at the moment.
I, like most in the US (and many I know in the US/Canada/UK/DE, have moved to reading a lot of books electronically. I have a tendency to use my iPad rather than a kindle – in fact I passed my last one on a while ago. Without thinking, I finally got around to deregistering it. Well, that was a mistake – a huge one. Let me explain –
If you haven’t heard about Amazon Kindle’s wonderful idea for making more money – let me fill you in. As of the 26th – Amazon will be actively implementing their – you are not buying a book – you are buying a license to the book for however long we think you should have it. In real turns it means that as ot the 26th – you won’t be able to use the USB download feature (download, store off line, side load your book to anything that can read their particular kindle format. I also means that your ability to back up books will be gone.
For those of us who have been keeping backups – I strongly suggest that you keep your copies off-line (external hard drive). If you need one of the books – take your computer OFF LINE before transferring the book. I do not trust Amazon not to develop essentially a virus to go and wipe those files out on anything it finds (since the .awz and .awz3 are unique…).
Why, you might ask, am I claiming this is economic. Right now, if a book is revised, updated, the new book rust replaces the old. Amazon can, and has removed books from their inventory for numerous reasons to include the author pulling the book. If you had “owned the book” it will be removed from you. If it happens to be re-issued, you will have to buy it again. Seriously. I saw this happen with several books that I “owned.” Since the ISBN number didn’t change – I was left with a WTF ? And trust me, Amazon make money.
So there I was, about 30% of the way in to backing all my books onto an external hard drive when I had the bright idea that if I didn’t use the kindle special file as the download format in the script it might go faster. Wrong – without a kindle device registered – you can’t download the ONLY file (duh)…
Meanwhile, I am backing up and consolidating photos…. and will register a kindle tomorrow if I can convince the old one to charge enough.
