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.

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.

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!

> 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?

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.

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.

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

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!)

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 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?

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.

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.

That seems reasonable enough to me though. It should be the publisher's choice what formats of the book they are willing to sell.

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.

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.

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.

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.

All books published by Tor are DRM-free.

Same. I'm done.

The eBooks in Kobo's store are also locked down with DRM.

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.

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?

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...

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.

Not every person likes sailing under the Jolly Roger, matey.

Not even, it's opt-in.

Out of curiosity, what’s the ratio between sales on Amazon and the DRM-free option?

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

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.

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?

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"?