Kindle books were actually pretty good, back when they could reliably be liberated. Unfortunately, that's no longer the case.

In general, I think that's also a point we can draw from the cyberpunk genre, or maybe from Harry Harrison's old-school prefiguration of it in the Stainless Steel Rat series - the eponymous creature being one well suited to thrive "within the walls" of a society increasingly sclerotized with technocratic bureaucracy, but perhaps equally suited to a life of gnawing through the circumscriptions imposed by competing technofeudalist fiefdoms.

Off-topic, but legitimately purchased Kindle ebooks can still be quickly and easily liberated for the purposes of DRM-free personal backups of owned content. I won't comment on whether Amazon find this acceptable, or if it is legal in any given jurisdiction, but it is definitely possible.

Thankfully it will (probably) never get as bad as Stallman described it[1], but you never know.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

This is precisely why I buy vinyl or music from Bandcamp, and choose the disc version of the PS5.

I view my digital purchases as things I am forever renting.

Those discs aren't going to do you much good if you don't have access to or have had access to PSN, since most games ship with a huge day 1 patch to fix all the issues between going gold and the date of sale.

Movies/Music/Books can be displayed and played back on damn near anything. Games, especially modern games, exist in both a variable state (constantly revised/updated), but also with a much more limited ability to access the content.

I lost a small number of games due to PlayStation support not being able to get around the fact that although I purchased some of them via PayPal, I also bought other games with a credit card. They could verify I owned the actual account and I answered all security questions but they still wouldn't fix whatever issue I had (this was at least 5 years ago so I forget particulars).

That experience forever turned me off to relying on digital-only.

To your points, having a PSN account is necessary but I can always create a new one if need be.

Whenever possible, I prioritize non-DRM media for purchase.

... You can't store MP3 files why? You're renting your hard drives, too?

I meant digital purchases with DRM or inside a digital store like Vudu or Amazon Prime.

I have yet to hear about the first amazon account ban.

I don’t think they’re really interested in that, since the accounts are almost by definition making them a bunch of money.

I once used to buy digital movies on Amazon and thought it was a great experience. Until my first vacation in Canada where I discovered I couldn't watch my movies. I called them and they said that my movies were region-locked to the United States. To their credit, they did refunded all of my digital purchases. I haven't bought anything digital from them since.

So, not an Amazon account ban, but you quickly learn you are not "buying" a movie, but renting it, sometimes with silly restrictions like "only from these IPs".

I'm having trouble understanding your point. Leaving aside simply googling it, surely you can't be saying that because you haven't heard of something, it doesn't exist or isn't a threat or isn't worth any concern.

That exact "logic" is extremely common in journalism, as well as on most social media platforms including this one.

If you think about it, this shouldn't be all that surprising - after all, this is exactly how intuition works, and the human mind runs very much on intuition, people just don't realize it (at the object level).

I've never heard of intuition so this must false. I'm sure I'd know about it otherwise.

Sometimes I get in a kind of a depressed funk, and then a comment like this comes along to refill my optimism-for-humanity tank.

Considering I have heard, and regularly hear of Facebook and Google account bans, my sample size seems large enough to conclude that either amazon account bans don’t happen, or nobody cares enough to make angry posts about it.

It’s still a concern because of the mechanics of the thing, but it appears less applicable for amazon at the moment.

It doesn't have to be an account ban. I've recently started playing games on my old Nintendo 3DS again and discovered that I've lost my Nintendo Network ID password and closed the associated email account. That leaves me in a state where I can't log out of the account on the console without losing the associated digital software licenses.

Not that that's Nintendo's fault but I think something like this will be the fate of every account that's not used, closed or deleted for a long time and owning your data and software possessions would protect against it.

https://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-banned-this-shopper-then-he... talks about it - the primary reason is for excessive returns. Alternatively, there are sellers as well that are more in danger.

There was the case when they remotely deleted the novel 1984 from a bunch of devices.

Ah, good one. I’d forgotten about that.