this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
604 points (98.4% liked)

You Should Know

33369 readers
5 users here now

YSK - for all the things that can make your life easier!

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must begin with YSK.

All posts must begin with YSK. If you're a Mastodon user, then include YSK after @youshouldknow. This is a community to share tips and tricks that will help you improve your life.



Rule 2- Your post body text must include the reason "Why" YSK:

**In your post's text body, you must include the reason "Why" YSK: It’s helpful for readability, and informs readers about the importance of the content. **



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding non-YSK posts.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-YSK posts using the [META] tag on your post title.



Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.

If you harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

If you are a member, sympathizer or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.

For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- The majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.

Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.



Partnered Communities:

You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.

Community Moderation

For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.

Credits

Our icon(masterpiece) was made by @clen15!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

This is not an anti-Kindle rant. I have purchased (rented?) several Kindle titles myself.

However, YSK that you are only licensing access to the book from Amazon, you don't own it like a physical book.

There have been cases where Amazon deletes a title from all devices. (Ironically, one version of "1984" was one such title).

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html

There have also been cases where a customer violated Amazon's terms of service and lost access to all of their Kindle e-books. Amazon has all the power in this relationship. They can and do change the rules on us lowly peasants from time to time.

Here are the terms of use:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201014950

Note, there are indeed ways to download your books and import them into something like Calibre (and remove the DRM from the books). If you do some web searches (and/or search YouTube) you can probably figure it out.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

I hate that pirating is the ONLY way to even semi own what you buy. Bought an album off Bandcamp (DRM free music) and when one of the songs on that album got in a pointless argument about copyright and got taken down from my Spotify playlists.

Songs being taken off of Spotify is really common if you're into older stuff as the rights get passed on when the artist dies. Though in this case it was a year old album.

I was glad I bought it DRM free as I thought they could only unlist it from the store, not from libraries... until I saw it was gone there too.
I payed MONEY for them to take it out of my library on a DRM free site. That's like them taking my music CD and scratching it with sandpaper.

Pirating literally gives me the same experience as buying it for literally no issue. (except the lossless files but who cares)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

For ebooks in particular, owning what you buy isn’t that difficult though. You can legally buy DRM protected epubs in a lot of online book stores and then use the software calibre (open source) to strip the DRM. Much easier than with music, movies or software.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Some songs get taken down and relisted under different albums. I've had this happen with a lot of lofi music I thought was gone. Worth double checking!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yes, most Kindles allow you to load your own PDFs and .ebook files, so pirating them is inconsequential.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

I‘d recommend the software calibre. Great for managing your ebook library and it can convert epub into amazons azw, mobi or kfx formats (depending on which generation kindle you have). With the right plugin you can even create WordWise data for your kindle-converted ebooks.

You don’t even necessarily need to illegally download the books, as calibre can also handle the DRM of .ebub books you bought from almost any store. Of course, sailing the seven seas is still always an option though.