And I like swiss cheese on my ham sandwiches. Oh, sorry, I thought we were just saying non sequitors.

In all seriousness, that is not an answer to the question. Yes, some (often older) people will always use a search engine to find the same website they browse all the time. But search engines are also incredibly valuable for finding new things or verifying claims. I have a bookmark for the Warframe wiki but that doesn’t help me when I want to research different monitor energy efficiencies or find a repair guide for my toaster oven.

And while people CAN collect a set of (searchable) websites for different topics they are interested in… that is how we got into (one of) our current mess(es). How many people just use reddit for everything and thus make themselves vulnerable to corporate shittery and misinformation campaigns.

I haven’t checked this week (yay, might already be too late) but my understanding is that amazon only disabled the web interface to download ebooks to a computer.

Using the (Windows) Kindle for PC App at a sufficiently old version was still working last week even after people had claimed the web interface was disabled.

It is only a matter of time but it is also something that the vast majority of people are too computer illiterate to do so it is probably going to be a decent amount of time. Cost amazon more to disable it than to let people do it.

To my knowledge, Sanderson has not spoken out against Kindle*. His kickstarter was mostly to advertise Dragonsteel which is likely going to become his own publishing house at some point.

And while… fuck amazon, Kindle is a ridiculously author friendly platform to publish on and is the only reason we have so many amazing self published authors these days. And while KU is not great per book, it is an excellent way to get people interested in an author and buy their latest books. I strongly encourage actually reading what authors say instead of what users and armchair financial analysts do.

*: I would be incredibly shocked if he did. I think he is definitely becoming more “woke” than “mormon” these days based off his writing and character details but he is still very much a business person

I strongly encourage POLITELY reaching out to your favorite authors on social media to talk to them about this.

One of my favorite guilty pleasure reads is very open that this is why his ebooks are only on kindle. But he is also looking into alternatives (especially since he is now big enough to have at least a small publisher) because the readers he is trying to help with KU are the ones asking him to get away from it.

Not going to tear down my de-drm setup any time soon. But optimistic I might be able to before amazon does it for me.

Captchas don’t do shit and have actually been training for computer vision for probably over a decade at this point.

Also: Any “simple test” is fixed in the next version. It is similar to how people still insist “AI can’t do feet” (much like rob liefeld). That was fixed pretty quick it is just that much of the freeware out there is using very outdated models.