The more you have in universal mediums, the better off you will be in the long term.

I like BlueSky, even though people behave the same as they ever did.

The lede: Bookshop is now selling ebooks, and the proceeds from ebook sales goes to local, independent booksellers. Supporting indie brick-and-mortar’s has always kind of been Bookshop.org’s thing. Bookshop exists in direct opposition to Amazon.

So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the majority of the initial rhetoric is: “but what about my Kindle?”

Credit where it is due: Amazon created a great eReader with the kindle and it helped grow the ebook market to where it is today. Since they were focused on the reading experience, few other devices compare. At least, that was the case for a long time. I love my Boox Palma.

But the saturation of Kindle’s meant Amazon got their chokehold on the industry. If you wanted to sell an ebook, it had to be on Amazon if it was going to sell at all. Their platform, their eReader, their readers, their sale.

And now that other options are coming about, customers are wondering what to do with the libraries they’ve purchased on their closed-garden devices. I wish there was an easy answer. Kindle books are made for the kindle app. ePub and PDFs can be side-loaded into Amazon devices, but rarely will you find one ebook retailer making their product available for downloading to a different device they don’t own.

No surprise, this is the cost of convenience. At first you love the friction-less experience of getting what you want, but to prevent the enshittification of the product the overall cost keeps climbing until it’s not worth it anymore. And with the state of the world, it’s not worth giving a monopolistic platform that creates billionaires another red cent.

I killed off my Amazon account a few months ago. After I got over the “oh, I need another X” and trying to open the app to order it, I hardly miss anything about it. Of all things, shopping for what I need (and the definition of “need” is vastly different when you aren’t using Amazon) is a far better experience.

We’re already seeing this with streaming platforms. The music you love today might be removed from your favorite platform in an instant (Own your music!). Most platforms have wholly incomplete catalogs and regurgitate the same tracks in a “we swear it’s not payola” scheme. It was convenient, until it wasn’t. Your favorite TV show is on Netflix today but will soon lose the license as yet another network pushes out its own streaming service to get a bigger bite of ad revenue.

When you subscribe, you don’t really own anything beyond access to whatever is currently available.

This is a great time to pick up an MP3 player. Hell, it might be a good time for someone to kickstart an MP3 player product – something modular and easy.

It’s a good time to find devices that aren’t dependent on a specific bit of software to use. Hell, it might be time to learn how to jailbreak and reformat devices so they can be used more universally.

Either we take ownership of stuff today, or we take the blame for not having anything worthwhile tomorrow.