While the Kindle desktop app isn’t designed to be portable, it does have one distinct advantage over Kindle mobile apps-size. You can also use a built-in text-to-speech mode to create auto-generated audiobooks you can listen to while you work, as well as annotate your books directly-perfect for students or academics. (and as example above, can mean the seller has no right to let you redownload – because that is still “distribution”.)įor now, for the works that I had a valid, but no longer readable copy of, Calibre was able to re-convert them – but you can’t expect even as dedicated to openness as the authors of Calibre to support old, versions of file formats forever.It has many of the features you’d expect to see from an eBook reader, including many seen on Kindle devices, offering the ability to change font and font sizes, alter page widths for better reading, as well as switch to an accessible viewing color mode. Depending on the contracts, that doesn’t just mean physical copies are no longer being produced – it can mean you can’t buy it new anymore – physical copies not sold are required to be returned to publisher, and destroyed, and e-books are no longer sold. *And* books are taken out of “print” by the publisher. This happens on Amazon too – and I believe not just from their side – my wife has published books on Amazon, and as the author, I’m sure I remember you can just remove them. I could have re-bought some of them from the new publisher that acquired the rights, but they didn’t re-publish all of the older ones. Luckily, I was able to either re-download many from Baen, but in process I did find that some of my library, although visible, was not re-downloadable – because Baen no longer has a relationship / publishing rights with some authors who published with them in the past. Many of the oldest would not open in my preferred e-reader, even though they had in the past – updates over the last 20+ years had rendered the version of the format my saved books were in incompatible with the modern versions. before android or ios) – I recently decided to reread a series from a prolific author I enjoy (of way over 30 books), published by Baen – without DRM – some in the “PRC” format, some in mobi. I have been buying e-books since the days of windows CE running on my IPAQ and Windows Phone (ya know. It’s not even DRM, it’s the file format, and publisher contracts. What other changes will they impose in the future? When you buy an ebook you think it’s going to last forever because it can’t rot away like a paper book, but ebooks are subject to an entirely different set of rules, most of which benefit big businesses over consumers.įiled Under: Amazon Kindle, eBooks Tagged With: kindle pc That’s already totally normal and accepted practice. Without warning Amazon or any other ebook company can suddenly require an update before letting users downloading purchased ebooks. If you buy a paper book you’ll have no problem reading it decades from now, provided it’s kept in good condition, but with ebooks and digital content in general no one really knows how accessible they’re going to be in the future when everything requires new updates and new hardware and new apps. Just because you can download your purchased ebooks now doesn’t guarantee you’ll be able to download them in ten or twenty years. Twenty years from now, how will ebooks be treated in both respects? With digital media, things are constantly changing. The reason the Kindle for PC and Mac applications have to be updated is because they’ve made it so newer ebooks can only be downloaded in Amazon’s KFX format instead of Amazon’s older Kindle formats.Ĭhanging formats and enhancing DRM schemes is going to be the norm moving forward in the ebook world. Ultimately, it’s not a good sign for ebook buyers and some view it as just another way for Amazon to impose control over content purchased from them. When do the forced updates end? What if Amazon starts requiring mandatory software updates for Kindle ereaders to be able to download newer ebooks?
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