Noted science fiction author and copyfighter Cory Doctorow is never one to shy away from a fight, and it appears a recent problem experienced by Kindle users has irked him something fierce. As Gear Diary’s Judy Lipsett discovered, some Kindle books have limitations placed on the number of times a book may be downloaded to various devices (a Kindle, the Kindle for iPhone device):
The customer rep asked me to send every one of the books in my Amazon library to my iPhone. Most of them gave the message that they were sent but a number of them returned the message “Cannot be sent to selected device”.
“Oh that’s the problem,” he said “if some of the books will download and the others won’t it means that you’ve reached the maximum number of times you can download the book.”
…
He proceeded to tell me that there is always a limit to the number of times you can download a given book. Sometimes, he said, it’s five or six times but at other times it may only be once or twice. And, here’s the kicker folks, once you reach the cap you need to repurchase the book if you want to download it again.
What’s worse is that you have no way of knowing the number of times the book may be downloaded to a device before or even after you purchase a book. Which is all, of course, it took to set Cory off:
The news about a secret limit on downloads is part of #3: we found out the hard way that Amazon can revoke your Kindle’s ability to read your ebooks aloud after you’ve bought them. Now we discover that there is a secret counter that limits your refreshes of your Kindle library (say, across multiple Kindle devices as you upgrade, or replace lost, broken or defective units).
It may be that the market would be willing to pay Kindle book prices for books with these restrictions (and whichever other ones are lurking in the shadows), but it’s just not fair or right for a company that prides itself on being customer-centered to refuse to tell you what you’re buying when you buy its ebooks.
Too true. Amazon may have been able to placate the Author’s Guild over the text-to-speech debacle, but it may not be able to placate customers. And of course, it remains to be seen if this practice runs afoul of the law.