Millions of us purchase ebooks through Amazon Kindle.
Most do not realize that the terms of service for Amazon Kindle permit Jeff Bezos to:
(a) not only track your purchases but your reading (it's partly how I, as an author, gets paid, but it obviously has other uses);
(b) Amazon can literally yank any book out of your library at any moment without warning; what you purchase with Kindle is not the content but access to the content only;
(c) Amazon can literally edit/change the contents of any book at any time you sync your library and you CANNOT go back to the old version. I use this, as an author, to correct typos and small errors in my own books, but I have a friend who literally rewrote a character arc in one of his own books -- in a way I hated -- and I could never get back to the old one).
Plus, under the Patriot Act, Amazon complies with any and all government requests for information.
Except for my escapist reading of a few authors, I have stopped acquiring books on Kindle, but Facebook would not let me tell you about my alternative.
It's this: Anna's Archive. Anna's literally is
the largest truly open library in human history. ⭐️ We mirror Sci-Hub and LibGen. We scrape and open-source Z-Lib, DuXiu, and more. 📈 42,295,586 books, 36,486,718 papers — preserved forever. All our code and data are completely open source.
You do not have to purchase a membership to try it out, just select Slow Download #1 as your download option. The only thing slow is that it will give you a wait time of up to 5-6 minutes to start your download. If you like it, then I would recommend a membership.
Most books are available in multiple file types -- epub, pdf, mobi, etc. -- but if one isn't there are any number of cheap, simple eBook converter apps out there.
I used to use libgen, but it is constantly under attack, and on any given day it can take you 10-15 minutes to figure out what mirror sites are working. Anna's, so far, has been stable, although I am sure it will come under attack at some point. And then we will adapt again.
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