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This year I decided to no longer spend any money with Amazon. Over the years I’ve spent quite a bit at Amazon on mostly e-books, and some paper books.
I’m exploring other options of buying and acquiring ebooks. Today I decided to divert some of the money I would otherwise have spent at Amazon as donations to Standard Ebooks.

Standard Ebooks is a US based ‘low profit‘ organisation that creates ebooks from books that are (considered to be) in the public domain in the USA, and releases those ebooks into the public domain themselves.
It ensures works are available as ebook, also when there’s no commercial entity willing to market an ebook version.

Creativity builds on creativity, creators mutually influence each other across borders and across time. The public domain is a key societal boon. In my voluntary work for the Open Nederland association, the focus is on facilitating the use of Creative Commons licenses for makers in the Netherlands. Creative Commons allows you to set generic permissions for various types of use, thus allowing creative works to flow more easily, both to the public and to other makers.

Making public domain ebooks from public domain books is a similar act. It ensures that human creativity available in the public domain keeps growing, despite various publishing houses actively campaigning against it (or even aiming to limit library access to works).

Much better to spend money there than at Amazon.
I’m diverting about 25% of my previous Amazon spending to Standard Ebooks.

There are various kinds of RSS feeds that I can access as a patron, as well as an OPDS feed for their entire collection. Such an OPDS feed, like with podcasts, allows one to distribute books and book collections as feed payload. My Calibre library tool (as server) and various e-readers (as client) can work with such feeds.

There is one caveat: whether something is in or out of copyright, depends on your location as you download a work. Works can be in the public domain in e.g. the US, where Standard Ebooks is located, but still in copyright elsewhere and vice versa. Your location determines if you are breaching copyright when downloading a work.

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Technology, working in technology, is inherently impacting society, and must concern itself with the democratisation of access and use, and the flow of information. My focus has always been the agency technology can provide, specifically to those who don’t have such agency without it. How it can strengthen community and autonomy. Unintended consequences and externalised effects of creating and using technology do always exist and impact different groups too, and need to be considered in any technology choice. My work in government data is about information and power asymmetries, my work in digital ethics more generally seeks to incorporate a wide range of other values and considerations, my work in tech regulation and standards similarly is to enable agency and confirm and embed values. Ethics is not about saying no to things, it’s about shaping our actions towards each other. Seeing each other as part of every question, not othering others to cut them out of deliberations. Democracy is at its core.
My day to day work in my company is carried by it and my voluntary board work reflects it as well.

My work in technology has always been what I’ve come to call constructive activism. It’s an often less visible way to enable change though than through e.g. overtly campaigning for such change. You can work in relative quiet. There are times however when it becomes needed to more visibly get involved, to be seen to get involved. I increasingly feel we’ve been sliding into such a situation in the past years here in the West.

Defend Democracy is a young civil society organisation, working in Brussels, to strengthen democracy, and defend it against eroding forces from here, elsewhere and from technology. Like my other voluntary board memberships enabling agency is key here. At the Open State Foundation it’s about citizen’s agency based on increased government transparency and better information. At the Open Nederland association of Dutch makers in support of Creative Commons licensing, it’s about makers’ autonomy in what happens to what they make and how it can contribute to society. At the ActivityClub foundation it’s enabling public discourse through a non-toxic common infrastructure (mastodon.nl a.o.). At Defend Democracy it’s about what those other three organisations have in common. Strengthening and defending democracy.

I am joining the board of Defend Democracy as its treasurer.

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In several jurisdictions (certainly the USA and Australia, Germany too) Amazon Kindle customers are told that by February 25th the ability to download books to your computer (for later transfer to your device over USB) will be disabled. I haven’t seen it in my Dutch Amazon store yet. That makes me wonder if it is a phased roll-out. This won’t prevent you from reading your e-books in any way, but will prevent you from storing them in useful formats outside of the Amazon silo (so that Amazon no longer can remove them at will).

I realise my steps to move all my Amazon bought e-books to an environment I control have been timely (yet, also late by several years one might say).

Within the next 10 days downloading Kindle book files and using Epubor to move them into your Calibre library should likely be a priority if you care about long term autonomy over your e-readings. Enshittification avoidance is a civic duty I’d say.

Where enshittification happens it must be made to hurt the companies choosing it. Like by no longer sending money their way. So this step just makes avoiding Amazon purchases easier to keep up for me.

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I’ve been using Flickr.com to externally share photos since March 2005 (just before the Yahoo acquisition), and I have some 40.000 photos there from the past two decades.
Pixelfed a federated photo sharing tool is meant as a Instagram alternative. I created a test account on Pixelfed.social in December 2018 (profile number 4000) but never used it for anything.

More recently Pixelfed has enjoyed wider attention and has been a top download on mobile phones.

I wonder, would Pixelfed be suitable as a Flickr replacement? Does anyone treat is as such yet?

A quick exploration of the settings seems to indicate I can’t, like in Flickr, share images with specific circles of contacts (e.g. designated family for pictures that have our daughter in it), or choose to not share them at all other than with myself. Uploads are limited to 20 images at a time, I saw, although albums (on Pixelfed connections) are possible. There also doesn’t (yet?) seem to be a way to explore an image exif or other meta-data, like location.

I’m tempted to self-host a personal instance to experiment. Anyone with experience in that?

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I’m trying to move away from buying Amazon e-books. I read quite a bit, 60-100 titles per year. Most of those in the past years have been e-books from Amazon (some 1000 titles in my Amazon collection). Ideally I want my spending at Amazon to end, because Amazon.

The question is, what are alternatives?
And how much friction will changing things introduce in both acquiring and reading books?

Like in any silo, inside it things are frictionless, and there is a hurdle to leaving. The hurdle here is to a large extend the sum of Amazon’s practices towards publishers plus how book publishing and selling are organised globally and the resulting lack of viable alternatives.

There is very little generic e-book publishing (meaning you’d own the title outright). Amazon ties it to Kindle, the two major book selling sites in the Netherlands each tie it to a different DRM-infested channel (Kobo/Rakuten and Adobe respectively). You’re licensing a copy, rather than owning it as they can withdraw access at any time. It also means if they go out of business or leave your local market you’re locked out of your purchases.
For most e-books you are tied to specific apps or devices with their specific stores. There is no meaningful separation between the medium file and the reading device, they are mostly a package deal.

Another Amazon lock-in effect results from price. I check all books with other vendors before buying. They practically never (as in maybe once in a year of reading) beat Amazon’s pricing. For paper books this holds too, as the Netherlands uses a fixed book sales price. This effect is specifically aimed for by Amazon.

Finally, Amazon often is the only source available to me for an e-book, especially when it comes to English language science fiction.

So the preferred conditions are:

  • e-books over paper books
  • no DRM for e-books
  • directly from author or publisher
  • wide ranges of books in multiple languages available
  • not needing several reading devices
  • from an independent bookstore (paper)

Over the years I have bought e-books directly from authors (like Cory Doctorow who wrote the posting about Amazon’s practices I linked to above), and independent publishers (like Verso in the UK, for which I currently have a subscription), both e-books and paper books. I prefer e-books, especially for fiction, as I read fiction every evening in bed. An e-book reader comes with its own light and is easy to hold while lying on my side.

Non-fiction I’m more ok with paper, although I enjoy immediate digital annotation in e-books too.
Not many authors provide direct sales through their site, let alone e-books, and the same is true for publishers.
I do frequent independent book stores regularly/mostly (both online and in physical stores), but that of course is for paper books.

For e-books there’s no DRM free route it seems, so it boils down to picking a different Dutch/European silo next to Amazon. This reduces part of my Amazon lock-in and spending, but leaves wide swathes of English publications unavailable to me if I would move silos entirely.
I can afford to escape Amazon’s price lock in, although it would probably double the cost or threefold of my reading for titles I buy, as I’ve regularly used the steep reductions Amazon uses to under 5USD. The local library is of no use for non-Dutch books, e- nor paper. I did get myself a university library subscription allowing easier access to paper academic books, and electronic journals, both categories outside of what I use Amazon for.

Next to moving sideways into a more local silo for e-books, an additional step I think is weaning myself from the instant gratification of buying an e-book. Coming across an inviting title, and immediately grabbing it on Amazon to add to the pile of books to be read is how it usually goes. Likely better to allow myself time to search the best route to get them. For non-fiction I have notes about books I think are interesting, but haven’t acquired yet. For fiction I until now merely do that for titles that have been announced but haven’t been published yet. Keeping a list may help reduce my Amazon spending.

In summary:

  • Start reading within the Dutch Kobo/Rakuten silo.
  • Keep a list of titles I’d like to acquire and explore at later moment the best way to doing that.

I’ve bought 7 titles this January through Amazon (16 last December). Let’s set myself a challenge of keeping that number from rising!