that boycott back there is not real

i mean some boycotts are real

Bart Molendijk via Wikimedia Commons

Shortly before Christmas, my Kindle broke. The timing was annoying for a number of reasons, but the big one was that I had vague plans to get the DRM off my books¹ and move them over to a non-Amazon system sometime in the next few years, when my Kindle had slowed down and it made sense to replace it.² Now I either had to buy another Kindle or make the jump without having done any of the de-DRMing.

An added factor in deciding what to do here was that I didn’t want to get a new anything because—I thought—there was some sort of boycott of new electronics that use rare earth minerals going on to support miners in Congo. Given that, the refurbished market for Kindle was better than the refurbished options for Nook or Kobo, so that was another reason to go with a Kindle even if it meant sticking with Amazon for two or three more years.