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  • 1 year

    “your” ebooks. – You never owned them in the first place. And if buying isn’t owning, questionably acquired ebooks aren’t stolen.

    • Check if it’s available on your library website first, for the sake of the author.

      • I mean authors don’t see money anytime someone rents an ebook do they? Libraries just need to pay for licenses to the publisher annually from what I’ve read on reddit/Lemmy.

        I can understand renting ebooks so that your library continues to fund a digital library, but if the book is available in paper form that doesn’t really benefit the author either.

      • I download books from my library to my kindle. It goes through Amazon though, so I assume I am also impacted by this BS.

        • It shouldn’t. The DRM is on the Amazon book file format. The books I get from my library are usually epub format.

    • Even after years and years of this being discussed, it shocks me how many people keep dropping money into services which force them to own nothing.

      Convenience is a helluva drug.

      • It depends, sometimes you can “buy” digital ownership from these places in the form of DRM-free files. If you are able to download the DRM-free file and make a reliable backup of it, then I could call that actual ownership. This is how I approach my music and ebook libraries. I don’t do subscriptions for streaming anything but TV.