Do you own ebooks?

To start with, I want to explain something most people don’t know when they buy ebooks from Amazon and other retailers. You don’t own the ebook you purchase. Yes, that’s right! You’ve never owned those ebooks; you only have a license to use and read them. This has always been in Amazon’s TOS but who actually reads those?

Amazon has rectified this by adding this wording under the buy button; By placing your order, you’re purchasing a license to the content and you agree to the Kindle Store Terms of Use. Amazon is generally not about transparency so it’s good that they’ve finally done this.

Drink up me hearties yo ho!

This download feature has led to a whole lot of pirating over the years and while I truly do understand wanting to download your ebook so Amazon can’t take it away (Yes, they’ve been known to do that) or close your account and thereby also keeping the book from you, the problem with pirating and Amazon isn’t so much that authors are being screwed out of rightfully earned money, it’s that Amazon punishes Kindle Unlimited authors when their books are pirated…

Yes, even if their books have only ever been available on Amazon and the pirates therefore has to have gotten the ebooks from Amazon. Amazon can close an author’s publishing account and they will keep the author’s earnings/royalties, too. Double whammy, isn’t it? You lose your source of income as well as two to three months worth of income.

I have seen the saying, ‘If I can’t own it, it isn’t piracy’ going around and it breaks my heart. First of all, you’ve never owned the actual ebook to begin with. Only the license. It has always been this way. Second, you’re only hurting authors by pirating, not Amazon. They’re still making bank while authors earn less and less.

This isn’t much better than when I saw people pushing readers to get Kindle Unlimited at a steal and then read as much as possible to punish Bezos and Amazon. Fun fact, that only hurts authors. If you want to know how and why, I have a blog post all about it. You can read about how Kindle Unlimited actually works here.

Where did it start?

There’s a lot of book piracy, especially using Amazon, and how do they get these books to pirate? They download them. So why was downloading ebooks to your computer even an option to begin with?

Back when Amazon came out with the Kindle, they did not have an internet connection and thus you had to download your ebooks to your computer, put them on a USB drive, and transfer them manually to your Kindle.

As Kindles have now had Wi-Fi for many years, this feature no longer makes sense to keep, especially considering that people use the feature to pirate ebooks.

You may be asking, why do people still download their ebooks then? They can’t all be pirates! You’d be correct. Generally, there are two reasons. One, they want a backup of their ebook in case they lose access to their Amazon account or Kindle. Two, because they use a different device to read on than Amazon’s and need to download the file to send it to that device.

Want to own your ebooks?

Do I believe that you should absolutely retain the right to keep the ebook you purchased? Of course! It should be yours to do with as you please within the law (piracy is a criminal offense).

Is this not a perfect segway to push readers to purchase directly from authors? When you do, you have to download the book in order to send it to your device so that you can read it. And you’re supporting authors much more than if you bought on any retailer. I don’t know about you guys but to me this seems much more like a win win situation!