« Cartoons | Home | Recent Comments | Categories | Cleaning Jobs »
DRM be damned: How to protect your Amazon e-books from being deleted
[Quote]:
If you buy e-books from Amazon and want to engage in a bit of digital civil disobedience—by stripping the files’ DRM and making sure that Amazon can’t deny you access—we’re about to show you how. Yes, many parts of the Internet have known about this technique for some time now, but we feel that it bears mentioning again here.Over the past week, the tech world has been abuzz with news that—surprise, surprise—Amazon can remotely wipe any Kindle, at any time, for effectively any reason. (The company did it before, ironically, with George Orwell’s 1984, back in 2009.)
Curiously enough, step one doesn’t include “don’t buy from them in the first place!”
|
That’d be more “step -1″. The article addresses people who already have a Kindle, have already invested in books for it, and are spooked by the episode with the Norwegian woman. (Who did not have her kindle wiped remotely, though the case was equally bad.) So “put it in a drawer and write it off along with your books” is going to rank far below dealing with the situation some other way.
I do wish consumer organizations would make more noise about the inherent problems with centrally controlled DRM-based ecosystems.
Nitpick: it turns out, that while Amazon is capable of wiping books from Kindles, that’s not what happened in this case (even if that is how it was initially reported).
That does not subtract from the other concerns, nor the way Amazon manages accounts, nor the way they handled this particular case, nor the worry of how they’ll manage accounts in the future. But it is important to be accurate.