In Response to Amazon preventing to download books you bought: Some DRM free bookstores and publishers

I do that. Every game I buy on Steam corresponds to a DRMless copy.

I always look on itch.io and GoG first!

Several Steam games are DRM-free and don't even need Steam to be installed to play them: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam

For those games, you can just make a copy of the game directory.

To my knowledge, Sanderson has not spoken out against Kindle*. His kickstarter was mostly to advertise Dragonsteel which is likely going to become his own publishing house at some point.

And while... fuck amazon, Kindle is a ridiculously author friendly platform to publish on and is the only reason we have so many amazing self published authors these days. And while KU is not great per book, it is an excellent way to get people interested in an author and buy their latest books. I strongly encourage actually reading what authors say instead of what users and armchair financial analysts do.

*: I would be incredibly shocked if he did. I think he is definitely becoming more "woke" than "mormon" these days based off his writing and character details but he is still very much a business person

There's an archive of books belonging to a certain anna, which has not failed me yet.

Plus I actually want to support the authors. My issue is with Amazon not the authors, so I want to pay for the books I'm reading so they can keep making more of them. If I could buy the books directly from the authors in some cases I would, and in all cases if it was available from the Kobo store I'd be willing to buy it there. Unfortunately that damn exclusivity clause on Kindle Unlimited means my options for them are Amazon, Amazon, or Amazon (or roll the dice on piracy and not support the author, not to mention even when it is the book in question the quality is often poor).

Not going to tear down my de-drm setup any time soon. But optimistic I might be able to before amazon does it for me.

As far as I'm aware it's now too late for that. Amazon has removed the ability to download ebooks to your computer meaning the only way to access azw files now is if you've found a way to rip them out of the Kindle memory (not possible using normal means, but maybe if you've cracked one open and probed the flash memory directly).

I used to de-drm all my kindle purchases using the manual download links Amazon had, but those have now been removed. That's actually what prompted me to switch to Kobo. I'm not going to "purchase" a book I can't create a backup of.

Sort of? Kindle Unlimited itself is digital only, but the exclusivity clause only applies to ebooks I think, so in theory you could purchase a physical copy elsewhere.

I've pretty much entirely abandoned physical books. It's just far more convenient using an e-reader which has a backlight for reading in the dark, fits thousands of books in a device that's pocket sized, and let's me instantly purchase, download, and start reading the next book in a series as soon as I finish the last one.

I do have physical books still, but I haven't bought new ones in about a decade now.

While that may be true, so far at least they seem to be doing an OK job. Their ebooks are often sold sans-DRM, and in the cases they aren't every one I've gotten has used Adobe Digital Editions which are easy to strip the DRM from (and is a widely supported standard unlike Amazon's proprietary DRM scheme). Additionally their e-reader devices, while not open hardware are repairable with disassembly guides provided by them and they even sell replacement components like screens. I have not verified this claim, but they also claim to use recycled plastic for manufacturing them and recycled cardboard for their packaging (should you care about such things).

For better or worse, if you want a Kindle like experience, you're likely going to be forced into working with a large-ish corporation, but despite the average experience when doing so that doesn't mean that corporation must be an evil anti-consumer hellscape of rapaciousness and greed. So far at least, Rakuten/Kobo seem to be doing OK by their customers.

As long as Kobo supports epub, I think it's fine. They still support my H20 Aura from 2015, I'm not complaining.

I purchase physical books, but I’d be fucking daft to purchase a REVOKABLE LICENSE to a book. That said, I have SO MANY digital books that I obtained for free.

I hereby swear that I see them at the library every week officer.

🏴‍☠️

And ideally your search engine of choice would be z-library or libgen