Pardon my French on the title. You’ll see why, though.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Recently, my trusted Kindle 3’s display broke. That device is from around 2012 and served me very well. It was registered with my Amazon account and I do have a few e-books on that account.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Remarkable first discovery<\/strong>: The broken Kindle automagically un-registered and disappeared from my device list. Wtf?<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is remarkable, because apparently you cannot download your purchases if you have no Kindle device (or app) registered. I very much doubt that this is legal in the EU. Sure, you can install the Kindle app on a phone, tablet or (Windoze) PC or Mac. But that’s just chicanery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But imagine for a moment what this means: You don’t buy a book (physical paper). You don’t even buy the license to read it at your own time and terms. You buy the right to view your book on an infrastructure that Amazon controls and in a way that Amazon dictates you. The moment your device drops out of support, you can conveniently buy a new device<\/em> – at x Euro, producing completely unnecessary electronic waste. All this just to look at the books you paid money for already<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Remarkable second discovery<\/strong>: The firmware of the Kindle 3 (the one with the keyboard) was never re-touched to support one-time passwords (OTP) in a half-way user-friendly way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I won’t go on about how bad security is at Amazon. I’ve had a colleague who got their account nicked and got pushed around by customer service like in a Kafka novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\nDevices are “obsolescensed” by not doing simple things (like OTP)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n