A quick look at Amazon's Kindle app and its awful DRM system
2024-10-05
As an unwanted side effect of my 9-day cycling vacation in August, I had to travel with an absolute minimum of luggage and thus couldn't afford to bring one or two books - the usual amount I read in such a time span - with me. In the situation of sitting in an empty hotel room, seeking entertainment and not wanting to watch a stupid television program, I then fell for downloading the Amazon Kindle app to my phone. So, let's take a quick look at how I liked it and Amazon's awful Kindle DRM system...
As taught in literally every course about human interaction, I'll start with the good this time around before coming to the bad. Much to my disliking, I was actually positively surprised by the Kindle app in terms of ease of use, features and the reading experience. Some might argue that there isn't much to rendering the text of a book on a screen and they are somewhat right, but somehow many e-book apps still manage to fuck this up. Not the Kindle app though - it has a relatively straightforward user interface, syncs beautifully over your Amazon account and even allows you to pay with it (which is as much a downside due to how many more books you buy as its ease of use is a positive aspect). Reading the book itself is as simple and clean as it should be with black-on-white or white-on-black text on a blank canvas only displaying the time as well as reading progress alongside the content. You simply flip the pages by tapping on the corresponding side of the screen or swiping across it and can access tons of helpful, but unobtrusive features like a dictionary, translator, highlighting tools, chapter overviews et cetera by long pressing on a section of text or the middle of the screen depending on what exactly you want to do. Especially the dark mode on an OLED screen with a mate screen protector is rather enjoyable to the eyes - even in the dark. I hate to say it, but it's actually a good app overall.
Sure, there are some issues with it like the surely intense user tracking Amazon does or occasional
crashes when copying text, but the real issues are the e-books Amazon sells themselves. You see, e-books
are very much like email one of the very few types of digital media today, where open formats have won
and are the most widely spread option used. In the e-book game
EPUB
is the unrivalled format king and almost every online seller uses it. It has one big downside for these
companies though and that is the fact it wasn't designed with any kind of DRM (Digital Rights
Management) in mind and thus has no protection against unauthorized copying and distribution out of the
box. Granted, these features were added later on for better or for worse, but they still haven't become
that widely used to date. That's why Amazon decided to use their own file format with strong DRM
measures in place from the moment they launched their first Kindle and has stuck to it. Just like
EPUB
, it evolved over the years, expanded in features and in fact even changed its file extension from
AZW
over
AZW3
to
KFX
right now.
But what has remained the same is its proprietary nature and strong encryption. This means once you
bought a Kindle e-book, you're locked into the Kindle ecosystem and can only ever read it with one of
Amazon's devices, their website or mobile app. There have been efforts to crack the format and convert
it to
EPUB
in the form of extensions for the popular open source e-book management software
calibre
, but they only ever work with specific versions of the format and have become mostly unmaintained in
the last years due to how complex it has become it get around Amazon's encryptions measures. Even worse,
they obviously require you to provide the e-book file to them, but you can't easily download it from
Amazon anymore. The only options are to download a book to the Android app and extract it from there,
which is notoriously unreliable, or to transfer it to a real Kindle device and dump it from there, which
I can't do without buying one just for this use-case. Ultimately, this means Amazon's DRM systems is
basically like stealing your property - you don't pay for owning the book anymore, but just for the
service of being allowed to read it.
As someone that even backs up his Spotify playlists to local MP3 files, this feels awful and is a reason
for me not to use the admittedly quite handy Kindle app on my phone anymore and not recommend the Kindle
ecosystem. Luckily, they are more open e-reading solutions available I could have used, if I had looked
a bit more closely at the topic on my vacation, and all books I wanted digitally so far are also
available in other stores featuring the
EPUB
format. What do we learn from this?
Take a closer look at a service and its practices before starting to use it the next time around -
even when you are in a hurry.
With that said, feel free to share your thoughts and personal experiences in the comments down below,
have a lovely and until next week...