Comment by MerlinDE

10 hours ago

This move has nothing to do with usability or device capabilities or software support. The only reason for turning them off is to remove a hole in their DRM. These old devices allowed you to remove the copy protection from their books (hardly anyone else uses DRM these days anymore). Removing the old devices makes freeing your books from DRM just much harder.

12 comments

MerlinDE

Reply
ay  9 hours ago

With almost 600 books in my kindle collection over a period of about 15 years, I would like to think I was a relatively active customer. When they announced “your kindle books are just a license to read”, which happened about the time they announced the deprecation of the old format, I went and converted the entirety of my library to Calibre with multiple open formats.

That was in December, I have not bought a single book on Amazon since then, and the kindle app is not installed on my new phone. Just in case anyone from the relevant AMZN department is reading this.

sails  6 hours ago

Yes.

I often laugh (cry) at the Kindle Product Manager team who ship nothing but DRM updates.

How about a dictionary modal where the font is the same size as the page text..? Hard to imagine what they do all day, given they do seem to force updates but nothing seems to improve

cvcount  10 hours ago

> hardly anyone else uses DRM these days anymore

I thought that all the major ebook stores had DRM on most purchases, and it was just a few indie publishers choosing to be DRM-free. Has that changed?

  • generic92034  8 hours ago

    There is a difference between hard and soft DRM. Soft DRM can be only some watermark, not keeping you from creating copies for your own devices. Hard DRM aims to prevent any copying.

    In my experience soft DRM is very common, hard DRM not so much.

  • blcknight  8 hours ago

    It hasn't changed, and I don't know why people are saying that most books don't have DRM. It is only a small minority.

    Tor books is the largest publisher without it (owned by Macmillan). Otherwise everything is truly hard DRM either ACSM with epub or Kindle's. They are both more or less easily defeated though.