Tuesday 18 February 2025: Another proprietorial move

Over my first dirty cuppa of the morning I once again read a daily newspaper (on Readly). This does seem to be becoming an easy habit, which is good. Perhaps I’m feeding my tech devices fix whilst weaning myself off games and wasting time in general. I also seem to be getting through the paper quicker, picking and choosing which stories I actually want to read.

I fed the birds, folded some washing, put a washload through and hung that up, then put another load through. Then I made us both another cuppa (me, dirty; him, clean) and joined him in the office where he was already on a Teams call. When he’d finished that, I asked him to reset the internet router and booster because, to be honest, our internet has been almost complete pants for months now. 

The roads are up all around our village. We are 3 villages really, and the roads have been up in between us all too. They’re putting in fast, high speed broadband. But you can bet we won’t be among the first to actually get access to it. We’ll probably be among the last, actually, when it’s us who’ve had to put up with the inconvenience.

I finished the last few paragraphs of yesterday’s blog and got it posted, then fired off a query to the Pixabay forum asking why we can’t choose to hide AI images any more. I also posted a comment on the Fluff Busting Purity FB page that ‘Sponsored’ and ‘Paid Partnership’ aren’t currently being hidden from my feeds.

By the time I’d done a quick email declutter and shared yesterday’s blog post to BlueSky, I’d had a reply from Pixabay! We can choose to hide AI still, they’ve just moved it to a different menu. Excellent service, there. And I don’t just mean because they still have the option. I mean because someone bothered to come back to me in the first place. Unlike FB Purity, who did reply but was so rude (and not just to me) I deleted my comment.

I added a bit more to today’s blog and fully intended on cracking on with writing and/or editing, but I found out, quite by chance, that those lovely Amazon people have another one of their nasty tricks up their sleeves. From 26 February, we can no longer transfer ebooks to our readers via a USB cable…Instead, we have to send them via wi-fi to registered devices.

Well, thanks for that. I immediately downed tools, swapped to PC (I know where they are on the PC), and went to collect every single book I’ve ever bought from Kindle, downloaded them, opened them in Calibre, and successfully converted all but 3 of them. For the record, I apparently have more than 7,000 ebooks on my Kindle account. Most of those had already been converted before I swapped to the Mac, which left around 900. 

I backed up ‘My Kindle Content’ to external hard drive, then I started to work through Calibre, removing any duplicates and naming any that had only brought a reference number with them. I didn’t get through them all by the end of the day, but I don’t have many left and when I’ve done, those will also be saved to a directory on the external drive. 

This proprietorial move by Amazon isn’t going to stop ebook piracy. The pirates are already way ahead of the game. The only people it will hurt are the writers and authors who will see their sales diminish. Consumers like me have already stopped buying books from Amazon. I buy them from Google Play Books or Kobo now, or I get them via Bookfunnels or direct from publishers and/or writers. Real books I buy from real bricks-and-mortar book sellers. And I’m seriously contemplating removing all of my own ebooks from Kindle. 

So that took up the entire remainder of the day. This morning I will do work, and when I’ve ticked all of my boxes, I’ll go back and finish the Calibre job. Once they’re on the Seagate, I can collect them, via Google Drive if necessary, and transfer them to any reader I own and onto the Crucial hard drive. I’m keeping my latest Paperwhite for the NetGalley books I still have to read. But in future, if it doesn’t come in a generic epub format, I’m not buying it.