With DRM, you don't buy and own books, you merely rent them for as long as the retailer finds it convenient. Andy Boxall of Digital Trends said: "Amazon in turn uses the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to take your books and privileges away if it finds you've been naughty.
According to Amazon's Kindle Store terms of use , "Kindle content is licensed, not sold". Should you attempt to break the DRM security block or transfer your purchase to another device, Amazon may legally "revoke your access to the Kindle Store and the Kindle Content without refund of any fees.
Under Amazon's rules, this type of action is barred, as the publisher seeks to control what content is read in which territory of the world. In , Amazon was forced to apologise for deleting books written by George Orwell from customers' Kindle devices without their knowledge following a rights issue the books were added to its Kindle store by a third-party who did not have the rights to them.
Company founder Jeff Bezos said the move was "stupid" and "thoughtless". Update: Amazon contacted us on 23 October to say it has posted the following statement on its customer forum: "We would like to clarify our policy on this topic. This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here. More From Forbes. Nov 13, , pm EST. Nov 13, , am EST. Edit Story. Please know that any attempt to open a new account will meet with the same action.
Now just to spoil the story, I'll skip to the happy ending for Nygaard: After taking her story public, Amazon saw the error of their ways and restored her Kindle library. She's still waiting on her replacement Kindle, but in the meantime has access to her library through the Kindle iOS app on her iPad. But Amazon doesn't get off the hook so easily. When we reached out to the company Monday, their PR representative would only send us a canned response they'd dropped into their customer forum: "We would like to clarify our policy on this topic.
Account status should not affect any customer's ability to access their library. Our follow up question — "Why wasn't [Nygaard] told why her account was cancelled? And it probably won't be. Nygaard's little dust-up with Amazon isn't, in and of itself, a big deal. But it serves as a bitter reminder that we don't ever truly own the digital goods and software we buy online.
Instead, we rent them, or hold them in a sort of long-term lease, the terms of which are brokered and policed exclusively by the leaseholder. As Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow put it in a blog post yesterday :.
This fine print will always have a clause that says you are a mere tenant farmer of your books, and not their owner, and your right to carry around your "purchases" which are really conditional licenses, despite misleading buttons labeled with words like "Buy this with one click" — I suppose "Conditionally license this with one click" is deemed too cumbersome for a button can be revoked without notice or explanation or, notably, refund at any time.
The core issue might actually be a simple matter of semantics: when we click a digital button that is labelled "Buy," we expect that we're actually buying something. Under the agency model, the retailer sells the ebook as an agent for the publisher.
The publisher sets the retail price; the retailer pays the publisher a wholesale price based on a discount from the retail price. So this means that young startups, existing companies wanting to get into the ebook business or established giants like Amazon, are all considered agents for the publishing industry.
This is why in the past years most businesses who are serious about selling ebooks, have developed self-publishing units. Self-publishing is a big money maker, because the companies that offer this service have also worked out distribution agreements with other companies specialize in self-publishing, this includes, Smashwords, Findaway Voices, Book Baby and many others. Authors who select these companies can distribute their works to all of the major online ebook retailers, such as Amazon, Apple, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, Google etc.
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