I’ve collated the links to non-Amazon sources for ebooks, that I wrote about in the past weeks, in a separate page.
Category: books
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Bought an ebook through Rakuten (a Japanese company) for the first time just now.
Tiny Experiments by Anne Laure Le Cunff, has just been released.
I bought it at the Rakuten website, as it was the only non-US channel listed at the publisher’s page.
It was a few Euro cheaper there than on Bol.com, the Dutch platform that uses Rakuten’s Kobo ecosystem for their ebook sales. However I could use my Bol.com credentials to pay at Rakuten. The book showed up in my Bol.com library immediately despite not having been bought there. The file carries Adobe DRM. I downloaded it and added it to my Calibre library tool.
TIL: compare prices for ebooks between Rakuten and Bol, as they are interchangeable channels, and purchases end up in the same place.
I should probably keep a page here in this site listing the purchase options other than Amazon.
In mijn speurtocht naar andere plekken voor het aanschaffen van e-boeken dan Bezos’ Amazon of ook Bol met hun DRM kwam ik toevallig Maven Publishing tegen. Nederlandstalige en vertaalde non-fictie, zonder DRM. Geen heel groot aanbod, maar wel geschikt om eens in te neuzen.
Redirecting My Amazon Spending to Public Domain Standard E-books
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.
Bought my first e-books since I stopped buying from Amazon early January. Bought directly from an author through their own publishing company. No DRM.
Earlier I didn’t succeed yet in buying an e-book from ebooks.com, somehow the credit card transaction wasn’t accepted by Visa. Earlier this evening I did succeed in buying there on second try, using Paypal. The books had Adobe DRM.
All purchases downloaded to Calibre which is now my local central library for e-books again after years of neglect. Epubor is a great tool to help make the material you purchase accessible from all your devices.
Amazon Removing E-Book File Download Options
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.