Earlier this year, one of our authors reported hitting some sort of undocumented limit when using the “Clipping” feature on Kindle. And then other readers discovered they were unable to load Kindle books onto either additional Kindles or their iPhone running the Kindle app because there’s a limit to the number of simultaneous devices a Kindle book can live on.
While I can’t speak about the terms other publishers have with Amazon (though it’s a safe bet at least some of those kind of restrictions weren’t Amazon’s idea), because we want O’Reilly Kindle books to be available without any DRM, we asked Amazon if those limits applied to our books, and if so whether they could be lifted.
Though it took some work on their end (and they deserve credit for being receptive to our request), I’m happy to say that there is now no simultaneous device limit or clipping limit for O’Reilly Kindle books, and those changes have been retroactively applied for anyone who’s already purchased one of our Kindle books. Here’s the Product Details section from The Twitter Book on the Kindle Store:
As a reminder, most O’Reilly books aren’t yet available on the Kindle in large part because the Kindle 1 doesn’t yet support tables. But you can buy a Kindle-compatible Mobipocket version directly from oreilly.com as part of our “ebook bundles,” which also include EPUB and PDF formats, which provide a nice alternative if you have a Kindle 1 and run into a table from one of our books that’s difficult to read.
Just to be clear, our desire to make these books free of DRM does not mean that we are allowing our readers to redistribute copies to their friends, but to allow them to read the book on all of their own devices, and to otherwise make use of them without artificial encumbrances. If you’re interested in multi-user licenses, talk to us.
Thanks again to Amazon for working with us on this.