Technology

I am honestly surprised it took this long! Kindle has been around a long time and it's not like Amazon was any less evil back then. It makes me wonder if the competition has been starting to make them nervous!

Exactly this. As an idiot I purchase DRM music when Microsoft had its own music store. Some years later they closed it and there was no way to validate music keys.

But thankfully I still have an old Roxio9( I think) CD, and back then Roxio didn't know what DRM was and would take the mp3 and burn it to DVD anyway, bypassing the key check, then I would just rip it back off the DVD...DRM is useless

There's no impossible because if you can see it, it can be captured and digitized, but there is a level of complication that can make it unreasonable. They could make it unreasonable to crack the drm outright and require you to screenshot/OCR it. Then they can limit the OS to make to difficult to automate capture.

Bottom line, they're just kicking payers off their network when it's easier to pirate it than to buy it through their service.

Just wait until you can only stream books, not download them, with random words replaced with synonyms using an algorithm that lets them track down who the originator of any scanned copies is.

That might sound ridiculous, but streaming-only to prevent perfect copies and hiding purchaser identifiers in the data are both DRM techniques that have been explored in other media already. There's no limit to how anti-consumer publishers can get when they think there's slightly more money to be had.

Wait, can't you just load non-Amazon books on the Kindle? I thought this is only about the ability to redistribute books you buy from Amazon.

I mean I'd still sure like to hear if there's a good alternative. But if not, I think you can still use it, just don't buy Amazon books for it. Recommend researching first though.

Edit: I found a company called Kobo. 6 and 7 inch colour models available, as well as 6, 8, 10 inch black and white models. Marketing for the 6" Clara Colour model claims good repairability and iFixit seems to agree. And yes, the colour ones are still e-ink.

PocketBook if you want openness and long runtime (book-replacement), it runs plain Linux.

Kobo/Onyx if you want Android flexibility, with possibility to flash LineageOS/PostmarketOS (though they're slow for tablet use).

But personally, if you're not using it to transcript notes (recommendation Remarkable) or want more than merely reading books, i would go with a tablet.

Pocketbook readers are pretty nice

I have a super note, which is an eink tablet, reader, it's quite nice and drm free but a bit pricey.

How exactly does one suck a fuck?

Cannot recommend Kobo enough. You can jailbreak it if you like, but I didn't get much benefit from that personally. I'm partial to the overdrive integration, but if you're loading epubs you probably aren't using that. If in the US, I'd recommend at least setting it up, since it's pretty easy and maybe more immediate for some books, but obviously she won't get to keep the epub after.