Amazon – Dickens of a Blog

tl;dr: Old technologies die and companies drive profits by pushing new ones, but at the same time, the warning of this is less about a specific company and more about a whole mindset. Kindles are fine, but you should have back-up plans.

Above screenshot is from the top of ArsTechnica’s article: For the first time ever, Amazon is cutting old Kindles off from the Kindle Store. Which seems…strange. Not that they are doing it, but I thought they had already done something like this for older Kindles. I’m getting Mandela Effect’d in real-time.

Anyhow, says AT references an article from Good-E-Reader: You can no longer buy e-books on Amazon Kindle made in 2012 or earlier.

Technically that’s [sic], as far as I know, since the purchasing seems to still be possible for the next month or so, but it’s a minor correction.

Another possible source if you just like to see various talk about the same tech news is not-shockingly the same way:

There are a variety of specific points brought up but it seems like consensus for the actual impact is:

You will not in any way lose your library, just the ability to connect said library to devices over 14-years-old.
The “bricking” they talk about seems to be more about books being associated with your account…
- …which in some context is the same as “losing” them but there are mitigations.
- …but in principle you could factory reset and still have a functional device by transferring books via cable.
A big impact seems to be people who use some variation of local public library collections and maybe [/maybe not] Kindle Unlimited type services, who might very well lose access to those.

My “first take” [for some definitions of first take, after spending an hour reading up on other takes and such] is that:

Amazon is 100% in their right to remove support for old technologies and hardware not up to date with current standards and future-plans, but at the same time PHHHHBBBTTTT.

Amazon is only going to lose (a relatively small amount of) face by this, no matter the reasons and this demonstrates the danger of the ownership-free future The Algorithm Class have been pushing.

[in 10 years you’ll still be hearing people talk about Amazon just stops supporting Kindles left and right much like how the 1984 incident back in…2010?…is still quoted as though it happens on a regular basis despite other bookshops being more prone to it]

Look, 2012 was a lot of time ago. Stuff that was brand-new in that era like Nintendo’s Wii U and Microsoft’s Windows 8 have already been sunset at this point (the former in a way no doubt similar to the what the early-Kindles are going through, still functional just not connectable to a shop or receiving device specific content). Computers and TVs from that era are different. Phones are completely different. Stuff changes and tech stuff changes significantly across 1.5 decades.

If anything, it’s a testimony to how well the old Kindles were built that the devices are functional enough that people are still attached to them…¹

The fact that it is almost trivially easy to access your Kindle library through your phone or tablet or browser or through a computer app also factors into my somewhat lack of ire about this, though I still have ire.

Outside of the simple truism that old technology eventually gets forgotten [digital files last forever or five years, whichever comes first] my broad assumption that the DRM-wars are a big part of this decision. For whatever reason, we are in a world where ebooks are one of the most protected technologies and, in principle, harder to crack than music [often sold with zero DRM] and at least physical movies [which, if nothing else, can be played on a variety of players before you even get to ripping data from them].

Ebooks, especially Kindle-proprietary formats, and audiobooks [ditto, but Audible] undergo a constant push to innovate where a lot of the innovation is simply to stop people from breaking the DRM on the books they bought.

Piracy is real and has a real impact, but this confuses me to no end.

That is where absolutely any sympathy from me for any company, author, or anyone on the side of Amazon in this case ends. You should not have to rely on a third party to maintain your library and then be expected to buy upgrades to technology or sign away more rights just to re-read a book you bought [a lease to read] years ago. If you don’t want to maintain the library without snatching increasing amounts of personal data to build up into personas you sell to other entities, let us maintain our own. Books do not need DRM. If you are relying on anti-consumer tech to swim above piracy the sharks have already won.

All this being said, here are a few things that are semi-contradictory but I think are true enough to wrap up this kind of going-nowhere besides to take more pot-shots at the anti-ownership-driven future:

Promoting piracy in retaliation for this is a terrible argument. I’m old enough and been on the internet long enough to know that pirates are going to promote their auto-response to everything like it’s a…well, an auto-response. “Netflix increasing its prices? Pirate all the movies!” That kind of stuff. “Content creators barely get paid anyhow!” is the old workhorse that has been used in various forms for years and it remains as ignorant now as it was back then.

I 100% support anyone who uses technology to get around DRM to back-up their own library. Zero qualifiers. Don’t care about any contract or license or what have you. I don’t necessarily think they should have any rights to share it [but…] and especially not to make money off it but I should, and you should, have the right to make a copy of those files that does not require a specific device.

Promoting other ebook readers or even physical books is not precisely the answer. Books break. Folks who read 3-4 books a week will slam shelves full of books pretty quickly. Libraries and bookswap stuff is nice [I donate a lot of physical books] and I support that. Still, physical books are not necessarily going to have the advantages that some ebooks have even though they trump ebooks in other ways.

Other ebook readers are definitely an idea but if it involves simply buying into another ecosystem? Eh. I’d rather promote 100% open ebook readers or apps for common devices that can access all your libraries. See my second point.

I still like my Kindles. Though I am somewhat not in the target audience for this outrage since I tend to update my Kindles semi-often, every three-to-five years. I put them through a lot of wear and tear. Also, I’m the sort who would rather update my ebook reader than get a new gaming console or even a new phone.

Technologies will continue to die by design and a shift towards anti-ownership will continue to try and strip of your rights. Full-stop, the end.