Amazon has revised the text when purchasing a Kindle e-book on its online store. You do not own the book you bought but are licensing it. It used to say “By clicking on above button, you agree to Amazon’s Kindle Store Terms of Use.” However, the text in the USA has been changed to “By placing your order, you’re purchasing a license to the content and agree to the Kindle Store Terms of Use.”
This text has been fully rolled out in the past few weeks. This is likely because the new California law (AB 2426) requires companies to disclose that “digital” purchases are just licenses. The revised terms of use are only displayed to customers in the United States. Residents of Canada, the UK, and other international markets continue to see the old text.
This is not a policy shift from Amazon for the US; they are more upfront about it now. Amazon has always licensed the digital content to users, so anything purchased does not mean the user owns it, they just bought a license. This is why Amazon reserves the right to remove any books from any Kindle for any reason. This has occurred numerous times, with such popular titles as 1984, when a rights issue was at play.
No actual ownership of e-books has been in the forefront of the tech news industry lately. Amazon announced that it would kill off the USB File Transfer system for Kindle books that are stored on a user’s computer on Feb 26th. People used this system for backup purposes to ensure their “purchases” were always around, just in case. However, it is now nearly impossible to back up e-books anymore since Amazon patched the ability to do it on Amazon for PC and keeps issuing firmware updates to remove the new jailbreak methods that pop up occasionally.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.