It’s also about destroying US soft power in general. Putin wants an isolated US so he’s having Trump torch every bridge with every ally the US has. Any country that the US has a friendly relationship with is in the firing line.

Right now he’s pretty laser focused in on about a 5 year period in 1940 and a certain country in Europe. Unfortunately I don’t think he’s actually read how that particular story ends though.

Something something need H1B something something not enough qualified Americans.

No you can’t. They changed the firmware so eBook downloads now go into a partition that’s not accessible when mounting the kindle over USB.

Sort of? Kindle Unlimited itself is digital only, but the exclusivity clause only applies to ebooks I think, so in theory you could purchase a physical copy elsewhere.

I’ve pretty much entirely abandoned physical books. It’s just far more convenient using an e-reader which has a backlight for reading in the dark, fits thousands of books in a device that’s pocket sized, and let’s me instantly purchase, download, and start reading the next book in a series as soon as I finish the last one.

I do have physical books still, but I haven’t bought new ones in about a decade now.

Unfortunately Kindle Unlimited is a Faustian bargain due to the exclusivity clause. We’re now stuck in a catch 22. There are excellent (for consumers) alternatives out there to Kindle/Amazon, the most prominent of which is Kobo which has a variety of very competitive e-readers. Additionally Kobo Plus is essentially Kindle Unlimited, although I don’t know for sure whether it has an exclusivity clause (I hope it doesn’t, and the policies of Kobo make me suspect not, but I haven’t confirmed that). The biggest problem from a consumers perspective is simply that many authors works are just not available from the Kobo (or other) store.

However the consumer perspective is only half the picture. From the perspective of an author/publisher Kindle is undeniably the largest platform out there with Kobo being one of their largest competitors (in terms of e-readers, I suspect in just ebooks Apple is bigger) and it’s minuscule compared to Kindle. While functionally the Kobo store and Kobo Plus give everything that the Kindle store and Kindle Unlimited do, what they are severely lacking in is customers. An author could choose to publish on Kindle and Kobo as well as make their books available on Kobo Plus, but doing so means foregoing the option of Kindle Unlimited which will result in fewer consumers having access to that authors works at least in the short term.

So we arrive at the catch 22. Consumers get a much better deal with Kobo, but lose access to many of the authors works they may want to read. Authors need to stick with Kindle and Kindle Unlimited if they want to reach as many consumers as they can, but doing so discourages consumers from switching to Kindle/Kindle Unlimited alternatives like Kobo/Kobo Plus. Until enough consumers move off Kindle Unlimited authors won’t want to abandon it, but until enough authors abandon it consumers will struggle to move off of Kindle Unlimited.

Not going to tear down my de-drm setup any time soon. But optimistic I might be able to before amazon does it for me.

As far as I’m aware it’s now too late for that. Amazon has removed the ability to download ebooks to your computer meaning the only way to access azw files now is if you’ve found a way to rip them out of the Kindle memory (not possible using normal means, but maybe if you’ve cracked one open and probed the flash memory directly).

I used to de-drm all my kindle purchases using the manual download links Amazon had, but those have now been removed. That’s actually what prompted me to switch to Kobo. I’m not going to “purchase” a book I can’t create a backup of.

I recently switched to Kobo as a Kindle alternative, but that also highlighted a problem. Kindle Unlimited includes a TOS for publishers that prevents them from selling their books on any other platform. A significant chunk of the Kindle catalogue is also included in Kindle Unlimited, which means a significant chunk of authors works are locked into the Amazon ecosystem.

It’s been very annoying to discover how many book series I’ve been reading that are simply unavailable elsewhere because they opted to take part in Kindle Unlimited.

What a load of shit. The TL;DR: near as I can tell is that because Individual cells can survive outside of the body they’re arguing that’s a 3rd state that’s neither alive or dead.