Ambient Irony

Tuesday, May 07

Intercourse The Penguin: A Critique Of Artificial Scarcity In A Post-Scarcity Economy

If you subscribe to a magazine electronically on Amazon, they will delete your back issues after six months "for your convenience".

Yes, they actually say that. They delete your property for your convenience. If you go searching for why your back issues - THAT YOU HAVE PAID FOR - seem to be missing, you find that in the fine print on "How magazine subscriptions work". A shorter and more accurate explanation would have been "They don't."

And if you think that smacks of doublespeak, don't forget that this is the company that made news by deleting unauthorised copies of 1984 off customer's devices.

I've sent a complaint to Amazon; it's hard enough to even find how to do that these days. I was very good and didn't swear... Much at all.

But, frankly, FUCK DRM in all its forms.

I may expand on this subject once I have calmed down a little.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:20 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 164 words, total size 1 kb.

I bet what they were thinking is that they'd accumulate in the Kindle's limited memory, so they're expiring them automatically as a help to people.

But older issues should still be available from the cloud. It's not as if storage there is a problem.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tuesday, May 07 2013 03:19 AM (+rSRq)

2 Sadly, no. That would be merely pointless (these magazines are mostly text and less than 1MB each) instead of inexcusable.

The back issues have been deleted from both the Kindle app and the cloud. One or the other might be understandable - either your device keeps six months worth, or it keeps everything but you have a six month window to download issues as they came out.

But no, it's both. And if you cancel your subscription, they delete all the back issues from your account anyway.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, May 07 2013 01:59 PM (PiXy!)

So, what's their angle? Do they sell "permanent" bundles of back-issues separately?

Not much sense in taking away your stuff if they aren't going to re-sell it back to you, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't do it anyway.

(i.e. are they maliciously evil, or just capriciously evil?)

Posted by: Mikeski at Thursday, May 09 2013 04:05 PM (Zlc1W)

4 I believe you can actually lock individual back issues to keep.

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, May 09 2013 09:14 PM (cZPoz)

5 Mauser - I did that. It deleted them. With the new version of the Kindle app, that ability has been deleted too.

Mikeski - right now, I don't know what they hell they think they're playing at.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, May 10 2013 02:22 AM (PiXy!)

6 I suppose it's too late for the lost issues, but going forward, can you strip the DRM and save them separately somewhere so Kindle can't eat them?

Posted by: RickC at Friday, May 10 2013 10:40 AM (WQ6Vb)

7 Possibly. It won't let me download them to my PC, DRMed or otherwise, which would make it easy.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, May 10 2013 10:41 AM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Comments are disabled. Post is locked.

41kb generated in CPU 0.013, elapsed 0.1015 seconds.
56 queries taking 0.0925 seconds, 211 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.

Tuesday, May 07

Praise for Ambient Irony

Contact Support

Contact Pixy

Business News

Search Thingy

Recent Comments

Topics

Monthly Traffic

Content

Categories

Archives

A Fine Selection of Aldebaran Liqueurs

That Ol' Janx Spirit

Mostly Harmless

MuNu Blogroll

Dish of the Day

Feeds