That was an absolute killer feature for me, and I was also recommending Logos because of that to friends with Kindles.
Why is that no longer possible? Will it be possible again in the future?
I'm a bit confused as to why people are confidently assuming this is Amazon's fault and not FaithLife's. Maybe I'm missing something, but where has it been established that the issue is with Amazon and not with FaithLife and it's deals with publishers?
I wrote this on this forum back in Oct 2014:
"You may not use the Service to send infringing, unauthorized, or otherwise illegal content."
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201124320
Would sending an entire book be considered "infringing content" by Amazon?
I am looking at it from Amazon's perspective. Does Amazon know about this and approve?
My point is Amazon would have no idea what contracts have been negotiated with Logos. They may see it as a competitor using their servers to store books that weren't bought from Amazon. Or a user storing "infringing works" on their servers. I would not want Amazon to shut down my account because of this.
From their Terms and Conditions:
"We may discontinue the Service or your participation in the Service at any time in our sole discretion. The permission we grant you to use the Service automatically terminates if you do not comply with these Terms."
The option to export books manually via the export function is just terrible.
When you purchase a resource from Logos, you are actually purchasing a license. This is true of ALL electronic media (i.e. Kindle, iTunes, etc.). As part of that agreement, FL is responsible for taking appropriate measures to ensure unauthorized usage does not occur. FL is very generous to work hard so that as many of your resources are available on as many devices as possible. Even still, some publishers and copyright holders put restrictions on your licenses. For example: Some resources aren't available within the mobile apps. Others are available on mobile, but not on biblia.com (or the LN web app). When these restrictions are in place, it is because the copyright holder won't allow FL to do so.
The implementation of "send to kindle" did provide some safeguards... although I don't know how copyright holders would view them. The biggest safeguard was that the "set kindle address" function only worked one time for the end user. If the user could keep switching email addresses, what would stop someone from buying a book and sending a copy to all of his friends? Worse, the user could sell books to others!
You asked about exporting to .mobi... what would prevent users from passing copies around or selling them?
I was surprised that FL even made this feature in the first place... although I was very glad for it and am very disappointed that it's ending. Users frequently asked if "send to kindle" status could be added to the product page... but that was never really an option. FL has the reputation of over promising at times, but they were certainly conservative about this feature. There were no advertisements (that I am aware of) featuring "send to kindle."
Yes, you buy the license. But you end up having the files anyway. I can just connect my Kindle to my PC right now, copy all the files from my Kindle to the PC, convert them to whatever format I want via Calibre and send them to all my friends anyway. So the files are at the users already with the Send-to-Kindle feature. The possibility to download the epub/mobi file would not change anything...
If amazon decided to cancel, then there's nothing FL can do about it.
But FL was able to postpone it due to user response, so it's not true that FL can do nothing. If Amazon decided to cancel it at the end of March, then how come FL had the leeway to keep send-to-kindle another couple weeks? Why can't they postpone it even longer?
Intellectual property licensing is a very complex space wrought with landmines. There may have been a little wiggle room on the cutoff date but I believe FL is doing the best that they can do with both the technological and legal constraints they have been presented with. It can be argued that they created this feature on unstable techno/legal platform, but I do believe they wouldn't revoke it without some very good reasons. I am sad as everyone else especially since the Kindle platform was the only way that my legally blind wife can read the material (font sizes are bigger on Kindle). Also, this fragmentation from a DRM perspective is extremely frustrating to the consumer especially when most of the technologies are easily bypassed. I hope that FL will be able to develop a new solution that allows us to read our resources on e-ink devices, but I think that this hope is in vain for the short term.
Baen and Pragmatic are also facing issues with the "send-to-kindle" feature and have viable workarounds (download and email it yourself), but as publishers they, at least, have the flexibility to decide on when/where/how their published works are copied. FL, hopefully, will decide to this with the works they own (Lexham) and hopefully demonstrate to the publishers that there is a net win to not over-restricting the use of your published works.
This may provide a clue as to what is happening behind the scenes:
http://the-digital-reader.com/2016/02/07/no-send-to-kindle-wont-help-vanquish-amazon/
If amazon decided to cancel, then there's nothing FL can do about it. But FL was able to postpone it due to user response, so it's not true that FL can do nothing. If Amazon decided to cancel it at the end of March, then how come FL had the leeway to keep send-to-kindle another couple weeks? Why can't they postpone it even longer?
Because is part of the secret contract you and I are not allowed to see 😂
then how come FL had the leeway to keep send-to-kindle another couple weeks?
Because when companies make contractual changes such as these there is usually a transition period. We do not know what the "drop dead" date is for Faithlife.
No skin off of my back as I never used the feature to begin with. If you want to read your FL books on a tablet then buy a Surface Pro,a 2 in 1 computer or some tablet that can handle FL books.
I see this as an Amazon issue not a FL issue. If there is a problem take it up with Amazon not FL.
then how come FL had the leeway to keep send-to-kindle another couple weeks? Because when companies make contractual changes such as these there is usually a transition period. We do not know what the "drop dead" date is for Faithlife.
That doesn't make sense. If there was a different "drop dead" date, why did Fathlife choose March 31st initially? Why not choose the drop date itself? Or did they have another reason for cutting us off sooner?
That doesn't make sense
Er .. ah ... have you worked in a business that had dependencies on other businesses? In payroll for example, when banks merged we had to do a conversion of all employees accounts that had direct deposit into the bank that was "disappearing". We had a drop dead date where the new bank would not be able to process our direct deposits. We had the payroll before that which was our last possible chance to make the change and handle problems if there were a mass failure. Then we had the target payroll where if there was a problem, no one would even notice. Guess what we scheduled for.
That doesn't make sense Er .. ah ... have you worked in a business that had dependencies on other businesses? In payroll for example, when banks merged we had to do a conversion of all employees accounts that had direct deposit into the bank that was "disappearing". We had a drop dead date where the new bank would not be able to process our direct deposits. We had the payroll before that which was our last possible chance to make the change and handle problems if there were a mass failure. Then we had the target payroll where if there was a problem, no one would even notice. Guess what we scheduled for.
Yes, if you have to direct deposit money, and it fails, you could have a major financial crisis. And this is analogous to allowing Logos customers to download books to Kindle because ... why?
There is no money involved, so there's nothing catastophic that could happen. And a typical "mass failure" for computers is that a server would go down, but if anything, that would actually help the goal of disabling that feature. What sort of "mass failure" are you thinking about that would necessitate Logos disabling send-to-kindle early?
Because of exactly what happened ... the email warning users failed to go out. And to insure that the software without the capability is vetted independently of the actual pulling of the plug ... to avoid conflicts with other activities ...
FL still has not issued an official statement why the feature will be retired. Up to that point you are just speculating. And just shifting the blame to Amazon does not help at all at this point. FL should really explain whats going on and what they´re gonna do about this situation. Imho the best solution would be to, as other users already suggested, offer an option to send the books to your personal email adress as a .mobi/.epub/.azw --> That way you can just forward them to your kindle yourself. As I see it there should be no copyright issues, because you bought the license and other Bookshops do it like that as well. Also I think such an option would not be hard to integrate at all into Logos.
If FL tells us they are gonna do that, I would be happy. Otherwise I´m just sending my whole library (>1´500 books) to my Kindle during the next two weeks and copy the Files on my Computer, just to be sure...
FL still has not issued an official statement why the feature will be retired.
The official announcement of that step started with the official statement why:
Due to a combination of technical, legal, and permission issues outside our control, we're going to retire the send-to-Kindle feature
points to consider:
For all those reasons I don't think Faithlife is playing bad here, but don't expect to get more details about things we can't do anything about in the firstplace.
Imho the best solution would be to, as other users already suggested, offer an option to send the books to your personal email adress as a .mobi/.epub/.azw --> That way you can just forward them to your kindle yourself.
This solution exists, you can just use a S2K printer or print to a file you then bring over to your kindle in the format you like. I think that the current size limit for that is probably a very user-friendly reading of the contracts between Faithlife and the publishers, which I am pretty certain do not allow the proliferation of non-DRM'd mobi files.
Otherwise I´m just sending my whole library (>1´500 books) to my Kindle during the next two weeks
This would probably kill the service for all other users that want to use the grace-period to bring over a couple of books they really want for some good reasons. Not the most Christian way of handling all this...
Not the most Christian way of handling all this...
Interesting way to look at this. FL is first and foremost a business, involved with publishing / providing Christian material.
You can turn the "blame card" always on the other side, and accuse them of not being / acting Christian, when some party is not getting their acts together. But then the question might be asked, whether it is more "Christian" to charge more for identical books, when they are provided within the FL ecosystem, instead of, say Amazon.
In the end, if he bought most of his material to be read on a reading device outside of the FL / logos-world, and this option was clearly announced prior to buying into this system (as it was with L6), then why should he not use his right to recover what soon might be lost (and no, please not another lecture on how to use the print/export method and waste useful hours for something, that can be done in seconds...)
