I broke up with my Kindle. Here's how I turned the page. - WaPo
Imagine buying a beautiful new car and seeing the low fuel light blink on as you drive it home. Although it only accepts Amazon’s proprietary gasoline blend, that’s fine. Nearly 80 percent of gas stations are owned by Amazon. Then you reach into the glove box to retrieve your purchase agreement and read the fine print. It turns out you don’t own your new car after all. You licensed it. Amazon has the right to enter your driveway, remodel the interior, repossess it and even unilaterally change the license, for any reason at all.
That, in a nutshell, is the experience of buying e-books and audiobooks on Amazon’s Kindle, the most popular e-book reader on the planet. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
While workarounds exist, the company tends to limit readers’ control over the digital books they ostensibly own and make it difficult or impossible to use on other companies’ devices or lend to others. Amazon has even reached into customers’ libraries and altered what they bought. After a licensing dispute in 2009, it remotely deleted an unauthorized edition of George Orwell’s 1984 from customers’ devices. (It has since agreed to limit the practice.) The irony was lost on no one.
More..
https://archive.ph/G0ulM#selection-387.0-445.32
(I use my iPad to read online but if some are interested)
= new reply since forum marked as read
