If you’re a fast reader, you can return an ebook from Amazon within 7 days of purchase really frickin easily. You can buy and return most popular books with a few clicks, without getting off your butt.
(Sigh.) It’s bad enough that you’ve chosen to defect; it’s downright evil to try to popularize the notion of defecting. The more people do this sort of thing, the more likely it is that Amazon changes their policies, affecting those of us who are co-operating (i.e., not exploiting the policy).
If you must obtain ebooks by extralegal means, there are such things as torrents and ebook sites, where you will find far more books than you will ever be able to read, and where you will only be committing copyright infringement, instead of infringement, wire fraud, theft of resources, and violation of that stupid US anti-hacking law that Aaron Swartz was being prosecuted under. (Oh, and let’s not forget the part where you just came pretty close to admitting that you’ve committed those crimes already.)
Advocating law-breaking on LW for ethical reasons might be one thing; advocating it for reasons of petty selfishness is quite another.
[Edited to add: this comment is not about protecting Amazon; it’s about 1) not promoting illegal activities on LW, and 2) it not being a good idea to get into a habit of defecting on agreements (whether social/informal or legal/formal because of self-serving rationalizations like, “they can afford it” or “I can get away with it”.]
(Sigh.) It’s bad enough that you’ve chosen to defect; it’s downright evil to try to popularize the notion of defecting. The more people do this sort of thing, the more likely it is that Amazon changes their policies, affecting those of us who are co-operating (i.e., not exploiting the policy).
Amazon can take care of itself. It doesn’t need your paternalistic moralizing intervention. If Amazon believes that on net having a policy that allows returns of possibly already consumed goods will produce more profit than a more defensive strategy then it can do so. Save your shaming for people who need your defence or who are being ‘expolited’ in a way that isn’t straightforward (albeit miserly) use of the deliberately included features of a powerful website.
Something actually ethical to recommend would be the use of calibre to convert and remove DRM and then returning the book while keeping it. That’s clearly illegal and something I incidentally haven’t done. I’ve never bothered looking in to the ‘return book’ kindle feature for those books I have purchased from amazon. (I just use that tool for the purpose of getting things into a format TextAloud can convert to mp3.)
(Sigh.) It’s bad enough that you’ve chosen to defect; it’s downright evil to try to popularize the notion of defecting. The more people do this sort of thing, the more likely it is that Amazon changes their policies, affecting those of us who are co-operating (i.e., not exploiting the policy).
If you must obtain ebooks by extralegal means, there are such things as torrents and ebook sites, where you will find far more books than you will ever be able to read, and where you will only be committing copyright infringement, instead of infringement, wire fraud, theft of resources, and violation of that stupid US anti-hacking law that Aaron Swartz was being prosecuted under. (Oh, and let’s not forget the part where you just came pretty close to admitting that you’ve committed those crimes already.)
Advocating law-breaking on LW for ethical reasons might be one thing; advocating it for reasons of petty selfishness is quite another.
[Edited to add: this comment is not about protecting Amazon; it’s about 1) not promoting illegal activities on LW, and 2) it not being a good idea to get into a habit of defecting on agreements (whether social/informal or legal/formal because of self-serving rationalizations like, “they can afford it” or “I can get away with it”.]
It would help you argument is you were not to invent quite ridiculous notions just to make something look more scary.
Amazon can take care of itself. It doesn’t need your paternalistic moralizing intervention. If Amazon believes that on net having a policy that allows returns of possibly already consumed goods will produce more profit than a more defensive strategy then it can do so. Save your shaming for people who need your defence or who are being ‘expolited’ in a way that isn’t straightforward (albeit miserly) use of the deliberately included features of a powerful website.
Something actually ethical to recommend would be the use of calibre to convert and remove DRM and then returning the book while keeping it. That’s clearly illegal and something I incidentally haven’t done. I’ve never bothered looking in to the ‘return book’ kindle feature for those books I have purchased from amazon. (I just use that tool for the purpose of getting things into a format TextAloud can convert to mp3.)