I'd also point towards alternative reading apps and hardware and drop everything related to Amazon.
this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2025
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Is there a way to donate to the authors? Because I think pirating and then donating the money (directly) to the author is much more ethical than putting a megacorp or a publisher in between
Even better if you send it with something like Monero which doesn't even put the bank between you and the author
Amazon’s ebook store front (as well as the internet in general) is flooded with AI slop. The internet is a place where the signal to noise ratio is dropping rapidly.
Physical media is necessary. Especially books. Especially the kinds of books regimes might want to ban. When it’s time to rebuild, we’ll need firm ground to stand on, and physical books work as long as you can hold them.
Don’t use kindle? They aren’t the only ebook provider
Uh, title is a bit clickbaity, editorialized. Amazon isn't changing books yet, they are planning to make it possible for publishers to do so, I think, and also recoking ownership. And the video is not great either.
The man who made that video is annoying. The story he read out was from the twits by Roald dahl, it was a few years back that those changes were made. Dahl was a great author but wasn’t a very pc person , his family have had to apologise for his anti semitism. So whoever is in charge of his works wanted to make them more modern and less insulting which misses the point of Dahl but anyway. They’ve done it with Enid blyton books too. In one of hers they have a dog called the n word so probably more necessary with her work lol.
All amazon have done is update the digital edition to the match the latest edition. There’s a million things to hate Amazon for you don’t have to make things up. And also if you want books that can’t be altered buy a paper book, you own them and they don’t run out of electricity.
And also if you want books that can’t be altered buy a paper book
The books on my 1st generation kindle have been there 15 years unchanged. Just don't connect devices to the internet that don't need to be connected to the internet.
The "internet of things" that was sold to us is just a way for corporations to exert more control. I am pro-technology. I think an ebook reader is infinitely more useful and valuable than a paper book - I can fit tens of thousands of books on my Kindle, more than I could read in a lifetime, and a full charge lasts more than a month at a time.
I can use whatever font I want, I can scale the size to what I want. I can change the margins, place bookmarks, gives a % of how far I am in a book, skip to chapters, etc.
Like, it's objectively better than a book.
But it doesn't need to be connected to the internet.
That's still not OK
Printing new editions of a book was always a thing
Forcibly destroying all previous editions is not however
Quietly swapping your earlier edition with the current edition was not, however.
Doing it silently without consent is definitely not okay. Or if they do such a thing, they should notify the user and give an option to rollback if they wanted. That’s what a company that respect users would do.
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That's why I only read manuscripts. Don't trust machines. F*cuk Gutenberg
This reminds me of a joke....
A new monk arrives at the monastery and is assiged to help the other monks in copying the old texts by hand. When he looks closer, however, he notices that they are copying copies, not the original books. The new monk goes to the head monk to ask him about this. He points out to the head monk that should there be an error in the first copy, that error would be continued in all of the other copies. "We have been copying from the copies for centuries," says the head monk, "however, I must admit you make a very good point, my son." The head monk then goes down to the cellar with one of the copies to check it against the original. Hours pass and no one sees him, so one of the monks decides to go downstairs to look for him. When he arrives he hears loud sobbing coming from the back of the cellar and finds the old head monk leaning over one of the original books crying. "What's wrong," he asks the old monk. "The word is CELEBRATE!" sobs the old monk.
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It’s time to de-Google, de-amazon, de-Microsoft, de-apple, etc.
Now? As if they were so ethical all those decades before.
You know what they say about the best time to plant trees. It applies to many things.
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13+ years ago when I'd say why I hate social media, cloud services, all this convenient dependence, everybody would act as if this was stupid.
My logic was that if there's a mechanism allowing such influence, no matter how small, its power will grow almost until the death of such an ecosystem. Because the returns of abusing it will always be more than the expenses.
I don't like this Cassandra feeling really.
Most people have an astounding lack of imagination. Its like they thing that things can't get much worse because that would be too different to now....
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