my email is in my bio!)
It seems wild to me to just accept a loss of $1000 for something that isn't your fault. I'd be persistent in each contact with Amazon and if you're really not getting anywhere I'd go to small claims court or do a chargeback.
Just ask for the refund. If they lock your account you can always make a new one (gonna be a scary day when that isn't possibl cuz they use biometrics or something.....).
But if they just close your account in response to asking for a rightful refund.... Literal thievery
For $1k stolen from me I think I’d go with not shopping at Amazon again, tbh.
Yeah, I get that Amazon is incredibly convenient, but $1000 is $1000 no matter which company takes it from you. If some local mom and pop shop effectively stole $1000 from me, you can bet your ass I'd never patronize them again.
Much less money lost, but Amazon is notorious for not providing free game codes that are supposed to be included with GPU purchases. The customer rep at first apologized and offered a small refund (less than the cost of the game). A later rep started implying I was trying to defraud Amazon.
Many people online share similar experiences. Wonder how much money this wide-scale fraud saves them.
Something similar happened to me. The delivery company returned two packages, two separate orders, as damaged back to Amazon. They were marked as "delivered". They automatically refunded just one item in one of the returned orders.
I had to call them to get a refund for all the items on all the orders, and even then they had a lot of difficulty figuring out what was happening. Isn't Amazon supposed to be a world leader (maybe after Walmart) in this stuff?
That should be the last straw. In the least, why haven't you closed your account?
No, this is silly. Don't do this. You absolutely keep pushing for a refund and go via you CC provider if they don't respond.
And risk being locked out of the world’s online marketplace and all of Amazon’s other businesses? Maybe a bit hyperbolic but that’s where we are headed for sure.
Damn that is scary. I’ve been reading on Kindle since 2017, I have about 200 books on there.
I doubt I would re-read many of them, but my partner is still going through some of them (with the family library thing).
I’d be pissed if it got wiped.
I'd download epubs of everything from Anna's Archive and/or soulseek (Nicotine+ is nice) and kindly tell them to fuck off with their account.
I saw the writing on the wall when they recently removed the facility to download your own books. I downloaded all of them, removed the DRM with Calibre, and now obtain e-books through other sources.
About Kindle, if you're in Europe, you could try Nextory or BookBeat. They don't have as much content, but are good services nevertheless.
Unfortunately bad press is likely going to be the only thing to give you your account back. You should write a blog post and let the internet and the media do its magic
Amazon used to be really customer centric 5-10 years ago, I remember once I ordered a physical book which was late in delivery and I urgently needed that book, so they gave me a free kindle edition till the book got delivered.
Last week I had a vendor tell me that they did warranty service through Amazon, and I should contact Amazon for a replacement, even though I was outside of their return window. It turned out to be a lie. But Amazon refunded me the full amount anyway, without prompting. The handful of times I've contacted Amazon tech support this has been my experience. The previous one was when they replaced a $250 porch pirated delivery, no questions asked.
This behavior genuinely earns them more of my business.
The only reason for a recent review (like with all the recently banned Facebook accounts from 2009) is firing up AI tools that didn't exist 5 years ago.
Or general auditing purposes.
That is truly insane - sorry that you’re unable to access the books that you rightly purchased.
Though I highly doubt this alone was the reason for an account ban. Is it possible your credentials were stolen/misused without your knowledge?
That’s possible, but I can’t know for sure because Amazon never provided any concrete details. I didn’t receive any warning emails, only a cryptic message after the ban:
> "Amazon.co.uk found that the rate at which refunds were occurring on your account was extraordinary and could not continue."
After looking through my order history, the only refund I could find on this account was the one related to the book I mentioned above. If there was any other activity or misuse, Amazon hasn’t disclosed it to me, which makes it impossible to verify or dispute their conclusion.
> As a result, I can no longer log in and lost access to all my Kindle e-books.
Can't you file a suit in a small claims court?
Hah, they actually did a slight rollback! When I first heard about them stopping the downloads, I immediately downloaded all the books I purchased from Amazon and went from buying ~1 book per week to 0. Seems a lot of us doing so had some sort of effect.
Unfortunately, it seems like this will be chosen by the publisher, so of course probably most of the books won't be downloadable at all, and Amazon can now point their finger at the publisher instead of taking the blame themselves. Publishers was probably always the reason behind the move, but at least now Amazon have someone else to blame, which I guess is great for them.
I have bought more than 600 books over a decade or so;
But after they decided the ebooks were actually just license to read, I did exactly the same as you, and now rather than happily buying from them, actively discourage everyone in my social circle from using kindle.
I am not going back, whoever they decide to blame.
It’s pretty unusual for Amazon to put any other entity’s interest ahead of it’s own, so they can be presumed to have some business reason for it, like the number of people who’ve decided not to buy from them any more.
But only if the author/publisher explicitly go in and permit it.
This isn't announcing that pdf's and epub's are now available for everything that was drm-free, this is announcing that they will _permit_ pdf's and epub's to be available.
I'm a self-published author. This is the default setting for new books uploaded without DRM. It's gated behind an "I understand" checkbox. I plan to allow my books to be downloaded as PDF and ePUB.
It makes sense not to do this retroactively.
Can you create the epub and pdf files yourself and have them distributed unaltered?
That seems reasonable enough to me though. It should be the publisher's choice what formats of the book they are willing to sell.
Having the action prominent and potentially with the default reversed would still leave it to the publisher's choice.
We can understand why they do it this way (they only need the option to exist, and can afford to apply dark patterns to it), but we don't need to excuse Amazon. Especially when they don't give a shit about what we think in the first place.
This was unexpected. They lost me as a customer when they stopped allowing me to download books I bought and I'm in the Kobo (+ BookLore) side now and I am not coming back.
I wonder how many books are actually DRM-free and are going to be affected by this change. I suspect relatively few, but I would be happy to be wrong
For me it appears highly genre-correlated. High percentage of science fiction books come with a small statement "this book is drm free on request of publisher / author". Zero of my photography, music, computer science or graphic novels came with such a tag.
Yeah, Tor Books publishes without DRM, and they seem to be one of the bigger SFF publishers these days. John Scalzi, George R.R. Martin (though not the ASoIaF books), Robert Jordan, Annalee Newitz, Charlie Jane Anders, and a bunch of other SFF authors I recognize. I'm sure there are others, but all the once I've noticed have been from Tor.
Indeed, and I love Tor for this. Brandon Sanderson has also come out against DRM. I already loved the man's books, now I love the man too
I bought a Kobo for the same reason but when it came to buying books, none of the books I wanted to buy were on Kobo's store.
Recently signed up for Littler Books for the sole reason they offered everything in epub, pdf and Word doc. Sad this is not the standard for paid content.
How many books are actually available DRM-free? This reads a bit like "Amazon will provide free land, construct a paddock and provide feed for life if you order a unicorn, except unicorns don't exist".
Books enter the public domain. Project Gutenberg and others produce DRM-free versions. Many academics and people who wish to share their knowledge also publish works DRM-free, sometimes under permissive (copyleft), licenses.
The fact you see DRM as the norm and non-DRM as “a unicorn” that “doesn’t exist”, is mildly sad. You should explore all of the above a lot more, and much more besides.
I assumed that that was clear from the context, but let me rephrase it then:
"being made available DRM-free on Amazon" (and I'd narrow that down to "primarily/only on Amazon")
Of course public domain books are DRM free but I'm getting those from Gutenberg, not Amazon. Likewise, the copyleft books I'll most likely download from their own homepages, not Amazon.
I'm aware that DRM free media exists, including for currently copyrighted content that Amazon distributes ;)
Mildly sad is also that you seem to fault GP for not “exploring” more, instead of the insane practice of DRMing everything in the first place. I never have purchased DRM protected media and never will - I’d rather pirate everything digital and but physical hard copies.
I don’t actually think it’s their fault, and if they feel I’m faulting them, that wasn’t the intention.
I think it’s sad that what we thought everyone saw as a nonsense is now so normalised that alternatives are just disappearing from view. Everyone should be encouraged to explore.
Piracy is your preferred option, but when that became more mainstream we actually ended up creating the market for more DRM, in the form of iTunes, Spotify and others. I’m not sure I want the future of digital media to be entirely subscription-based like that.
What might be a better solution is showing that media creators can achieve more of their own objectives through releasing media without DRM. This only works if their objectives are not entirely around making money from media sales, and more aligned to influence, or audience building.
I’m actually surprised at this point that musicians - given they don’t make money from streaming services and see them as tools to build audiences for live tours where they really make their money - don’t just jump over already.
I was just talking about books, but sure for music there are tons of alternative options as well. I detest streaming platforms and it’s pretty easy to buy music directly from the creators in almost all cases - except maybe the top “superstars” but I would argue that they are probably doing fine anyway… Also physical records still exist for music as well. Lots of artists can do just fine with living from media sales.
Look I’m not saying “pirate everything and never pay the artists” - I’m saying “never pay the predatory tech companies that have inserted themselves between us and artists”
> Books enter the public domain.
...and then they get re-packaged with DRM on Amazon's store, mostly because people uploading public domain books on Amazon have no idea what they're doing.
> Project Gutenberg and others produce DRM-free versions. Many academics and people who wish to share their knowledge also publish works DRM-free, sometimes under permissive (copyleft), licenses.
You can read DRM-free stuff on a Kindle already, so that's not particularly relevant here.
> The fact you see DRM as the norm and non-DRM as “a unicorn” that “doesn’t exist”, is mildly sad.
When every big publisher is doing it, it is the norm. That doesn't mean there doesn't exist any book publisher which doesn't do this, but the vast, vast majority of the books actually sold today contain DRM. We don't have to like that norm, but pretending it isn't one is just denying reality.
This.
While lots public domain books are on Amazon's store, most of those books are not free, both in the sense of "free or charge" and "DRM free". A lot of literature classic are released by a major publishing house with foreword and annotations, which to be fair, are copyrighted works and provide value. And they cost a bit of money. The "real" public domain versions provide by Amazon are barebone. Those versions are often good enough for many people, but you don't need to get them from Amazon in the first place.
In other words, public domain or not does not have much to do with DRM-free or even Amazon.
You'd be surprised. Tor and Solaris both offer DRM free books on Amazon. Also anything self published tends to be DRM free.
I saw the writing on the wall and downloaded my books from Amazon a few months before their announcement. Out of around 1000 books I had 300ish that were DRM free.
Dumb question, but: is there a way to find/filter ones that are? (I can't seem to find anything in the (web) UI that makes it clear which books are downloadable.)
There wasn't when I went through my collection. Reading the announcement from Amazon it looks like the existing DRM free books will not be automatically flagged to be downloadable.
The publisher/author will have to go through a process to have their books be downloadable again.
All books published by Tor are DRM-free.
And Baen. Baen has a storefront of their own online at https://www.baen.com/.
...in the US. I tried to buy an ebook of the Stormlight Archive from Australia and was sad to discover that DRM-free versions were not available.
I think you missed the joke. Tor is an anonymous relay service, often used for pirating copies.
I assume GP was referring to Tor Books, (which name confused me immensely at first since I've been using the Tor project for many years) but that would have been an absolutely hilarious joke and I think you interpreting it as a joke is totally reasonable given how prominent the onion router project is.
Tor Books is a publisher. They run https://www.tor.com/.
Too little too late, already ditched the whole ecosystem after so many years and devices.
Same. I'm done.
Yep, never again. I tried to take a pragmatic position with the DRM, and it is just not possible. I buy the crap out of DRM free stuff, but if it's not DRM free, it's not for me
Just get a kobo instead. The price difference between with ads and a new kobo is minimal. Not worth the Amazon headache with a locked down device.
I have Kobo, but their decision to enable secure boot in newer models, and consequently pushing out FOSS choices as operating systems makes me think I won't get another Kobo. Yes the Nickel menu works still with secure boot enabled devices. I like to think that devices I buy might have different use-case in future, and secure-boot enabled devices seriously harm that.
The eBooks in Kobo's store are also locked down with DRM.
Kobo is extremely region limited.
It's fine if it fits your need, but will be far from a good alternative in most regions.
Thing is Kindle hardware is significantly better and cheaper. If you don't mind tinkering get a kindle and jailbreak it to remove ads and add koreader.
> Kindle hardware is significantly better and cheaper. If you don't mind tinkering get a kindle and jailbreak it to remove ads and add koreader.
Because Amazon were increasingly locking-down their systems - and also because they are all-round shits - I decided to abandon the ecosystem having been a customer since the days they only sold books.
I have owned two Paperwhites, two Oasis devices, and a Kindle Scribe. I sold all of them last year and bought a Kobo Libra Colour.
I get WAY more joy from reading on the Kobo. I love buying books from the Kobo store (yes I know they also have DRM) - and I'm buying and reading WAY more on the Kobo than I was at the end of my time with Amazon.
Every time I buy yet another book on the Kobo Store I feel the thrill of sticking it to the horrible, anti-user shits at Amazon.
There are two single line comments recommending kobo over kindle in this thread. How do I know this is a genuine recommendation and not astroturfing?
I'll chime in - the Kindle Paperwhite I believe is the superior machine from a physical feeling and aesthetic perspective. The problem (for me) is who makes it. Amazon keeps locking it down so it's harder and harder to load your own DRM free books onto it, in addition to tracking everything you do on it (like sending all your reading statistics whenever you get online).
I have a Kobo Clara BW. It's still a great machine, but the Kindle is definitely superior for feel and visuals, but I use the Kobo 95% of the time. They are way more open with the software and I have mine in "sideload" mode (an official setting), which really just means that it doesn't make me log into anything and it doesn't even attempt to connect to the internet. Also, I can purchase a DRM free ebook on the train, plug a USB cable into my phone and my Kobo, and then load it on like that. Now I own my digital book, have supported the author with a larger margin, and get to read it on my more private machine.
Definitely not a no-brainer for everyone, but I'm happy with my Kobo.
I have both. The Kindle is a better device overall, but the I like Kobo's software better.
What I found disappointing was when I had to swap out the screen on the Kobo and found that it was glued and that the battery was soldered. I managed to do fix it, but I don't like things that are unnecessarily hard to fix.
How do you know anything? You can never know for sure if you can trust another person, and this is why people can get schizophrenia.
Asking people to verify that they are honest will never help you. Dishonest people will of course lie to you and say they are honest. While honest people will be insulted by your question and not want to engage with you.
What you can do is verify. Try a Kobo, try a Kindle. Make up your own mind.
Indeed, and it doesn't take a whole lot of effort to do an internet search to get more opinions. If you think everyone is astroTurfing and shilling, then you have to fall back to the good old-fashioned scientific method of trying things out yourself.
It would be great too to bring that information back to HN and share it with us.
I wonder if this is in response to Bookshop.org's DRM free e-book shop. I buy a lot of e-books and have completely switched over because of that feature.
I’m waiting for Bookshop.org to offer an integration with any hardware reader for most of their books. When they do, I’ll switch to whatever that reader is.
Bookshop.org has a DRM free section? Where do I find such a thing?
Cool, but quite a small subset are DRM-free. OTOH. its seems like all the audiobooks on libro.fm are DRM-free?
https://support.libro.fm/support/solutions/articles/48000695...
Haha, what a headline.
The internet "allows" ePub and PDF downloads for ALL books. Adjust yourselves accordingly.
Amazon deserves a lot of criticism in the general sense, but this can only be seen as a positive move. Most importantly, if they set an industry standard, others might follow.
Fundamentally, I prefer a physical book to a digital one. But, the primary reason I'd never even entertain a digital book is the lack of ownership. Ownership is incredibly important, and we need to celebrate victories when they happen.
I agree this is a positive step, but this is like notch 1 on a scale of 0 to 100, 0 being maximum abuse of your customer. I think it's downright evil not to allow this for DRM free books, which they have been doing for many years now. It is positive that they reduced the level of evil by a little bit, and I'll give them credit for that, but this movement is so minor in the scope of things that it does not sway me whatsoever to go back to buying from their Kindle store
Not every person likes sailing under the Jolly Roger, matey.
Too much convenience, selection, and the prices are all too low!
So Gutenberg and the internet archive could monetise click through links or an affiliate program? No disrespect intended, if this meant we could fund them with Amazon pitching in some vig I'd think about it. Mind you, they'd probably make more with direct donation per person, but Amazon could drive many multiples more via the store.
First think I do and have ever done after having had to buy a book from Amazon: Pull it into Calibre and remove DRM.
These days I don’t buy from them but the same with Kobo which is a better company to begin with.
For all three DRM-free titles?
Not even, it's opt-in.
I hope they will allow me to download e-books that I uploaded through their upload site.
I do backups but better be safe than sorry.
Can anyone find even one DRM-free ebook on Amazon Kindle?
I've noticed a lot in the SFF genre, including my current fiction read: Joe Abercrombie's latest release The Devils[1].
You'll see something like the following on the bottom of book details:
> At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D3CB76TV
As the author of five books (and my most recent one entirely self-published), I haven't yet worked out how I feel about this or how to respond. My current compromise is to charge more on the DRM-free LeanPub.
Genuine questions here, not rhetorical or trying to imply anything with them.
Why charge more on a DRM free site? Do you think people buying from there are doing so that they can share the book illegally?
If someone wants to share the book illegally, I would imagine they'll just download it from one of the pirate mirrors out there and not bother paying you at all. My guess is you're probably just reducing the number of people willing to pay the price. Classic supply and demand curve against price.
Out of curiosity, what’s the ratio between sales on Amazon and the DRM-free option?
Amazon wins by miles, almost to the point of incomparability. For all my issues with Amazon, that’s fine by me: compared to all other platforms, that’s where the reviews and other forms of social proof are.
Do yourself a favor and go get a Kobo reader, install KO Reader on it and never look back.
I like to be able to price shop, but I do want to support the authors. So I use Kobo & Kindle, then buy it wherever it's cheapest usually.
Then I use epubor ultimate to convert to epub and read it on my generic e-ink reader. Some folks object to the licensing or whatever with epubor (unattributed GPL?) but it works, it's easy, and when Amazon tightens up the DRM they always find a way around it eventually.
Dang, it's unfortunate they don't support Linux
At least better than completely disallowing it I guess.
What's amazon's angle on this? Because it's not believable that they wouldn't have an angle.
So the real question is - how is amazon going to enshitify drm-free books? Are they trying to wipe out gutenburg, standard-ebooks, etc?
Are they trying to be the youtube of drm-free? The place where everyone goes, and that becomes crap due updating Ts&Cs - inserting ads or charges?
I believe every book I buy I’m allowed to backup in any format I want. Come and get me
All ePub and PDF downloads are here: https://open-slum.org/
So much for your master’s mercy
time to pick up my e-book reader again..
They're still going to take note of what you're reading and possibly brand you as a non-ultra-capitalist disruptor. Amazon can get fucked.
I still buy physical media from them once a year (November) when availabilty and rest of the world can't compete price-wise. Yes I recognise the hypocrisy of said actions and minimise it as much as possible. Non-US based. Many physical media producers (e.g. Disney) no longer produce stuff for our 'region'.
The current experience of using a Kobo Libre Color, Koreader, any webdav mounted in koreader and pirating everything on annas archive et. al. cannot be beat by any commercial offering. Unsuprisingly my copy of 1984 has never been deleted from my NAS
You are essentially a distributed Fahrenheit 451 node.
> pirating everything on annas archive et. al. cannot be beat by any commercial offering
While I understand people pirating movies - there are hundreds of movies I'd happily pay to watch, but which are literally unavailable to me because of some arbitrary 'regional' restriction imposed by the distributors. But I can't think of a single book that isn't available in most parts of the world - certainly they're available wherever a Kobo is for sale.
So how are new books going to be published in the future, if people like you don't pay writers for their work? Would you like your work to be pirated, so you wouldn't be able to even buy another Kobo?
I feel like if the platform is unwilling to give you access to books you posted for, you should be able to download them from arrr without authors or publishers being affected financially - buy first pirate later.
People have been writing for much longer than writing has been a profession. And their work has been published by the means of the day, which pre-Gutenberg in the West meant hand-copying.
It's not immoral in any way to make a living off of your own creations, but - artists gonna art.
>Would you like your work to be pirated,
Imagine being so good at writing, that people out there are trying to get a copy of it that they can upload to The Pirate Bay. Hell yeh, I'd love that... seems like reaching the big leagues.
Nobody with sane mind cares. You may buy Kindle, but then you jailbreak it right away. You can "buy" Kindle e-books, but then you exfiltrate these right away. When you stand your ground, what can Amazon allow you or not allow?
Sure, if you don't mind playing a stupid cat and mouse game with one of the largest corporations on the planet, go for it. I did it for a bit and got real tired of the drag
Spoken like a techie, with the attitude NYers have to the "flyover states".
Only tech-savvy people who are morally OK with pirating and jailbreaking are "sane"?
> Spoken like a techie, with the attitude NYers have to the "flyover states".
Like you mean, when people from what you call "flyover states" demonized cities so much, that they are ok sending armies into them?
Lets be real, the overwhelming majority if derision and toxicity flows the other way.