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Hear me out: what if our outrage over an apparent Amazon Kindle Software update and DRM for ebooks is wildly overblown?
I'm not talking about the recent Kindle update that reportedly strips away the ability to remove DRM (Digital Rights Management) from downloaded books. While you might argue that there's good reason to maintain this ability, I say writers gotta get paid, and the edge cases of needing to remove electronic rights controls don't add up to a good enough one to undermine authors' ability to make money off their works.
Instead, I want to talk about the reported change that initially really ground my gears: decommissioning the "WiFi workaround." This refers to the commonly used Airplane Mode trick for reading a digitally borrowed book long after the loan ends.
As an avid reader and Kindle owner, I have relied on this workaround for years. Here's how it works: I visit the Libby app and peruse my local library's books. Overdrive's app is, by the way, still one of the best things to ever happen to Kindle reading.
Instead of buying every book I want to read, I check them out from my library. I borrow the book through Libby; it connects me to Amazon's vast book library, where I sign in to get a digital edition delivered to my Kindle.
On the Kindle, I make sure it's connected to the internet, update my bookshelf, and start reading. Loans usually last two weeks.
When I'm on vacation, I can finish three or four books in a week. When I'm working, I mostly read at night in bed and only get through a few pages before falling asleep (don't judge me). This happens every night, which means that, instead of reading a book in days, it can take me weeks or even months.
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To make sure I can still read the book after the loan ends, I turn off my Kindle's WiFi and set it to Airplane Mode.
This is such a well-known workaround that when I called my local library to ask about it, the guy at the resources desk knew immediately what I was talking about.
"It's a well-known hack," he told me without enthusiasm.
I asked if I should be concerned that, since I wasn't "returning" my digitally loaned book on time, I was holding up anyone else's loan.
"I wouldn't worry about it," he told me, adding, "It's not gonna bother anyone else."
Basically, it doesn't matter if I took any action to return the book. The library has already reclaimed the DRM for that book and is ready to loan it out to someone else.