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

Edit - I don't mind paying for the service. Maybe charge everyone $99 to file a case to avoid everyone piling on, but it helps resolve most egregious ones, and fee could be refunded at the agency's discretion.

In that case, I appealed and was told, for the first time, that the reason for the refunds was that the card I'd been paying with didn't match the stored payment information saved to my account.

Both cards were equally valid and there was no indication anywhere that having saved payment information disqualified you from paying by any other method. As best I can tell, Blizzard just updated their policies one day for no particular reason, then made not complying with the new, secret policies a bannable offense.

Those are big words Amazon certainly doesn't earn.

But if they just close your account in response to asking for a rightful refund.... Literal thievery

I had to call them to get a refund for all the items on all the orders, and even then they had a lot of difficulty figuring out what was happening. Isn't Amazon supposed to be a world leader (maybe after Walmart) in this stuff?

Many people online share similar experiences. Wonder how much money this wide-scale fraud saves them.

Waiting a few months is not smart because not every delivery service is going to store the delivery status details. I've generally found that after 3 months, data starts disappearing from services and refund options can become technically impossible. Like, on eBay, even if a seller wants to refund you after more than 90 days, they can't. Part of this is for accounting too -- at some point you just have to be able to definitively close the books and say here are the sales we made, that number isn't going down in the future because of potential outstanding returns.

If you used to be one of those good consumers who would never even think of breaking DRM, I hope you reconsider it now.

This behavior genuinely earns them more of my business.

> "Amazon.co.uk found that the rate at which refunds were occurring on your account was extraordinary and could not continue."

After looking through my order history, the only refund I could find on this account was the one related to the book I mentioned above. If there was any other activity or misuse, Amazon hasn’t disclosed it to me, which makes it impossible to verify or dispute their conclusion.

They decided that when they launched the Kindle. It's always been that way.

We can understand why they do it this way (they only need the option to exist, and can afford to apply dark patterns to it), but we don't need to excuse Amazon. Especially when they don't give a shit about what we think in the first place.

I've also purchased some books that are available as serials on the web for free.

I would imagine those publishers would be aligned with making them .epub

Even if I wanted to join, Kindle Unlimited is not offered here. I can't even buy the eBook from Amazon.

No where legit is DRM free for eBooks from the big publishers. You don't even have to use the Kobo app since they let you download the ACSM file and use it Adobe Digital Editions which could be used on a computer or ADE supported eReader like Pocketbook (or Kobo!). This has been the case since before they were even called Kobo! And if the publisher offers the book DRM free they just give you a DRM-free ePub instead of the ACSM file.

These days, with the Calibre DeACSM and DeDRM plug-ins you don't even need ADE. It's also trivially easy to remove the DRM from the Kobo desktop app or their readers. It's way easier than Amazon and a way better experience with multiple routes to a DRM free file.

I buy like 60% of my ebooks from Kobo and have never owned a Kobo-brand ereader.

"being made available DRM-free on Amazon" (and I'd narrow that down to "primarily/only on Amazon")

Of course public domain books are DRM free but I'm getting those from Gutenberg, not Amazon. Likewise, the copyleft books I'll most likely download from their own homepages, not Amazon.

I'm aware that DRM free media exists, including for currently copyrighted content that Amazon distributes ;)

...and then they get re-packaged with DRM on Amazon's store, mostly because people uploading public domain books on Amazon have no idea what they're doing.

> 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.

You can read DRM-free stuff on a Kindle already, so that's not particularly relevant here.

> The fact you see DRM as the norm and non-DRM as “a unicorn” that “doesn’t exist”, is mildly sad.

When every big publisher is doing it, it is the norm. That doesn't mean there doesn't exist any book publisher which doesn't do this, but the vast, vast majority of the books actually sold today contain DRM. We don't have to like that norm, but pretending it isn't one is just denying reality.

Now they could actually be distributed as unencrypted .epub

"Download options: EPUB 3 (Adobe DRM)": https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/enshittification-4

Kobo does sell some other books DRM-free, so perhaps this is some sort of error. You can buy it directly from the publisher without Adobe DRM, there it has a watermark instead.

I picked a random book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/hemlock-silver-t-kingfisher/022...

It's DRM Free, and available as an ePub. Other than Kindle, what device does not accept ePub?

Example: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/gardens-of-the-moon

They've been doing this for YEARS before Amazon.

For this feature alone, I'd never go back to Kindle. Sure, I might be able to replicate it with jailbreaking + KOReader. But the Kobo worked this way out of the box.

Because Amazon were increasingly locking-down their systems - and also because they are all-round shits - I decided to abandon the ecosystem having been a customer since the days they only sold books.

I have owned two Paperwhites, two Oasis devices, and a Kindle Scribe. I sold all of them last year and bought a Kobo Libra Colour.

I get WAY more joy from reading on the Kobo. I love buying books from the Kobo store (yes I know they also have DRM) - and I'm buying and reading WAY more on the Kobo than I was at the end of my time with Amazon.

Every time I buy yet another book on the Kobo Store I feel the thrill of sticking it to the horrible, anti-user shits at Amazon.

I have a Kobo Clara BW. It's still a great machine, but the Kindle is definitely superior for feel and visuals, but I use the Kobo 95% of the time. They are way more open with the software and I have mine in "sideload" mode (an official setting), which really just means that it doesn't make me log into anything and it doesn't even attempt to connect to the internet. Also, I can purchase a DRM free ebook on the train, plug a USB cable into my phone and my Kobo, and then load it on like that. Now I own my digital book, have supported the author with a larger margin, and get to read it on my more private machine.

Definitely not a no-brainer for everyone, but I'm happy with my Kobo.

Kobo feels like something I actually own. More so than Kindle or even my iDevices. That's a little unusual these days from a mainstream product and that will make its users enthusiastic.

What I found disappointing was when I had to swap out the screen on the Kobo and found that it was glued and that the battery was soldered. I managed to do fix it, but I don't like things that are unnecessarily hard to fix.

Asking people to verify that they are honest will never help you. Dishonest people will of course lie to you and say they are honest. While honest people will be insulted by your question and not want to engage with you.

What you can do is verify. Try a Kobo, try a Kindle. Make up your own mind.

Genuine question.

What's to "celebrate?" This is like "celebrating" a ketchup company removing the rat hairs.

:)

But I don't read books I haven't legally acquired, whether through a paid bookstore, or temporarily borrowed via Libby, or Standard Ebooks or whatever. I won't yell at other people for doing that, but I don't do it myself. In a nutshell, I follow the same rules as with physical books I own (or temporarily possess).

Imagine being so good at writing, that people out there are trying to get a copy of it that they can upload to The Pirate Bay. Hell yeh, I'd love that... seems like reaching the big leagues.

It's not immoral in any way to make a living off of your own creations, but - artists gonna art.

Like you mean, when people from what you call "flyover states" demonized cities so much, that they are ok sending armies into them?

Lets be real, the overwhelming majority if derision and toxicity flows the other way.