As somebody who wrote a book in the past, yes, this. Give Amazon no money. If you want to spend money because pirating makes you feel bad, send a few bucks to the author, buy something on the publisher's store, or go to your local book store and spend some money there.

But never feel bad about not sending money to Amazon.

If you read what follows, he makes it very clear he intends to do more or less what you suggest

Right? I never understood why people think it's morally right to buy books/movies/music from predatory service providers

I ended up migrating to ebooks.com and importing them into Calibre (after some work to get Adobe Digital Editions to import nicely) and using that to manage my Kindle. Did the same with my old Amazon library too when they were talking about stopping you exporting the azw3's

Assuming the author and publisher are not evil, you want to at least give them their legitamate cut.

Or buy it literally from anybody other than Amazon.

I went to kobo when my Kindle told me if would no longer work. Now I don't buy anything from Amazon

Actually if authors could sell directly I’ll gladly buy from them each and every time and cut off the middle man.

The next sentence says:

> And it can hardly escape anyone’s notice that I would achieve exactly the same end-state — the book on my Kindle — if I just skipped the first two stages.

Came here to complain about this workflow too.

If you don't want to resort to piracy, there are many vendors that sell epubs with weak DRM and presumably give money to publishers. Ebooks.com is one. If you have not already, I would recommend looking into calibre for managing such titles.

(I did this even when I used to buy from Kindle, first thing I would do is break the DRM and put it into calibre even if I was only reading on Amazon devices, because I never trusted Amazon in the first place. But supposedly the DRM breaking flow is broken with new kindle releases.)

Or just buy an actual book from and independent bookshop.

Did you read to the end of that list and then close the article?

>Cut out the middlemen. Torrent it and send the author some money.

If this is the ideal model, why don't authors skip the middleman themselves and just put the .pdf/.epub on their website directly in exchange for donations?

On the same note, why do game devs need to give Steam 30% of their money and not just sell to the public directly and pocket the 30%?

Maybe because those middlemen platforms provide a combination of discoverability, user review rating system, network effect, convenience, and trusted return policy at scale that's valuable to both consumers and developers/authors enough for both parties to tolerate it as the status quo even if it's not perfect, it's just good enough to be the default.