so back in 2009 Amazon deleted 1984 from customers Kindles apparently the publisher who had listed the ebook didn't have the rights to it and so Amazon had to do something about all the copies that they sold and the solution they came up with was to just delete them from the Kindles the incident was kind of alarming because it showed that Amazon had the power not just to deliver content to your Kindle but to take it away and not just power I guess also the legal right to do so this isn't the only time something like
this has happened with Amazon in 2012 a woman lost all of her digital content when her Amazon account was suspended for violating the terms of service so she contacted Amazon about this and they got back to her via email I'm going to hold up my notes so I get the wording right here because in that email they said that Amazon reserves the right to refuse service terminate accounts remove or edit content or cancel orders at their sole discretion and then she was told that she shouldn't just start a new account but I would imagine if
Amazon had just taken all of your digital content you wouldn't want to start a new account so you could buy it again this could happen to anybody if you violate Amazon's terms of service and remember Amazon can change its terms of service whenever it wants they could suspend your account and then you would lose access to all of the books that you bought or music or movies but I've never really bought music and movies from Amazon what I have bought though is a Kindle and I have over a thousand books on this now I've been
using a Kindle for years I think my dad bought me my first Kindle when I was like 200 9 and so I've been reading on a Kindle for about 15 years and while the majority of my books are physical many of them are just off camera here in my studio I have read a ton of books on this Kindle and I've given Amazon a lot of money for it this is also true for audible I listen to audible on my phone sometimes and I have 310 books in my audible account so that meant that if
for some reason I ever lost my Amazon account I would lose access to just under 1,00 books either in ebook or audiobook form that is a lot of money so I want to go a little bit deeper into the problems that Amazon and Kindle and Audible and all this sort of pose for us and then I'm going to talk about what maybe we could do about it a spoiler there will be no big call for revolution at the end or overthrowing Jeff Bezos because I don't even own a pitchfork but I'll talk about some steps
that I personally going to take that maybe you might want to try taking too but we'll first talk about what makes buying an ebook kind of so weird so I was looking around on my shelf to see if I could find a copy of 1984 and I couldn't even though I know I own like three copies uh so I'm going to pick another book here that you often would read in high school and so the catcher and the Ry so suppose that you wanted to buy this book from me what you would do is you
would come and you would hand me money and we would agree on a price and then I would take the money and you would get the book and once you own the book you can can do whatever you want with it you could read this book you could lend it to a friend you could sell it you could even burn it you could try to eat it if you want you know it's not my copy anymore that's your business and that's because now this book would be your property and generally the idea is that barring
some exceptions that are usually codified in the law you can do whatever you want with this property going to slightly move this here so my Hegel statue is a little bit closer now you don't own the rights to 1984 in general just because you buy this copy so you can't make copies of it and sell it that was actually part of the problem with those digital bootlegs that were on Amazon that started off this video but in general your particular copy is yours and so you get to decide what you do with it but none
of this applies to an ebook that you buy at least from Amazon it doesn't apply to your audiobooks and it doesn't apply to actually the majority of the digital content that you buy even stuff that's not from Amazon um this would also be true for like steam if you buy video games there but we're talking just about Amazon here today cuz it's the one that's like relevant to me I wanted to make sure I was right about this so I looked at the Kindle terms of service and they are very clear that when you make
a purchase on Amazon what you are buying is not a copy of the book you are buying a license to access that book when you license something you acquire a much smaller set of Rights than when you purchase it and basically what you're doing is buying the sort of indefinite right to continue to access your content though as we've seen before with Amazon sometimes content just leaves its platform I think this happens most often with movies where films that you have bought through Amazon Prime suddenly are unavailable and that's because their agreement expired and so
your license is no longer honored and Amazon is actually able to change the terms of the license or what you're allowed to do with the content that you're licensing kind of whenever they want you used to be able to take a book that was on your Kindle and let someone else borrow it so you wouldn't be able to read it while they were reading it but you could let them borrow it and that was discontinued in 2022 so you actually lost a right to do something if you owned a lot of Kindle books suddenly the
books that you owned could only be read on your account or on someone who you were like Library sharing with and you could no longer just lend them out to friends so whatever right that you had licensed before you lost that right but because of the way that the terms of service are sort of worded that was totally legal and if Amazon ever figures out that for some reason that book shouldn't have been on your device as we saw with the case of 1984 they can just take it away and Amazon also has the right
to just change the content that they've already sold to you that sounds a little bit like a conspiracy theory so we're going to get clear on actually what I mean by that but first I'm going to take a moment and thank today's sponsor brilliant brilliant is a fantastic way for you to learn new things if you're interested in learning things like how to code or mathematics or probability statistics things like that then brilliant has something to offer you brilliant offers structured learning plans with bite-sized daily lessons that are going to make it easy for you
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link that's brilliant.org Jared Henderson or you could just click on the link down in the description you'll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription thanks again to brilliant for sponsoring this video so now we can talk about what I mean when I say that Amazon can change the content that's on your Kindle so I really love the fantasy series The Wheel of Time really like those books and in addition to physical copies that I've purchased I have all of them on my Kindle cuz that's how I like to read big beefy fantasy books because
I don't want to carry those books around and the other day I thought maybe I should start reading The Wheel of Time again it's about time that I could revisit that world and I went on my Kindle and I went to the very first book The Eye of the world and I noticed that something was a little bit different the cover had changed so it had gone from kind of a generic fantasy cover which I never really loved but at least I could recognize it and it was now a cover that was advertising Amazon Prime's
show The Wheel of Time which we're not going to going to talk about you want to talk about all the problems that the Wheel of Time show had a man carrying thing had a fantastic video about that maybe I'll link that down below along with my sources for this video so suddenly what I found was that the book cover was different and they've done this now to the first two books and I imagine as the series progresses they will continue to change the covers now a cover change is not the biggest deal in the world
uh but it is kind of a small example of what is possible I didn't choose to update my cover instead Amazon was just able to make that change and even if I don't like object to the change even if I don't think the change is a big deal because I have paid for something I like to assume that I have the right to decide if it changes or not I mean it sounds oversimplified but like it's mine damn it and I want to be able to decide if it changes but again that's not how Kindle
books work they are Amazon's digital files you just get to enjoy them while they let you do it Amazon says that if major changes are made they will actually ask readers in advance whether or not they want to make those changes and you're also allowed to opt out of changes in your settings as far as I can tell for opting out of changes it's sort of an All or Nothing thing uh but if I'm wrong about that someone could correct me down below so if I want to allow Amazon to change typos or formatting issues
I also have to allow them to make possibly content changes and even if Amazon says that they will always tell us in advance well Amazon gets to determine its own rules it basically all of the power is in their hands you know there was this trend in the publishing industry a couple of years ago and I don't know where it's gone since to take older books and just sort of revise them to remove like offensive content and I don't own any of the books that have been revised like this so I couldn't check to see
if my ebooks actually reflected that or if they were changed based on what the publisher had decided to do if I had purchased the books previously and then someone changed them I would be quite upset about that because those books were mine but again we have to remind ourselves they aren't yours they're just books that Amazon lets you read Because you paid them $9.99 but maybe I could like learn to tolerate some of this if it weren't for the fact that Amazon also is just really bad for the publishing industry and it's bad for authors
because of the fact that Amazon is sort of an effective Monopoly you know and even if they're not strictly a monopoly they have a lot of Monopoly like Powers Amazon is able to take huge cuts on digital sales and they're also able mostly for self-published authors to enforce exclusive ity as a way of telling you oh we we'll take less money as long as you promise to not sell your ebooks or your audio books on any other platforms so if you're going on Audible and you see those books that say audible exclusives the author and
Publishing Company make more money every time you buy one of those books but the cost of that is that you have to buy it or license it really let's be clear through Amazon or audible it's a good way for Amazon to ensure that it's like the only place people think about when they go to buy ebooks or audio books but the more concentrated all their power is for the publishing industry the less they actually have to pay authors or publishing companies and the less incentive they have to actually treat customers with respect or you know
to let us keep the things that we paid for so for me it really comes down to these three simple points I like to own what I pay for I like to be able to do what I want with the things that I own and I like companies that treat authors well and actually help sustain an industry that gets me all these things that I like to read I mean I spend most of my free time reading so I would actually like to you know support authors in the process and sometimes I want to support
authors even if I'm using something like this Kindle so the question is what are you going to do about it one option is to just stop listening to audiobooks and to stop reading ebooks and to buy only physical books from now on I like that option the majority of the books that I buy are physical but I have to admit I like ebooks a lot and I like audio books so I'd like to be able to do all of this if it's at all possible so we need to instead look for kind of other ways
I am looking for other places to buy audiobooks obviously you lose out on those audible exclusives but there's things like libro.fm I don't know a ton about them but that's another place to buy audiobooks that I think is friendlier to customers I'm also looking at other places to buy ebooks and that's kind of my first step which is to look for Alternatives I probably need to buy a new e-reader at some point I don't know much about non-k Kindle e-readers cuz I'm just so used to using a Kindle so if people have recommend recomendations for
those I would love to hear about them down below so get a new e-reader find new ways to get the digital content that also supports authors and actually lets me own my stuff and then I can move forward from there it will be significantly less convenient I might not be able to access every book that I'd like to access but I'll feel better about the decision in the long run as part of finding those Alternatives by the way I am looking to see if I can just totally replace affiliate links on my channel away from
Amazon and towards another place like there's a website called Bookshop I've heard good things I think they have an affiliate program so I can link to books that helps support the channel um and if I can get that to work I will replace Amazon links with Bookshop I'd say stay tuned as I try to figure it out if that's going to work but that would just be another way to support an Amazon alternative the second thing that I'm going to try to do is to embrace localism so on the one hand this could just mean
buying books from local bookstores I already do that quite a bit there's some great bookstores here in Austin um I go to them pretty regularly sometimes I have to buy books online because my local bookstores will not stock the books that I want to read but then I could look for Alternatives and not necessarily buy them from Amazon uh but we've already talked about Alternatives but when possible I will be trying to buy my books from local stores there's a second aspect to localism though which I guess you could call like digital localism I'm no
longer trusting a company like Amazon to store all of my content for me so I'm going to start storing it on my own going to embrace my sort of inner Lewis Rossman about this be really paranoid so ebooks audiobook files whatever it is that I could possibly own I will have it stored locally so that I can access it when I want and that way no giant Corporation could ever take that from me and then the third thing I'm going to try to do is just spread the word so I want to talk that's why
I wanted to make this video I know this video is not quite my usual content so I don't know if anybody cares what I have to say about this but I think it's important for people to realize just kind of how bad of a deal Amazon is both for you as a customer and for the authors people then other people could start looking for Alternatives and look for local Solutions like I'm talking about here because absent some like major regulations or a huge surge in competition against Amazon I don't even know how that would happen
anymore but absent that the situation isn't going to change so individuals like us have to figure out what we can do to maybe feel a little bit better about our book purchasing decisions I've been rambling for a while I don't even know how long this video is going to end up being I hope this was valuable I'd like to hear your thoughts I think it was at least coherent if it wasn't you can let me know but I look forward to hearing from you down below I'll talk to you soon