Amazon Kindle Outage Blocks Book Downloads (goodereader.com) 40
Amazon's Kindle e-reader system is experiencing a widespread outage, affecting new book downloads and access to undownloaded titles in users' libraries. The issue, confirmed by Amazon support, is expected to last at least 48 hours.
Good (Score:1, Funny)
-Literacy-? On my freedom weekend?
Once again (Score:2, Insightful)
Another reason physical books are better than digital. Don't have to worry about them not being accessible because of someone else. You have the book, you can access it whenever you want.
You want a new book? Go to the store.
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So says the guy who has the time and energy to cart around >15000 books at every move. That's not me anymore. I have local digital copies of several thousand volumes I couldn't do without.
I gave the rest to someone with the energy to deal with them. It was damned hard parting with books I'd treasured for decades. But time catches everyone, eventually. Hence, rhe number of less-sighted seniors (and others) making every book large-type.
Don't be so quick to generalize. It will usually blow back on you.
Re:Once again (Score:4, Insightful)
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You do understand storms like rain and snow can make it difficult to get to a physical store, right? Or even prevent the store from opening. Either way, you can't buy new books. The only issue is with non-downloaded books. You never (really) need to clear space on an e-reader, so the only reason the book isn't on there is because you didn't want it to be.
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' Either way, you can't buy new books. '
More true than you think.
All the books in the store have been handled by people who licked their thumb before turning pages, disgusting.
Re:Once again (Score:5, Interesting)
Horses for courses. I have over 3000 physical books, but most of what I buy now is digital. I used to lug up to a dozen books when I travelled for more than a few days. Now I carry them with me. Similarly, search and rapid access (most of the time; barring events such as this) is better.
More interestingly (and critically) a bibliophile relative had a bad set of brain bleeds. He lost the use of pretty much half his body. Thankfully his cognitive capabilities have almost completely recovered, and he's gained very limited walking ability, but even turning pages and holding a book is close to beyond him physically, and forget about easily accessing bookcases filled with physical volumes. E-readers are a godsend for him.
I get all the negatives. Soulless. Narrow number of gatekeepers (mostly Amazon and Ratuken/Kobo). Easy to lock you out of your books, whether through malice or incompetence. You don't really own the books. You can't legally easily lend them. They can be stealth-edited. May well harm authors in the long run due to massively reduced competition. Lack of longevity. We can discover centuries old volumes, even millennia-old, from the past. Good luck with Kindle Unlimited in... a century? a few decades?
But simply snarking about the superiority of physical books (and IMHO they are mostly a superior and more beautiful technology) is to ignore a non-trivial range of use cases where they are, sadly, inferior.
Download and rip then there are no negatives. (Score:2)
" Soulless."
Collectors can have what they print from a file custom bound or DIY their own, even on parchment if they're motivated.
" Easy to lock you out of your books, whether through malice or incompetence. You don't really own the books. You can't legally easily lend them. They can be stealth-edited. May well harm authors in the long run due to massively reduced competition. Lack of longevity. We can discover centuries old volumes, even millennia-old, from the past. Good luck with Kindle Unlimited in... a
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Download, remove DRM, back up, and that ceases to be a concern.
Did this with my collection ages ago, but haven't done it on anything I've got in the past 5+years. Do you happen to have a link to the current dedrm process for kindle book files (what I was using doesn't work on the current stuff)?
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Compared to paper books without a physical index (or ones with a crap index)?
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One thing which Kindle excels at is enabling unknown and/or beginning authors to self-publish and give them exposure that would have been impossible. They've also enabled me to read quite a lot of ancient authors that I would never have been able to otherwise afford. A dead-tree copy of 'Geography' by Strabo or 'Comentarios Reales' by Garsilaso de la Vega would have set me back a pretty penny but I just downloaded Strabo the other day for $1.99, and good luck finding 'Romance of the Three Kindoms' by Luo
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I just downloaded Strabo the other day for $1.99, and good luck finding 'Romance of the Three Kindoms' by Luo Guanzhon or 'The Instruction of Ptah-Hotep' (the world's oldest known book).
Why are you paying for public domain works when Project Gutenberg [gutenberg.org] exists? Granted, there's only a native language version of Luo but they do have the world's oldest known book [gutenberg.org] in English. Download Calibre [calibre-ebook.com] and you can put whatever you want on a kindle.
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Well, I'm paying because I didn't know about Calibre. Thanks.
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'I get all the negatives. Soulless. Narrow number of gatekeepers (mostly Amazon and Ratuken/Kobo). Easy to lock you out of your books'
You really should get a copy of CALIBRE.
https://calibre-ebook.com/ [calibre-ebook.com]
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It's this. I can lug a few pounds of dead tree, or, between my kindle and my iPad, I can have a literal library of novels and RPG PDFs and read whatever strikes my fancy at that exact second in time.
My shelves are full of dead trees. But I figured out long ago that collecting books and reading books are two different hobbies.
Re:Once again (Score:5, Insightful)
You have the book, you can access it whenever you want.
No you can't. You're limited by space and logistics. Real books are great. I love the feel and the smell of them. But there's no "better" here. I just finished moving 4 bookshelves worth out of the attic since we're getting some work done and I was swearing the entire time about the fact I bought them physically. Likewise I do not have fond memories of long intercontinental flights or holidays where a significant size of my limited backpack was taken up by books. These days a kindle is far superior to that in every way.
By the way no one was denied a book on their kindle. They were denied the book they needed to download from the store. Amazon was unavailable for a few hours today. Whoop de fucking do. You know what is unavailable for 16 hours every single day, and sometimes longer on the weekends? A book shop.
Re:Once again (Score:4, Interesting)
Wait until your car starts behaving like this. Soz (lol) no internets no car.
Have you really decried books as being inconveniently sold? They aren't booze or fags! You can of course still buy them from the original online book store - Amazon and someone will rock up with your book after a few days.
If there was a market for it then fuel (gas) stations would pick up the slack, or we would have 24h libraries or worse. I'm sure if you wander into a late night opener, you will have your pick of jazz mags. Perhaps if you repeatedly request War and Peace, you'll get it.
There will come a time when books no longer exist as a physical thing outside of museums. The thing is: a paper book can't be easily altered and certainly an entire print run can't be altered post printing.
Do we care? Well probably not. No doubt we will formulate robust strategies to ensure that written notions and thoughts are not disfigured during the process of formulation to delivery.
Yes, we are fucked!
e-cars [Re:Once again] (Score:2)
Wait until your car starts behaving like this. Soz (lol) no internets no car.
Well, this is about people being unable to download new books, not unable to access books they already have.
It's more like, if cars became e-cars, there's an outage and you're now unable drive to any NEW places, but can still drive to places you've already put into your list of destinations.
(which admittedly would suck).
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Wait until your car starts behaving like this. Soz (lol) no internets no car.
The Fisker Ocean EVs apparently needs access to their cloud services for some functionality (such as the sunroof and doggy windows, and perhaps more if the servers go offline permanently), and it is not clear what will happen to those cloud services as Fisker goes through bankruptcy. Those owners are lawyering up to make sure their interests are protected in the bankruptcy proceedings.
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Wait until your car starts behaving like this. Soz (lol) no internets no car.
Except you didn't read what I said. No one was denied reading their books. You're denied downloading a book. Forget the internet. Here where I live cars can only be purchased 5 days a week for an 8 hour window because that's when cars shops are open.
Have you really decried books as being inconveniently sold?
No I haven't decried it. I've pointed out the absurdity of something that is less available as being superior to something that is available 24/7 as being "superior" in the context of availability. It's literally the opposite.
There will come a time when books no longer exist as a physical thing outside of museums.
No there won't. Just like you can se
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I traveled in Peru back in the '80s for five months, living out of my backpack. I brought one book with me, and traded with other travelers from time to time, for a reading fanatic like myself that was quite traumatic.
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'Real books are great. I love the feel and the smell of them. '
Indeed, smelling the spit of all the people who licked their thumbs to turn the page in the book-shop, after having returned from the toilet without washing their hands. :-)
Who doesn't love that.
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No, but you do have to worry about them being lost in a fire or flood.
If your Kindle gets burned up, you can get a new one and your books are all there, good as new.
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'You want a new book? Go to the store.'
The store is closed at night and miles away, I get my kindle books in seconds, much cheaper than getting out of my underwear, driving, paying for parking and using a bookstore without search function.:-)
Wow (Score:3)
Gee authors, I hope you weren't advertising anything today. Or maybe launching a new title. Them ad buys get expensive don't they? What's going to happen if everyone returns your book and then pees all over your buy page with one star reviews? How many hours do you think it will take to clean up that mountain of shit?
Here's a free hint: more than 48.
Hey Amazon? Got nothin' but love for you. Nothin' but love. You right fucked my writing career, spiked all my books without telling me, charged me 60c (and up) a click to guess who wants to buy my books even though you have all their names on a mailing list and you threatened me (and all the other authors) with bans, penalties and deleted books if we put links in them you didn't like.
But you know what the good news is? I was six years ahead of you fuckers. I beat you. I beat your robot ass like a rented drumset. What's happening on your site doesn't affect me at all. Now I can put whatever I damn please in my books, and furthermore I don't have to bundle nine years of work into one twelve cent box to get visibility.
MY STORE isn't down. Happy Independence Day!
Not downloaded titles? (Score:2)
I have an old Kobo reader somewhere. I could download every book I'd ever read onto that. How can a more modern device not always have everything on it?
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I have quite a few titles in my library. I tend to only download them to my Kindle when I'm reading them, for no particular reason. I'll often buy a book when it's on sale and not read it for months or years.
But I also back them up locally, unencumbered by DRM, into my Calibre library. Once I can no longer do this (Probably when they stop supporting the ancient Kindle 3), I will cease to buy Kindle books. I also back up my Audible library locally, and again once I can no longer do that, I will not be us
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I cannot praise the Kobo readers enough. Yes, sadly pirating books off the internet and getting them on a kobo reader is easy enough. But you don't ever depend on somebody else allowing you to read. Your ebooks are yours, whenever you want to read them.
Why better?? DIfferent! (Score:3)
I get all the qualms about ebooks. I love (paper) books myself. But for travel, I much prefer a Kindle. Just easier and more flexible, and (for that application) worth the downsides of electronic books. The paper copy stays at home, in my library :-)
48 hours? (Score:2)
What, did Bezos fall prey to a phishing email containing a ransomware-infested payload?
For a company Amazon's size, a 48 hour outage is inexcusable.
Jeff knows what's happening (Score:3)
Is it just coincidence that Jeff is selling $5bn of his Amazon stock [ft.com]?
Maybe he's privy to info we're not and this is a taste of what's to come?
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He does that every year, to fund Blue Origin.
Okay, hear me out (Score:5, Informative)
This is a trade-off.
I have both physical, old tree, books for the important things. Like Algorithms, or higher quality content.
But I also have a Kindle (the larger screen one), for the other content, like fiction books, references, and pdfs (yes the screen is finally good enough).
The trick is not depending on it... And knowing that there is a USB port.
I would highly recommend Calibre. It is open source, and will happily translate books into Kindle (or another) format.
In other words, you don't actually need to depend on Amazon for all book needs.
How to use Calibre to remove DRM (Score:2)
There is much more online but these links will get ye started:
https://itsfoss.com/calibre-re... [itsfoss.com]
https://manual.calibre-ebook.c... [calibre-ebook.com]
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Who doesn't download and rip immediately? (Score:2)
The storage space required is trivial so if you like it, download it, rip it and back it up (remembering the rule of threes, a single copy is not backup).
If you do not control all of a thing it is not your thing.
Download on purchase, remove DRM then back 'em up. (Score:2)
Not hard. I've never bought a Kindle offering I didn't immediately save since what I do not fully control I do not fully own.
Calibre and related tools are your friends.
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Indeed.