Amazon will allow ePub and PDF downloads for DRM-free eBooks

[icqFDR]

I’d advise anyone buying e-books on Amazon to think it through carefully. My account was banned recently because, years ago, I ordered two paper books that Amazon said would be split into two shipments. Both books arrived without any issues, but later Amazon refunded me for one of them, claiming that one package never arrived. This happened 4–5 years ago.

Apparently, during a recent review, they decided this counted as fraud and banned my account. As a result, I can no longer log in and lost access to all my Kindle e-books. They also remotely wiped my Kindle, so my entire library is gone. I appealed the decision, but I’ve been waiting for over six months with no resolution.

[egeozcan]

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.

[cassianoleal]

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!

[al_borland]

Banning long-time customers in otherwise good-standing for a mistake they made years ago, which would already be settled financially and such a minor cost is wild.

I can imagine something like this has happened to almost everyone.

So much for being the world’s most customer-centric company. That mission is dead.

[nippoo]

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!)

[b8]

I only got unbanned when I got hired at Amazon and emailed the head of the fraud team lol. I had the same issues you had with being stonewalled and ghosted while banned. Anyways, just downloaded them off of Anna's Archive or join private trackers. There's also still methods to de-drm the Kindle books, but many people will do it for u via requests on private trackers.

[mathieuh]

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.

[nsagent]

They screwed me in a different way. I simply didn't log into Amazon for a couple years as I've tried to minimize my use of Amazon. When I went to log in, they locked my account without any way to unlock it. Talking with support multiple times did nothing. Now all my digital purchases are gone.

Edit: If anyone knows a way to get them to unlock the account, I'd appreciate it. They won't issue a password reset or anything similar, which seems ridiculous considering they never claimed fraud. Simply that it had been too long since I logged in.

[ekjhgkejhgk]

What is that you say? Stallman was right again?

https://stallman.org/amazon.html

[huijzer]

I'm also particularly skeptical of Amazon because our Kindle Direct Publishing account was banned also for no reason. They said something about me having had a previous account before, but I'm not sure that was true and I think it was a very extreme measure. We were actually selling books at the time until we got banned. They obviously also "forgot" to pay out the most recent month.

[prism56]

I buy all my ebooks. I search DRM free, if there is DRM only I'll buy it the cheapest I can then download it from Annas Archive. I like to support authors but I need to own what I buy.

[wrxd]

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

[josephcsible]

> They also remotely wiped my Kindle

I wish the CFAA were used to go after people like whoever at Amazon was responsible for that, instead of people like Aaron Swartz.

[jgbuddy]

I work at Amazon and can escalate this if you're interested. Let me know the order ID and I'll see what I can do.

[Insanity]

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.

[ctrlmeta]

> 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?

[mapt]

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.

[alex1138]

Yeah, welcome to tech. Don't get me wrong, I sympathize completely with you. It's an outrage. But it's incredible that Every. Single. One. of these companies has terrible automation with no ability to file a ticket for a human to look at it

Facebook is marginally worse than the others because Facebook left you with no way to actually contact the friends you accrued https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433

[asdff]

Seems this is a possibility with any service. Even stuff like music streaming. I tried to listen to loveless on spotify the other day and apparently it has been removed from the service. It is time to start making rips of physical media I own or rent from the library again. Back to the high seas again too. We traded control for convenience and that comes back to bite us.

[embedding-shape]

Hah, they actually did a slight rollback! When I first heard about them stopping the downloads, I immediately downloaded all the books I purchased from Amazon and went from buying ~1 book per week to 0. Seems a lot of us doing so had some sort of effect.

Unfortunately, it seems like this will be chosen by the publisher, so of course probably most of the books won't be downloadable at all, and Amazon can now point their finger at the publisher instead of taking the blame themselves. Publishers was probably always the reason behind the move, but at least now Amazon have someone else to blame, which I guess is great for them.

[cwillu]

But only if the author/publisher explicitly go in and permit it.

This isn't announcing that pdf's and epub's are now available for everything that was drm-free, this is announcing that they will _permit_ pdf's and epub's to be available.

[codazoda]

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.

[_heimdall]

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

[BloondAndDoom]

Yes it reads that way, and I guess that also means all previous purchases will be behind DRM.

1. Sell digital things, that costs as same as physical copy

2. Make it so that customer doesn't even own them

3. Profit (No question marks in between)

What a mess. I've mostly stopped Kindle/ebooks but I still have audible which seems like suffering from the same problem.

[m463]

> But only if the author/publisher explicitly go in and permit it.

actually, many kindle books I have from years ago mention they have no drm at the request of the publisher.

...yet were distributed in DRM .azw format

[wrxd]

This was unexpected. They lost me as a customer when they stopped allowing me to download books I bought and I'm in the Kobo (+ BookLore) side now and I am not coming back.

I wonder how many books are actually DRM-free and are going to be affected by this change. I suspect relatively few, but I would be happy to be wrong

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

How many books are actually available DRM-free? This reads a bit like "Amazon will provide free land, construct a paddock and provide feed for life if you order a unicorn, except unicorns don't exist".

[PaulRobinson]

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.

[kmeisthax]

All of Cory Doctorow's books are DRM-free. Actually, he insisted on it as a contractual rider with his publisher, so he isn't available on any platform that doesn't have a DRM-free option. I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon re-allowing downloads for DRM-free is specifically because Doctorow's publisher is angry at them.

In practice, the biggest store that doesn't have a DRM-free option is Audible... which has a near-monopoly on audiobooks. So Cory Doctorow has to do crowdfunding campaigns for all his audiobooks. Of course, that doesn't stop his books from getting illegally reposted to Audible anyway, and Amazon doesn't care about enforcing rights they can't have. Which led to him actually publishing this gem on Audible: https://www.amazon.com/Why-None-Books-Available-Audible/dp/B...

[buu709]

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.

[amluto]

All books published by Tor are DRM-free.

[plorg]

It's not exactly nothing, but it's a pretty small change . Some publishers sell DRM-free on other platforms, and to be honest I was under the impression Amazon used to allow this in the past as well.

Of course if they really believed in the concept they would publish their own works DRM-free, but that would conflict with the business model of the publishing arm.

[reassess_blind]

Pirated books.

[TheSilva]

Too little too late, already ditched the whole ecosystem after so many years and devices.

[strawhatdev]

I wonder if this is in response to Bookshop.org's DRM free e-book shop. I buy a lot of e-books and have completely switched over because of that feature.

[syntaxing]

Just get a kobo instead. The price difference between with ads and a new kobo is minimal. Not worth the Amazon headache with a locked down device.

[ggm]

So Gutenberg and the internet archive could monetise click through links or an affiliate program? No disrespect intended, if this meant we could fund them with Amazon pitching in some vig I'd think about it. Mind you, they'd probably make more with direct donation per person, but Amazon could drive many multiples more via the store.

[Joel_LeBlanc]

It's an interesting move by Amazon, and evaluating DRM effectiveness is crucial, especially if you're considering investing in digital assets that use it. In my experience, the best approach is to analyze user feedback and sales performance post-implementation. I've found that tools like the Digital Real Estate Analyzer (DREA) can really help streamline the due diligence process, especially for assessing the potential stability of a digital asset. It’s all about understanding how these changes impact both the market and user experience.

[asplake]

As the author of five books (and my most recent one entirely self-published), I haven't yet worked out how I feel about this or how to respond. My current compromise is to charge more on the DRM-free LeanPub.

[jrm4]

Haha, what a headline.

The internet "allows" ePub and PDF downloads for ALL books. Adjust yourselves accordingly.

[monomial]

Do yourself a favor and go get a Kobo reader, install KO Reader on it and never look back.

[drnick1]

I'll never use Amazon for anything that isn't physically delivered to my door. They can keep their Fire tablets, TVs, and other spyware.

[nottorp]

For all three DRM-free titles?

[caseysoftware]

I've "collected" 500+ Kindle titles over the years and stopped buying from them completely when they blocked downloads earlier this year. When they enable these downloads, I'm going to export the ones I didn't get last time and continue NOT buying from them.

Fool me once..

[IlikeKitties]

The current experience of using a Kobo Libre Color, Koreader, any webdav mounted in koreader and pirating everything on annas archive et. al. cannot be beat by any commercial offering. Unsuprisingly my copy of 1984 has never been deleted from my NAS

[1970-01-01]

This is all very interesting news. From a sales standpoint, they're nearly admitting they cannot manage DRM properly and at Amazon scale. From a copyright standpoint, antipiracy will be extremely hard to enforce. The only middle ground is targeting honest buyers, and we all know how well that works. We should not expect this to be a permanent change. Perhaps it will be more of a very short, DRM-free golden age until another Amazon executive comes down and ends this experiment.

[Bridged7756]

I have a kindle. And it's really good, I've never read as much. Ive never bought a single thing from its store, only sideloaded though. And seeing the recent events im more worried about Amazon pulling the plug on side loading stuff. Turns out it's not that complicated to jailbreak your kindle though, so that's what I'm doing this weekend.

[Flimm]

Can anyone find even one DRM-free ebook on Amazon Kindle?