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Amazon: Older Kindles can no longer download e-books (www.heise.de)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 7 points 7 months ago (11 children)

My local library allows borrowing ebooks. It's incredibly useful. I own two kindles and haven't spent a dime at Amazon for ebooks. I do buy physical books now and then from there, but only if I really need it and can't find elsewhere.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (10 children)

    How do you return a borrowed ebook..?

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (9 children)

    It expires after two weeks. You can extend, just like borrowing a physical copy. Or return early, in which case it expires upon return.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (8 children)

    I mean, yeah, sure, I guess that's a decent solutions in terms of modern IP shit.

    But like, we all know you're not returning anything and if you wanted, you could also copy it for yourself.

    I just dislike how it feels like when it was actually books, they had actual reasons to everything. There's a queue because there's limited copies. You need to return it and if you're late there's a fee, because it's from other people's time, etc. Nowadays that all feels like larping just to protect large companies IP's essentially. Because digital copies don't actually get returned.

    Like when I was a kid I would've never thought a librarian would say "you're not allowed to read that anymore". Or that I couldn't copy a thing down at home from one of their books. But now as your tokens to ebooks expire, it kinda does feel like that.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    My best friend is a librarian, and they've stopped buying ebook licenses because the terms were awful.

    The publishers only allowed an ebook to be checked out a few times before the library had to purchase a license extension. The argument was that pylhysical books face wear and tear and eventually have to be replaced, so ebooks should have to be replaced too.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    It's true that normal books do experience wear and tear, but looking at what my local library has I'd say that many or most can still least many years before needing to be retired or replaced.

    As we're seeing with Amazon, with ebooks it's really the readers that expire over time

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    I find ebooks from the library to be very useful.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (4 children)

    I'm not saying they're not, or that the librarians are any more capitalist than they were in the 90's. I'm just saying it feels like they are.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    Big Library is not out to get you. They need to not piss off Big Publisher.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    No no, Big Library just isn't Big enough to stick it to Big IP, so that's why it seems like it even though I know librarians are still much the same.

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