I have had the most stressful evening today. After trying to purchase a case for an upcoming delivery of a very special e-ink tablet, amazon has decided to have some beef with me.

For context - they have been denying the purchases of ebooks recently and today they kicked me out of logged devices and apps - kindle and audible included. Then came a request to change password, which I obliged to, but it turned out that all my downloaded books were not downloaded anymore. The same with audiobooks. And dictionaries.

I quickly turned Viwoods AIPaper mini into an offline back up for everything, so I won’t loose my library, at least. The 4 ebook preorders-orders for the year were all cancelled without notification. 

Such a nice situation, eh. The reason might be me not being the perfect customer - I only subscribe to prime once or twice a year for a month and this May they have charged for the new cycle with this thing actually being cancelled three weeks before. 

For the past couple of months, I have been using other sources for ebooks - numilog for French (the app is horrible, though) and ebooks.com, but still the biggest chunk of my digital library came from Bezos. Well, not anymore. The Universe has spoken and I don’t want to wait till these guys close my account. I have more than 150 books in total, many used for re-referencing stuff, so these licences are important to behold. As it is not possible to calibre the fuck out of kindle books anymore, there was no choice other than to "brick" a whole device (which is actually good for the battery, won’t lie).

The story with the case is interesting, though - I found it on another website for more than half the price. So it all made me think a bit harder and come to a decision to avoid amazon for good. 

It used to be cheaper and more convenient, but not anymore. 

There is a whole other level of unethical and barbaric working conditions, which I tried to ignore and now am ashamed of. Should have purged it all earlier.

P.S. the guys on Reddit have been most helpful and suggested some other cool resources for ebooks, merci beaucoup ☺️ 

P.P.S. Asterix stuff had to wait, hopefully, tomorrow will be a bit more merciful in terms of time.

I almost never buy physical books anymore. The only exception: they are not available as ebooks, which mostly concerns literature in my mothertongue. What's more, some of those books are written and published by "enemies of the state". In this case, I never think twice:

And, as a rule of thumb, it is preferable to buy indie, so I order such precious paper bricks at Babel Books Berlin. The hand-written card is always there and it makes me believe in humanity again, such small and nice gesture!

The book on the left is the second updated edition of a non-fiction by an iranist about Iran. I read the first one a couple of years ago and want to see how much has changed. The one on the right is about British fantasy, once my special interest at high school. This book is visually absolutely stunning, no regrets that it has no ebook format.

This "haul" stands no comparison with those done on booktok and booktube, but it has indescribable value.

There is a small lifehack to use in my library: twice a week or so, they massively add new books. First came first served principle. Otherwise, it’ll take weeks to get some of those books, if not months. So, I diligently look through the “newest added” section. Today those 3 were added and I have downloaded them on my Pocketbook. If you look at the screenshot, in pinkish red are the prices for Kindle (I didn’t check kobo store or ebooks.com, but it can’t be very far apart). 56,45€. The library card is 10€ per year.

Yeah, no conclusions needed here 🥸

p.s. 99 ways has been on my wish list for a while, so I am glad even more