Amazon removing ability to back up your Kindle Library

[olivermoss]

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[barbaratp]

Recomendo você ler a entrada AMAZON ENDING DOWNLOAD & TRANSFER BY USB da comunidade ebooks acerca desse assunto. Tem links para um fórum de debate.

[brumeier]

Thank you for sharing that!

[mistressofmuses]

I hate this, and I hate that I don't have a stand-alone kindle, so it won't even give me the option to save or transfer the files now. ("You do not have a device to support this feature" or something to that effect.) I have the app on my phone, and that's what I've used to read my kindle books. I was hoping to at least back up my current files, but it doesn't seem there will be a way for me to do that.

[olivermoss]

Fuck

[mistressofmuses]

And I was just figuring out how to really manage reading ebooks, too!

(And yes, I know this doesn't automatically delete my library or anything, but I have a strong moral objection to purchasing something that I have zero control over. I was cautiously branching out toward purchasing more ebooks, as opposed to just sticking with freebies, and now I definitely feel less inclined to continue doing so.)

[olivermoss]

Oh yeah, lots of reasons to have objections with this, especially right now. (Also would give my right kidney to have been in the habit of backing things up when I bought them to have... versions to compare)

I've been buying some book one way, some another for a while, for a variety of reasons. A lot of what I read doesn't get physical releases, or at least they didn't used to. Not sure what I am going to do, especially since reading on my iPad is easiest on my eyes by a good bit.

I would really like my library to be in my pocket, easily portable, just in case, but shit sucks

[mistressofmuses]

Yeah, it'd be... interesting... to know if there have been changes to any particular things. I doubt that most of what I have is likely to have anything happen, unless there's a truly large-scale purge of certain types of content, but...

I'd just started really appreciating the portability of ebooks. I have long been conceptually in favor of them - my physical books take up SO MUCH space as it is, and there are a lot of things that I don't feel the need to buy in physical form - but struggled to remember to read them. Now I've gotten better at that, but feel like I need to figure out something else. A lot of authors release kindle only, too. :/

Ugh. Shit does suck.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, I wish I had archived all my stuff better to have original editions of ebooks for reasons... but I didn't. I do a lot, but that was just one area where I never got into it.

Ebook-only and kindle-only is a whole thing, especially with queer fiction. There is maybe a ebook reader format war coming up which is going to be... hopefully good in terms of Amazon losing market share but also complications I don't need

[mistressofmuses]

Things being ebook only I get is to be expected from a lot of self-pub stuff, but it does still suck sometimes. The stuff that's locked in as kindle-only sucks. I don't particularly *want* to be tied to kindle stuff, even outside of the whole "your files are not your own" thing, but there's so much stuff that's only there. And I know that reading it only exacerbates the problem and lets kindle corner more and more of that market.
I do wonder if there will be a surge in "rival" formats. Because it would be great for them to not have such a stranglehold on the market, and make it more viable for authors to not lock themselves into kindle exclusivity deals and such.

Yet also exactly that: I don't need more complications in terms of finding and acquiring the things I want to read. I don't want this to just feel like yet more streaming platform/console war stuff: if you want to read *these* authors, you need our proprietary system! If you want *these other books* it's going to be exclusive to some other app's format, etc.
(That already feels like more of a thing than I wish it was.)

[olivermoss]

Format wars are going to lead to juicy exclusivity deals and... ugh, image the whole 'I haven't seen Stranger Things because we've got Hulu right now' convos, but it's book series?

I do want everything on one platform, but then that platform is a massive controlling monopoly with super creepy influence.

[mistressofmuses]

Exactly... I feel like there's already a mild case of that with sites that function a bit like webtoon, where a chapter is released at a time, exclusive to their platform. I think that eventually things are free to read, but you can pay to unlock chapters early, or in some cases I think may have to pay to read things at all? A handful of romance writers that I've followed have put works out that way, but that's just so deeply not how I'm interested in reading stuff that I've never even looked at it.

Imagining that become more of a norm - having to subscribe to a given platform to read an author's work, imagining some rights-hell that would be bound to crop up if platforms went under or pulled a work for some reason, attempts at virality for a series via tiktok or such, trying to get people to pay for a given exclusive platform...

It sucks, because that's exactly it. I DO want everything accessible in one place... but something that has a monopoly like that ALWAYS pivots to evil. (The dream would be something that's not a monopoly, but where everything was completely interoperable, I suppose... but platforms hate that shit and want their proprietary formats.)

[olivermoss]

Amazon's been pushing Kindle Unlimited pretty hard for ages. They want that subscription lock in and the corresponding control over content, at multiple levels, both what books are out there and also being able to censor books. They've pretty much got that lock in for audiobooks, it's not a sub service but they've got people on that credit system, including me.

[mistressofmuses]

Oh yes. They push the KU stuff HARD. That exclusivity over certain titles, those subscription dollars (that pay out less and less to the actual authors, of course), that super tight control over the content...

I've avoided Audible so far (but only because I have so little chance to listen to anything, and I've got so many podcasts I'd want to get through before wading into audiobooks.) But I have been *tempted,* and I know there's basically zero alternative.