Rational rants

Amazon on the record: Device limits set by publishers

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Business & Technology

I queried Russ Grandinetti, vice president, Books, at Amazon about the lack of clarity about how many devices can access a Kindle book or how many times a buyer can expect to download a title from the Kindle Store. He referred me to Drew Herdener, director of communication at Amazon, who replied with the following:

Russ forwarded me your note. Thanks for your interest. To answer your question, there is no limit on the number of times a book can be downloaded to a registered device (i.e. Kindle, Kindle DX, iPhone). In the case where the publisher has chosen to apply DRM, there may be limits on the number of devices that can simultaneously use a single book. If a customer has upgraded or replaced their device(s), they can delete the content and deregister any device(s) no longer in use, which enables the customer to download to new registered devices.

So, to reduce the answer to its component parts:

Buyers may download an unlimited number of copies of a Kindle book title they have purchased to a registered Kindle device or iPhone (and, future supported devices) that are associated with the buyer's Amazon account,
unless a publisher has decided to impose a limit on the number of devices that may simultaneously have access to the title,
in which case, the user may go to their Manage My Kindle page and "deregister" a device to allow for downloading to a device that does not currently have an access to the book.

Publishers, not Amazon, make these decisions. Customers need information about device limits when buying, it should be displayed on the product page as a courtesy to customers. I still believe setting a higher limit than six is essential to making a book useful to a family. I have asked Drew several follow-up questions and hope to have a bit more soon on how customers can identify books with limits and whether there is a system-wide default limit on number of devices. A usability note based on this information: The Manage My Kindle page does not list either the number of devices on which a title may be accessed, nor the devices on which the title is currently is readable. Both would be helpful information, the latter because it should be possible to deactivate a device's access to a single title without wiping out the device's library—this is doubly important because only some of the titles in the Kindle Store come with simultaneous device limits. I may want to make a book accessible to my son's iPhone, for example, which would be the seventh registered Kindle device in our household, by taking it off my daughter's Kindle. If I disable all the titles on my daughter's Kindle by deregistering it, she'd be pretty disappointed, when all she wanted to do was share a book with her brother (not that she'd be in the mood to do that very often). ManageKindleitem

My roughly hewn mock-up of what this should look like in the Manage My Kindle library is displayed to the right. There is ample room in the Your Orders listings for a book to include a device listing that allowed per-device registration of the title. By checking the red box, one could deactivate the title on just one device, in this case "Dad's Kindle." Without per-device control of titles, the system effectively limits the number of devices a customer can use conveniently to the lowest number of devices on which they may want to read a DRM-limited title. That needs to change. And it is good that Amazon is listening. Cross-posted from Booksahead.com

posted by Mitch Ratcliffe
June 24, 2009 @ 5:30 pm

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