I wonder just like retailers are required to account for local sales taxes (I know it is not that clear cut), there should be some enforcement mechanism to settle disputes locally. Setup an agency which "legally" provides support for google, Amazon, and all those unreachable entities. Provides local jobs as well as quick grievance redressal. Maybe something like consumer protection agency but not federal, maybe at least one per county maybe more depending on the population.

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.

Something similar happened to me with Blizzard. I'd buy subscription time and, a few days later, they'd cancel my subscription and refund the charge. After a few rounds of this, they suspended my account.

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.

I never bought any ebooks off Amazon without removing the drm at the time. I did buy a lot of shows and movies, but if they take those away, I'll just pirate them, given I've already paid.

It's safer to assume that Amazon is always acting in bad faith and search to purchase your DRM free e-books from other vendors. There's plenty of other options out there besides Amazon

Customer centric ended a few years ago

99.99% of the time when you read something on the internet and your reaction is "that's wild" / "wow that's crazy" / "that's unbelievable", then what you are reading is in fact likely nowhere near the actual truth / real.

>the world’s most customer-centric company.

Those are big words Amazon certainly doesn't earn.

It seems wild to me to just accept a loss of $1000 for something that isn't your fault. I'd be persistent in each contact with Amazon and if you're really not getting anywhere I'd go to small claims court or do a chargeback.

For $1k stolen from me I think I’d go with not shopping at Amazon again, tbh.

Just ask for the refund. If they lock your account you can always make a new one (gonna be a scary day when that isn't possibl cuz they use biometrics or something.....).

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

Something similar happened to me. The delivery company returned two packages, two separate orders, as damaged back to Amazon. They were marked as "delivered". They automatically refunded just one item in one of the returned orders.

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?

No way I'd give away 1000 € in exchange to be allowed to buy from some store. Actually, I don't even have an Amazon account, but if I did, I'd prefer to be banned than to burn 1000 € like that.

Much less money lost, but Amazon is notorious for not providing free game codes that are supposed to be included with GPU purchases. The customer rep at first apologized and offered a small refund (less than the cost of the game). A later rep started implying I was trying to defraud Amazon.

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

Man, for $1000 I'd definitely be checking to make sure it got refunded, and manually requesting a refund after a week had passed.

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.

Amazon no longer having a record of it is absurd given the volume of data they store about all transactions.

For a phone in particular I'd be demanding serial number/IMEI information for the police report and ensuring that the stolen phone was properly reported as stolen. Since they record all of that when they ship it should be readily available.

No, this is silly. Don't do this. You absolutely keep pushing for a refund and go via you CC provider if they don't respond.

> so instead I accept they've just stolen $1000 from me with no recourse... So you basically approve of this behavior. I personally learned some time ago to stay away from these companies.

File in small claims court, they can't ban you for that and they have to send someone out

That should be the last straw. In the least, why haven't you closed your account?

wait is your email really username@username.net? I registered java.lang.string (at) gmail back when I was learning java 20+ years ago. Haven't really used it in over a decade though.

Just reach out to andy or bezos and the executive team will reach out and fix it.

Poor customer support is a serious problem for Amazon, Google and Meta. Hope to see alternatives unseat these giants from their monopoly status.

"Now all my digital purchases are gone."

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

If you're in the US just look up the small claims process local near you, and do it. The fee is small and you'll learn how it works, and that's worst case.

I'm more into the satisfaction of breaking DRM, but this is good too. Kudos for supporting authors!

Pretty much what I was going to say. I think Twitter (or whatever social media people use these days) would be a more appropriate place to put the company "on blast".

I'd download epubs of everything from Anna's Archive and/or soulseek (Nicotine+ is nice) and kindly tell them to fuck off with their account.

Or general auditing purposes.

Last week I had a vendor tell me that they did warranty service through Amazon, and I should contact Amazon for a replacement, even though I was outside of their return window. It turned out to be a lie. But Amazon refunded me the full amount anyway, without prompting. The handful of times I've contacted Amazon tech support this has been my experience. The previous one was when they replaced a $250 porch pirated delivery, no questions asked.

This behavior genuinely earns them more of my business.

As have I.

At least Amazon is clear we don’t own the book.

That’s possible, but I can’t know for sure because Amazon never provided any concrete details. I didn’t receive any warning emails, only a cryptic message after the ban:

> "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.

> But after they decided the ebooks were actually just license to read

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

What do you do now? I’ve been buying physical books off of Abe Books—not a bad thing at all—but I’d like to use my jailbroken kindle again because the form factor is so convenient.

Can you create the epub and pdf files yourself and have them distributed unaltered?

Having the action prominent and potentially with the default reversed would still leave it to the publisher's choice.

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.

Yeah, Tor Books publishes without DRM, and they seem to be one of the bigger SFF publishers these days. John Scalzi, George R.R. Martin (though not the ASoIaF books), Robert Jordan, Annalee Newitz, Charlie Jane Anders, and a bunch of other SFF authors I recognize. I'm sure there are others, but all the once I've noticed have been from Tor.

same here.

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

If you want to be part of Kindle Unlimited you have to give worldwide exclusivity to Kindle Unlimited, and can't have ever published your eBook on another platform.

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

It's not super easy to refund digital goods in general with few exceptions like Steam. I have done it with Kobo but IIRC you have to chat with a CS rep or least you did when I did it.

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.

Bad take. Kobo lets you know which books have DRM and which don't. And even with DRM, you can get them into Adobe Digital Editions and load them on to basically any e-reader. (Maybe not Kindle since it won't open DRM'd ePubs.)

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

Ironically on Kobo you can buy Enshittification with DRM:

"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 assumed that that was clear from the context, but let me rephrase it then:

"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 ;)

Mildly sad is also that you seem to fault GP for not “exploring” more, instead of the insane practice of DRMing everything in the first place. I never have purchased DRM protected media and never will - I’d rather pirate everything digital and but physical hard copies.

> Books enter the public domain.

...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.

Dumb question, but: is there a way to find/filter ones that are? (I can't seem to find anything in the (web) UI that makes it clear which books are downloadable.)

I have some tor books, but I used to download them as .azw even though they had the "this book is drm free ..." blurb at the beginning. (was back before amazon stopped downloads)

Now they could actually be distributed as unencrypted .epub

And Baen. Baen has a storefront of their own online at https://www.baen.com/.

...in the US. I tried to buy an ebook of the Stormlight Archive from Australia and was sad to discover that DRM-free versions were not available.

No, these publishers were already available DRM-free from other stores.

Yep, never again. I tried to take a pragmatic position with the DRM, and it is just not possible. I buy the crap out of DRM free stuff, but if it's not DRM free, it's not for me

Eh? Not sure what you mean.

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?

It's at least available as a search filter. On the book listing it seems to show "Type: Ebook (DRM-free)". Maybe there's a better way.

Will this affect my ability to install KOReader?

Only some are. At the bottom of each book's store page, you can see if a book is DRM-free. And if it is DRM-free, you can download an ePub.

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

They've been doing this for YEARS before Amazon.

Yes, but Calibre can get the files onto any other device with a drag and drop operation, which is not the case with the newest version of Amazon DRM.

Tor and Baen are two publishers that have been offering DRM free books on Kobo for a while.

Sure, but you can load any file onto the device.

I've had both. Kobo is fine hardware-wise. And light years better on software than Kindle. One huge example: I have 1000+ books in Calibre. Took the time to tag them all into their respective categories. Kobo recognizes those tags and my book collection is sorted. With Kindle, I'd have to sort by hand on device. It ignores Calibre tags.

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.

How so? Just looking online, the prices between a Kindle and Clara BW is minimal (the Clara BW is actually cheaper). I don’t see how the hardware is better when they use the same exact screen…

> Kindle hardware is significantly better and cheaper. If you don't mind tinkering get a kindle and jailbreak it to remove ads and add koreader.

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.

Try actually using a Kobo reader sometime.

I'll chime in - the Kindle Paperwhite I believe is the superior machine from a physical feeling and aesthetic perspective. The problem (for me) is who makes it. Amazon keeps locking it down so it's harder and harder to load your own DRM free books onto it, in addition to tracking everything you do on it (like sending all your reading statistics whenever you get online).

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 is the sort of device which would make HN happy. The software is much more open and permissive than Kindle. Integrates with Calibre more tightly. Has a fairly rich ecosystem of tweaks and addons which don't require a jailbreak. Wish it didn't have secure boot but am otherwise pretty happy with it.

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.

Here's a better rec: Buy any device with a carta 1300 screen and only buy from shops that are supported by the DeDRM plugin in Calibre.

Check their post history, nobody's going to be doing that kind of long con here. (Different kinds of long cons, maybe, but not for shilling an e-reader)

How do you know anything? You can never know for sure if you can trust another person, and this is why people can get schizophrenia.

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.

I have both. The Kindle is a better device overall, but the I like Kobo's software better.

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.

Where possible, I try not to focus on negative motives. Quite simply, if people see a benefit in DRM-free, why not expect them to pay for it? And there are other platforms beside the two I mentioned – it’s not a choice between DRM-free and (for better or for worse) Amazon.

Amazon wins by miles, almost to the point of incomparability. For all my issues with Amazon, that’s fine by me: compared to all other platforms, that’s where the reviews and other forms of social proof are.

Sales on Amazon are working as intended. DRM there is not a variable I can control.

I agree this is a positive step, but this is like notch 1 on a scale of 0 to 100, 0 being maximum abuse of your customer. I think it's downright evil not to allow this for DRM free books, which they have been doing for many years now. It is positive that they reduced the level of evil by a little bit, and I'll give them credit for that, but this movement is so minor in the scope of things that it does not sway me whatsoever to go back to buying from their Kindle store

It's a positive move, but too little, too late. These same publishers have already been available DRM-free from other stores for a long time.

Why?

Genuine question.

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

Oh, as a lawyer, I must insist that you should never do piracy and its wrong, which is why I try to inform people as much about this thing so that they can avoid it.

:)

Too much convenience, selection, and the prices are all too low!

Dang, it's unfortunate they don't support Linux

That's my take. I break the DRM off books I've bought. I own those copies. I'll format shift them for my own convenience. Bought on Kindle but want to read on my Kobo? It's impossible to make me feel guilt about that.

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).

I feel like if the platform is unwilling to give you access to books you posted for, you should be able to download them from arrr without authors or publishers being affected financially - buy first pirate later.

People have been writing for much longer than writing has been a profession. And their work has been published by the means of the day, which pre-Gutenberg in the West meant hand-copying.

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

>Would you like your work to be pirated,

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.

Datahoarders with hard drives full of pirated books are not nearly as much of a threat to writers as, say, AI slop making it difficult to market new books. If you pirate a book and read it, the author can still sell you the sequel. Not so much if you don't even know who the author is.

Thanks, I missed the key detail!

Hardware I pay for should be mine. If I do not jailbreak it, it is still theirs, despite me paying for it. They cheat, not me. Same goes for e-books, they can cut me off, they can (and do) change contents on the fly. I keep exfiltrated books for myself, and that is right.

> Spoken like a techie, with the attitude NYers have to the "flyover states".

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.