Public Service Announcement: Back up your e-books!

Wed, 19 Feb 2025 15:09:21 GMT

TL;DR: After February 26th, you will no longer be able to download books to your computer from that bookseller named after a river in Brazil. That means that you will not be able to back up your library to, say, a hard drive, or convert your books to a format you can read somewhere else.

Either of those would be a non-problem for people -- like me, until yesterday -- who only read books on their kindle, or the kindle app on their phone, and are comfortable with trusting $A to keep their books safely stored in the cloud. BUT, as pointed out in this article on Good E-Reader, they can no longer be trusted. They have been known to remove books from their store, and from the libraries of everyone who "bought" them, without notice, recourse, or recompense. They have also silently replaced books with modified (censored) versions.

You have until Tuesday the 25th to download your books.

After that you'll be able to sideload them onto a Kindle via USB, or use Calibre to remove the DRM and convert them to more portable ebook formats.

You can download books up to 25 at a time by putting them in collections. Not fun, if you have lots of books. Colleen and I had over 1000 between us. There is a bulk downloader: bellisk/BulkKindleUSBDownloader: Quick script to download all your Kindle ebooks. It's in Python and should be portable; the requirements can be installed with pip. It also needs Chromium. (Or Chrome, but you really don't want that.)

Good luck and happy hacking.

ETA: Claim Your Free COVID-19 Tests Now in Case the USPS Program Gets Shut Down - CNET

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COVID-19: Episode 11: Amazon VP Quits Over Firing of Whistleblowers

Mon, 04 May 2020 18:29:12 GMT

It isn't often that I see the name of someone I've met, and respect, in the lede of a New York Times article, but here you go:

Tim Bray, an engineer who had been a vice president of Amazon’s cloud computing arm, said the firings were “evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture.”
A prominent engineer and vice president of Amazon’s cloud computing arm said on Monday that he had quit “in dismay” over the recent firings of workers who had raised questions about workplace safety during the coronavirus pandemic.

But first go read his blog post - it's scathing. Here's a sample:

Management could have objected to the event, or demanded that outsiders be excluded, or that leadership be represented, or any number of other things; there was plenty of time. Instead, they just fired the activists.
Snap! · At that point I snapped. VPs shouldn’t go publicly rogue, so I escalated through the proper channels and by the book. I’m not at liberty to disclose those discussions, but I made many of the arguments appearing in this essay. I think I made them to the appropriate people.
That done, remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised. So I resigned.
The victims weren’t abstract entities but real people; here are some of their names: Courtney Bowden, Gerald Bryson, Maren Costa, Emily Cunningham, Bashir Mohammed, and Chris Smalls.
I’m sure it’s a coincidence that every one of them is a person of color, a woman, or both. Right?

Here are a couple more quotes:

at the end of the day, the big problem isn’t the specifics of Covid-19 response. It’s that Amazon treats the humans in the warehouses as fungible units of pick-and-pack potential. Only that’s not just Amazon, it’s how 21st-century capitalism is done.
[...]
Firing whistleblowers isn’t just a side-effect of macroeconomic forces, nor is it intrinsic to the function of free markets. It’s evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture. I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison.

The post links to other press coverage of Amazon's cavalier treatment of its warehouse workers during the pandemic.

Personal note: I met Tim at a Web conference twenty years or so ago, when I was working on an XML-based project at Ricoh -- Tim was one of the authors of the XML spec. Turns out he's also an environmental activist, and a signatory to an Open letter to Jeff Bezos and the Amazon Board of Directors calling for Amazon to adopt "an immediate company-wide plan addressing climate change". That's well worth a read, too.

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The Mandelbear's Musings

Public Service Announcement: Back up your e-books!

COVID-19: Episode 11: Amazon VP Quits Over Firing of Whistleblowers