[codazoda]

Self-published author here—I agree with these points and I hate DRM myself.

I write DRM free books and I publish them on Amazon for the Kindle. Since they ask authors, I presume they share the DRM status too, although maybe not as prominently.

I recently decided to buy another Kindle. I prefer paper books but I’m running low on space. When I looked at my library I realized the Kindle app has faithfully kept a list of all the Kindle books I’ve read over the years. I was surprised to find a pretty good collection of books in my library. So, it feels relatively evergreen at this point.

Most recently I purchased a Kindle tablet with a stylus to save myself from the collection of paper notebooks I’m starting to collect. You can read more about how I take handwritten notes on the Kindle in the post below.

https://notes.joeldare.com/notes-on-the-amazon-fire-max-11

I would certainly consider other options but Amazon is making it convenient for me and they make a decent product at a pretty good price. Maybe one day I’ll give the other players a try but for now I’m okay with the limitations of Amazon’s ecosystem.

[freedomben]

This makes sense, but what happens when the new Kindle sucks and you want to switch to the new super cool $startup e-reader? Can't take any of your books with you, so you have to hope that Amazon write an app for your new platform and that that app doesn't suck. So you're essentially trading long-term/future capabilities for a better short-term user experience. That might be worth it, after all it's hard to predict what will happen in the future. But I don't want to worry that someday I might not like the new Kindle and mine breaks, and I want to switch platforms and lose access to my whole library.

Are you able to save/export your own notes to PDF or something? (genuinely asking) I would be maniacal if I lost my handwritten notes to that! (I love my Remarkable tablet for it's ability to easily upload notes as PDFs to Google Drive).

I don't know how you feel about privacy, but behind that reading history data that you can see is details about exactly which pages you read, when you read them, where you read them, how long you were on the page, anything you happened to touch there, and more. Have you read any books that you would be embarrassed to admit to publicly? I have never had to worry that my paper book was spying on me, nor the epub version of the book.

[goosedragons]

Amazon will put DRM on a "DRM-free" book if it's using their new format KFX.

[freedomben]

Yeah I know somebody who has been buying kindle books for years planning to remove the DRM at some point, but it's never a great time. It finally was a good time for it and he discovered that he no longer can (even though his proof-of-concept test years ago worked fine). I would be beyond irritated if I had to isolate my Kindle from the internet and hope a vulerability is found that I'm capable of using, just for the chance to liberate books I purchased.