Don’t buy Amazon products. Fairly simple concept.
The problem is some authors signing exclusivity deal with Amazon, which means breaking the DRM and converting it is the only way to read it on a different e-reader.
Too bad. Then theres no sale unless I can crack the DRM ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This. All of these problems are solved by people not giving money. But often it seems difficult for people to actually stand behind principle when the time comes – convenience is a helluva drug.
i was dumbfounded that so many people stood up against Disney. it was so opposite of what modern americans do.
The problem is some authors signing exclusivity deal with Amazon
Well then those authors can go straight to corpo-sellout hell and die a painful death, I’d rather never read a book again than buy from amazon.
It’s only takes one person to crack those books and spread them across the high seas and the only way to force authors to abandon Amazon.
There are always people who extra motivated by these challenges. The fact that these are written texts and shown on a screen means there will always be away to scrap the content off even if that involves a camera on a second device.
DRM only hurts customers who want to pay for content.
Yep, I had a Kindle library of a few dozen books, when they started their shenanigans locking down the desktop client earlier this year I downloaded all of them, de-drmed and converted to epub with Calibre. Hosting them on Calibre-web and accessing with KOreader on a Kobo. I continue to buy books on Kobo and Google Books, which let me download copies (albeit with DRM).
Makes me wonder after all these years why Amazon is locking down ability to move books around. I wonder if they’re starting to feel some real competition and feel threatened! The market of cheap e-ink Android ereaders seems to be growing more and more
I started that process and hit a road block after getting all the books downloaded to my pc. Can you recommend any tutorials or guides that might help get everything converted?
I used this guide from a thread on Reddit. It relies on Calibre and a set of plugins https://www.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/1c2ryfz/2024_guide_to_dedrm_kindle_books/
Awesome, thanks!
I wonder if they’re starting to feel some real competition and feel threatened!
Probably the opposite. They’re confident they won’t lose sales over this because they’re too firmly established as a monopoly. And they know that with Trump in office they’re not going to face any pushback from the FTC.
- https://www.gutenberg.org/
- https://openlibrary.org/
- https://www.planetebook.com/
- https://archive.org/
- https://www.smashwords.com/
- https://books.google.com/
- https://www.freetechbooks.com/
- https://www.getfreebooks.com/
- https://www.openculture.com/free_ebooks
- https://www.goodreads.com/
- https://www.oreilly.com/ (trial)
- https://annas-archive.org/
- https://pdfcoffee.com/
- https://singlelogin.re/
- https://www.ereaderiq.com/freebies/
- https://www.bookbub.com/ebook-deals/free-ebooks
- https://digilibraries.com/
- https://www.overdrive.com/
- https://manybooks.net/
there’s so many others and of course torrents
It is remarkable how many books available for free on Gutenberg are sold in the same format on Amazon (it’d be one thing if they were special editions, new translations etc, but they’re the same!)
People out to make a quick buck are banking on suckers not knowing about Project Gutenberg, or failing to check it, or not wanting to do a couple of extra steps to get something onto their Kindle.
Check out standard ebooks. They take public domain books and “clean” them up with really good typesetting, spelling fixes, and other things. All free too
Standard is fantastic! The books are better quality than what they charge for on “marketplaces” and can be read for free or downloaded wholesale for a song. Add to that they host an opds catologue that fbreader can browse and you have incredibly convenient public domain books right to the ereader.
Shoutout to Anna.
Have you noticed that the download interface page for Anna’s archive has suddenly changed? I can’t figure it out!
I have not but I believe you.
What URL are you using?
You can also use Book Bounty to integrate LibGen support into Readarr. It’s a workaround for one of Readarr’s biggest weaknesses, as torrents historically aren’t great for ebooks.
Didn’t readarr get discontinued a few weeks ago?
It was officially unsupported, but it still works just fine if you use a third-party metadata provider. There haven’t been any breaking changes on the backend, so (unless sites change things) it will continue to work fine.
Assuming you have a card from a participating library.
Every time I go to checkout a book on Libby it’s like 6-10 weeks’ wait. If I put a hold on it then I’m just not in a place to read/listen at that time and then I feel bad for hogging it instead.
Better to just pirate or buy from a non-DRM distributor.
The best books are on IRC.
Anyone else notice that the download interface page for Anna’s archive has suddenly changed? I can’t figure it out.
Isn’t goodreads owned by Amazon?
I’m shocked at this unforeseeable turn of events.
The current timeline is truly a constant stream of unanticipated surprises
I will never, ever purchase a book I can’t remove the DRM from.
And there are people out there who are absolutely fanatical about book preservation. They will photograph every single page and run it through OCR and recreate an ebook just so it gets preserved. DRM is absolutely pointless and stupid.
Exactly this. As an idiot I purchase DRM music when Microsoft had its own music store. Some years later they closed it and there was no way to validate music keys.
But thankfully I still have an old Roxio9( I think) CD, and back then Roxio didn’t know what DRM was and would take the mp3 and burn it to DVD anyway, bypassing the key check, then I would just rip it back off the DVD…DRM is useless
For real.
When I still had Netflix and Disney+ I’d want to watch a show on my PC, but I’d just get black screen with only audio, because something about my setup the DRM didn’t like. (Possibly that I have USB displaylink monitors.)
So I had to watch on another device.
DRM isn’t stopping content being ripped. It’s just making life a pain for paying customers.
Offering a clean, ad free, usable storefront to purchase media would do more to prevent piracy than anything.
But corpos dont like that.
That could’ve been iTunes if their interface didn’t suck ass and if they didn’t go for the subscription-only model in Apple Music.
I swear for years it was THE place to buy music. I mean I never did, I didn’t have access to a card with online payments enabled as a teen, so I just pirated everything anyway. But it seemed like the default place.
I was so out of the loop a few years ago I found out they killed iTunes and was like WHY. idiotic.
Of course. It’s all about control. They see users as property, an object to be sold and traded.
Do not ever allow yourselves to be disrespected like this.
Try explaining any of this to my friends lol. Obsessed with Google, the tok, xitter, and shitty data stealing llms. Disgusting garbage.
This is the entire foundational point Gabe made with steam.
Hell I still get a chuckle when people bitch able steam “drm”. Since it’s entirely optional and can literally be turned off by just adding a text file with the steam ID in basically every case. If it’s even there to begin with
99% of the time the “drm” people bitch about is just the steam overlay dll crashing if steam is off. Cause you know trying to load something that’s off doesn’t really work.
You can literally just remove a single dll from like 95% of steam games and you have an entirely “drm” free game.
Silksong is a great example with how popular it’s been Iv seen thousands of people bitching moaning and crying about how it has drm on steam when it for a fact doesn’t. It just has the single dll so it can use the overlay. Just deleting the dll so it doesn’t load up the overlay and ta-da its fucking drm free.
I couldn’t get Netflix to play at high resolution on my old Roku because of some DRM crap. And I was a legit customer! Once again, piracy would have provided a superior experience.
Kobo is cool Now just fyi. Works well with calibre.
The biggest issue I have is ebooks are almost all excusevly sold on amazon. I would give authors my money and not sail the high seas if it ment no DRM.
I’m sorry but the idea that most ebooks are exclusive to Amazon is absurd. While they are trying and would love that to be true, it’s just not.
That was my first thought too, but I’m not so sure. I’d love to see data on it. I did a quick search and couldn’t find any numbers, but I did find articles talking about Amazon requiring exclusivity in some cases. https://www.ingramspark.com/blog/amazon-exclusive-options-createspace-kdp-select-and-acx
100% they have pressured some smaller publishers and authors into exclusivity, especially self published authors that use their print on demand services. But most books you can find at competing digital storefronts.
I hear what you’re saying, but I’d still like to see numbers before taking a stance.
To clarify:
“Traditionally published” books and even many “self published” books are sold in all major storefronts and often on the author’s website (if they have one).
The issue is that Amazon has REALLY REALLY good tools for self publishing and, at least until recently, Kindle Unlimited (?) was a great way for authors to make money without the power of a traditional publisher or the grindset for true self publishing. And Kindle Unlimited requires amazon exclusivity.
The “good” news is that Amazon is dicking everyone over with changes to Audible and the like (it is allegedly a big reason why Sanderson basically made his own publishing house) and a lot of the big names in SFF are increasingly considering their options. That is a drop in the bucket compared to Romantasy and the like, but it is not nothing.
So best recommendation is to politely nudge your favorite authors and to signal boost booktube/booktok/bookgram/whatever to keep pushing on this. One of my guilty pleasure “litrpg” authors has been open about this in the past that they use Kindle Unlimited but, at least on their discord, are increasingly looking into alternatives because so many of the diehard fans actively don’t want to give Amazon money but still want to give them cash.
Just to keep adding on: Funny enough, Christopher Ruocchio’s “whatever happened between him and DAW” is actually increasingly being used as an argument for why it is okay to change publishing formats. For those unaware, Ruocchio’s Sun Eater series is spectacular in that it starts as Space Rome and Barbarians At The Gates before… going places. But he had scope creep and wanted to do an extra book but his publisher (DAW) had given him a specific deal and did not want to renegotiate and it was a huge clusterfuck that more or less led to him changing publishers midstream.
Which is generally acknowledged as a death sentence for a series because it makes any form of promotion nigh impossible because the old publisher actively does not want to encourage sales of new books (that is “their” money) and the new publisher can’t sell the books that are generally required reading for the new ones. But between a lot of fans who had fallen in love with the series and prominent booktube influencers going REAL hard on it, he managed to successfully switch publishers and should be finishing up early next year?
But considering how many authors are in essentially the same mess where the first ten books are on Kindle but the next twenty might be on Kindle+Kobo+whatever? It is a very scary prospect that could literally end their literary career but… it is also increasingly doable.
Nice read. I’m no longer at keyboard. Good points.
Someone posted a comment somewhere else in this post with a list of sources of ebooks. Hope it helps!
“Almost all”… Unless you read a very specific niche, I’ve rarely looked for a book that I wanted to read and not found it elsewhere. There certainly are some that are specific to KDP, but hardly “almost all”.
In fact just a few minutes ago I got another bundle from Humble that I loaded onto my kobo with no issue
Between Kobo and Google Books I haven’t had a problem of not finding a book. Are you talking about small authors self-publishing on Kindle? I could see that being an issue
Boox is the best. Stock software, NO DRM. Downside is they are more expensive upfront
Boox’s Neoreader is surprisingly good, but KoReader just frog blasts it. And since it’s just and Android app, it’s trivial to install and keep updated
Agreed, that they are just an android tablet makes them far more useful than most ereaders as you can install apps from the Play store. I probably use mine in the kitchen more than as a reader.
How hard is to install KOreader on a Kobo?
KOReader is trivial to install but I would also say it is nowhere near as “required” as it used to be for the majority of readers.
In fact, a few months (year or two?) back when amazon started this bullshit in earnest, the main dev(s) behind Calibre finally picked up Kobos and DRASTICALLY improved support for the devices. Still some wonkiness with usually having to eject and re-connect to actually update metadata but everything “just works”.
Yeah, the wonkiness is particularly apparent on .cbz files. I got a color Kobo to read comics, but .cbz files don’t natively support metadata embedding. (It’s basically just a .zip file, so you could embed the data in the file… But the Kobo wouldn’t read it without actually open in the file.) Getting the comics to actually list the author and series has been a big struggle.
Oftentimes, comics will outright disappear from the kobo’s book list in Calibre, meaning you can’t even manage them at all; Pushing the file again doesn’t help because it’s already on the device, but Calibre can’t read the database so it’ll try anyways. The only solution when it happens has been to completely factory reset the kobo. Which is… Not a great solution.
Yeah. CBZ files have no metadata (I think there is actually a semi-standardized way to add it but almost nobody does?) so it won’t work well with metadata based systems. From discussions we had back in the day, the cbz/r/7z/tgz/whatever archives were mostly a necessary evil for file sharing. As long as you didn’t modify the scans, people could re-compress or whatever their files and still have a good chance of coming up as alternatives in DC++ and the like. And, at the time, PDF readers were basically Adobe Acrobat and not much else.
These days? Nobody really used DC++ anymore and the general etiquette is to keep an un-touched version in your torrent folder if you want to seed. And basically every web browser is a better PDF reader than anything before 2020. So there isn’t much value in not just reformatting to a PDF and removing the need for a special cbz reader.
All that said: I haven’t followed the changelog, but it might be worth checking if you have the latest Calibre version. Basically all the package managers are months, if not years, out of date and a LOT of work has been put in to making Kobos a first class citizen.
Basically a one-click install on supported devices. You just need a PC and a USB cable. Highly recommended
https://github.com/koreader/koreader/wiki/Installation-on-Kobo-devices
Easy enough. You can also install QuillOS which an open source operating system for Kobos.
Not to hard
Fairly intuitive, if you can drag the right file to the right directory on the device.
Also Canadian, though now majority owned by Rakuten.
Why not just remove the Amazon from the ebooks?
amazon: finally we defeated piracy
one kid with a computer: snickers
I’ve been slowly filling my wife’s Kindle Oasis full of pirated books over the last 2 years. I got it initially because it had internet service everywhere and I could just email her the epubs to simplify loading things.
A couple of weeks ago, even though airplane mode is always on for this thing, (so no wifi either) – this thing wipes something like 400 books from her library overnight. Granted, they were all pirated, but they’re doing some nasty stuff there. It looks like there’s renewed effort to combat this.
Sooooo, I sold it and bought her a Kobo Libra Color. Now, I just have her open up https://send.djazz.se/ – give me the 4 digit code, and I can upload books to her that way. Goodbye Amazon. Don’t let the door hit you.
Cannot recommend Kobo enough. You can jailbreak it if you like, but I didn’t get much benefit from that personally. I’m partial to the overdrive integration, but if you’re loading epubs you probably aren’t using that. If in the US, I’d recommend at least setting it up, since it’s pretty easy and maybe more immediate for some books, but obviously she won’t get to keep the epub after.
Not that I would know from experience, but I hear there are Calibre plugins that will allow a user to pull the DRM’d book (downloaded via Overdrive) to a computer and remove the DRM.
I’ve read that it’s a polite thing to do because you’re able to return borrowed books much more quickly so other users can check them out.
I originally had planned on doing that, but honestly I’ve not plugged my kobo into my computer since I in earnest set it up. Out of the box I jailbroke it, then I realized I liked it a lot and didn’t want to get confused as to what I was recommending to friends/family vs what was actually jailbreak stuff, so I decided I’d reset it and use it the standard way for a bit to get the hang of it. Once I did that I’ve never had a need to plug it into a computer and figured it wasn’t worth the effort.
I hope I’m not considered impolite for using it as intended, though I totally understand people who would want to do as you suggested. Anything to decrease hold times lol. Also not that I would know from experience, but I imagine others greatly respect and appreciate the people who do that, provide the means to do that, or the end results of that.
Bonus points for no jailbreak required : D I didn’t even realize there was a jailbreak for it (or what benefits there are to jailbreaking it… I should do some research but I haven’t found anything I couldn’t do with the stock firmware and it sounds like you generally came to the same conclusion).
Mine is using the stock firmware, wifi off unless using Overdrive, but I plug it into my computer to charge and load it with books. It just shows up as a mass storage device like a USB thumb drive and you can copy/paste books onto it (or use Calibre). After disconnecting it will scan for new/changed files and auto-import any recognized formats into the reader application.
The benefits to jailbreaking it are that you can change the layout of the device, remove store icons, and just in-general tidy up the UI a bit. I haven’t seen anything game-changing from the jailbreak; like adding apps or something.
Kobo is on my Xmas list. I still have a gen 2? Kindle and it’s still pretty workable.
The white one with a keyboard?
Mines grey with a keyboard.
Dang you will be impressed with the screen on anything you pick up. Resolution and contrast on the text is much better these days.
That’s weird and sounds like some kind of software problem. I can’t see how that would happen otherwise. I have a Voyage and don’t have wifi configured on it at all, just add books with calibre and it’s been fine for a decade.
It’s not a software problem, the Oasis has free cellular service for life.
If you turn your Wifi off on an Android phone for example - it still scans and uses the wifi to keep track of your location, for instance. It’s an anti-consumer pattern that companies are using. Airplane mode? – Sure, for YOU. But Amazon probably still allows cell service to connect every couple of hours for exactly this kind of thing.
The error message she received wasn’t sly about it either. It said something very direct along the lines of “We have determined that you are not eligible to read this book so we have removed it from your device”
Free cellular for life, except Amazon has basically limited it down to nothing
I loved my oasis, but the whispersync was, for all intents, busted, for the last few years.
Finally moved to a boox go color, installed calibre, and couldn’t be happier
Back when Randall Munroe released his “What if” in eBook format, it essentially was only available with DRM.
When I emailed him about it, asking for a place to buy it without DRM, he responded with DRM unfortunately being mandated by his publisher, and finished his email with a link to this comic of his:
https://xkcd.com/488/There’s no such thing as “impossible” when it comes to piracy.
Just wait until you can only stream books, not download them, with random words replaced with synonyms using an algorithm that lets them track down who the originator of any scanned copies is.
That might sound ridiculous, but streaming-only to prevent perfect copies and hiding purchaser identifiers in the data are both DRM techniques that have been explored in other media already. There’s no limit to how anti-consumer publishers can get when they think there’s slightly more money to be had.
Log2(8.2billion) is about 33. That means if each word only had 1 synonym, you only need to change 33 words to uniquely identify who was responsible.
21 words need to change if each has 3 options. 17 words for 4 options.
Then we change an additional 100 words in the process, and their tell becomes a tale.
There’s no impossible because if you can see it, it can be captured and digitized, but there is a level of complication that can make it unreasonable. They could make it unreasonable to crack the drm outright and require you to screenshot/OCR it. Then they can limit the OS to make to difficult to automate capture.
Bottom line, they’re just kicking payers off their network when it’s easier to pirate it than to buy it through their service.
Something something, piracy is a service problem. That’s why Spotify et al. still thrive, but more and more the Netflixes of the world are being replaced with yaaar
It’s also a pricing issue as well.
The analog hole works on a lot of stuff
That’s my post apoc Youtube plan. Play on a sanctioned browser with videos and use comskip, write them off to my storage.
We’re going back to my TV->AVI setup from 2003, only maybe we’ll use HVEC this time.
require you to screenshot/OCR it
So just like what people do with paper books.
What GOOGLE did WITHOUT PERMISSION to paper books. ;)
I’ve imaged a few short books with a cellphone and page correction software.
It takes dedication to make a pleasant final product. But those vacuum book scanners are freaking amazing.
but there is a level of complication that can make it unreasonable.
Lol, just read the Arch Wiki about Bluray playing. Unreasonable only takes a bit longer.
Especially engineering people get creative out of interest if they’re denied access. And that’s a beautiful thing.
MakeMKV is in AUR :) Sure, it’s not playing a disk…
This entire thing has been made needlessly complicated. Easy fix though.
- Get whatever ebook you want.
- Borrow some code from GitHub and teach a raspberry pi with a camera and a few servos to snap pictures of pages, turn the pages, snap again into a PDF.
- A script then parses all the images and OCRs them for the final PDF.
- You now own a backup of your DRM book, which you own forever. Pretty sure this is actually legal under DMCA since you are taking a backup of something you allegedly own. The encryption circumvention is irrelevant.
- now, break the law and throw the PDF on the internet to everyone. Go little bot! Go go go!
The encryption circumvention is irrelevant.
Oh you sweet summer child, judges will bend over backwards to slap people with multi-decade-to-life charges for ‘hacking,’ even if the ‘hacking’ is just the rightsholder accidentally presenting data to you.
To be fair, if you OCR the pages via camera, you haven’t actually circumvented DRM. That means it’s a completely legal backup, as the DRM on the original file was untouched and unaltered. This definitely does fall under fair use.
Theoretically, yes. Realistically, judges historically believe anything prosecutors tell them about hacking and circumvention.
There’s been people thrown in jail for the rest of their life for the crime of clicking a public URL that the company didn’t intend to be public.
There’s been people thrown in jail for the rest of their life for the crime of clicking a public URL that the company didn’t intend to be public.
Source?
The closest i’ve heard was a journalist being accused of hacking for the crime of choosing “view source” in the right-click menu of a web-browser.If you scroll down a bit, I actually already answered that question in this exact threat, one reply down.
In general I agree, but I am going to have to ask you for a source on that last one.
Looks like I mixed up two different cases- the cause of one, and the duration of another.
weev (who apparently is a giant asshole) was the one who got sent to jail for accessing a completely public URL AT&T wished he didn’t in 2010. The EFF took up his case. His sentence was later vacated by another court because so many civil rights lawyers kept joining his team pro-bono so the court tossed it out on a blatant technicality to get the issue to go away, so he only served ~2y.
As for the CFAA being used to slap people with life sentences, there’s too many examples to know which one I was mixing it up with. Aaron Swartz is the classic example.
so he only served ~2y.
Still 2y more than he should’ve, geez…
You didn’t circumvent it by breaking the encryption, but I’d say you still circumvented it.
Just do it in a country with reasonable laws
They already ruled on this in favor of allowing you to back up what you already own. See video games, DVDs and CDs, video tapes, this is well established already.
They actually walked that back using blu-rays as an excuse. If there’s any sort of DRM/encryption/etc, you’re completely unallowed to circumvent it, even for personal backup.
The goold old analog hole.
Tangent, but I have had an incredibly poor experience getting a library eBook onto a kindle. Libby gives out time restricted epubs - fair enough, I am actually borrowing the book, that makes sense. Kindle, despite being the “goto” ereader, and epubs being a standard format, cannot read them.
So, despite wanting to legitimately borrow and read the book, instead I am borrowing and DeDRM’ing it (which is its own convoluted process).
Why is Amazon pushing so hard for piracy? Its one thing to make their store easier to use, but breaking all other valid use cases just leaves the one remaining option…
I have a kobo ereader, it connects to my local library through the overdrive system and I am soooo happy.
Yeah, definitely considering that as a replacement.
Seconding their enthusiasm. I love my Kobo Libra Color.
I have owned 5 kobos over time, and just love them.
This one is my second but the first one is still working fine many years later. I just wanted color.
How is the color? I’ve been told it makes the screen less sharp, is it noticeable? I kinda want one, been using a tablet for comics lately and it’s nowhere near as good at night.
The color is a trade-off. It looks more or less like newsprint: a little faded, but still capable of some lively imagery. It also means that black and white pages aren’t as high-contrast. The “white” parts (that are really never fully white on any e-paper display) are a little less white, meaning it’s not as sharp and you’re more likely to need to turn on the backlight or to turn it up a couple percent.
I’m not too bothered by the trade-offs, and I like it when I can see things in color. It lasts ages even with the backlight on low, so that’s not a major problem. It also includes pen support and USB-C, so all in all I’m perfectly happy with it.
I got a Kobo about a year ago (Libra Color) it is just great. The kobo store keeps having sales on books I want for $2 so as much as I intended to use the overdrive connectivity, I just keep buying books on it!
Which is the right way to do it, make the ereader work properly, and then make the store so attractive that you use it anyway.
I think this explains why Amazon is locking down their books and making libraries non-portable. There is more competition
That’s what they want. If you don’t agree don’t get a kindle.
They list EPUB as a supported format. Nothing on their site says DRM EPUB doesnt work.
Amazon is full of shit. EPUBs only work by using send-to-Kindle which converts it to a file that works (either AZW3 or KFX. Despite the misinformation, EPUBs do not work on Kindle, except if you jailbreak, as you can then use KOReader to read them natively.
That last point is salient, as it means the hardware supports the format just fine. Amazon intentionally does not directly support EPUBs in their software.
Really? I’ve never had an issue. Libby sends me directly to Amazon to “check out” the book, so I don’t have to upload it to the Kindle manually.
Apparently for america, it works relatively seamlessly, but the rest of the world doesnt. No idea why, but that is what my brief research told me.
Ah, gotcha. That sucks.
Amazon and Kindle have always been upfront about only supporting their proprietary format and people just chose to ignore it.
Never had any trouble with my Nook.
I dont think that is true at all. They describe it as an e-reader and its reasonable to assume that that means it can read e-books. They even list EPUB on the supported formats section of the specs. No caveat there about only partially supporting EPUB.
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I transitioned from a Kindle to an iPad. It just works better and you can get refurbished older iPads with an excellent
OLEDscreen and warranty for less than a new Kindle in most cases.refurbished older iPads with an excellent OLED screen
The only iPads with OLED screens are the current generation of iPad Pro with the M4 chip. Every other iPad is an LCD screen (very good LCD, with deep blacks and very good local dimming, but still LCD).
Ah. I thought Retina was marketing speak for OLED. I stand corrected.
Retina is marketing speak for “pixels small enough to be individually indistinguishable by the human eye at proper viewing distances.”
For anyone stumbling along. “Retina display” is their marketing speak for higher pixel density than “average”.
Yeah but the goal of a ereader is to not have to read on a normal screen but on something that look more like paper
Oh, you mean paperwhite ereaders. You can get those too. Android based.
(Pedantry incoming)
Paperwhite is actually Amazon branding. E-Ink is a brand as well, owned by the E Ink Corporation. The generic name would be electronic paper or e-paper.
Edit: Clarity.
Not entirely true. E-ink is trademarked by the e-ink company, sole manufacturer of e-ink displays.
https://trademarks.justia.com/788/55/e-78855402.html
That part isn’t Amazon-related.
I meant its branding, not Amazon owned, I should clear that up though it is misleading as written.
I don’t know why people buy an stuff like this and get surprised when this happens.
Plenty of other electronics that you have full control over.
Plenty ? Really ? And what are those ?
Four times the prices and from four years ago ?Kobo e-readers are 1-to-1 alternatives that allow you to easily transfer epubs or PDFs to it with a USB cable.
As far as I can tell, Kobos are bootloader locked now https://old.reddit.com/r/kobo/comments/1ewadpc/kobo_is_now_using_secure_boot_on_at_least_one_of/
You can still transfer epubs and most books on the kobo store are sold without DRM (publisher choice)
That’s a far cry from
Plenty of other electronics that you have full control over.
mentioned in the first comment
Not arguing with your point, it’s valid. But I wanted to make it clear from OPs point about book DRM that this is not an issue with Kobo. The books themselves as mostly DRM free and you can put whatever you want on the device.
It’s not necessarily about the devices. Kobo books are very easy to remove DRM from, and don’t require owning a physical Kobo device or their app to do so. All it requires is two Calibre plugins. And EPUB is not a proprietary format, unlike AZW3 and KFX.
Also, I might be wrong, but it seems Kobo has a lot more DRM free books in general, compared to Amazon.
Kindle has always required either the Kindle app or an actual physical Kindle to de-DRM.
Having your cake and eating it too isn’t on the menu
Kindles were loss leaders to get you in their ecosystem, just like all the shitty cheap tablets they sold.
The from four years ago part is real, but honestly, 4 year old devices read books about as well as current devices as long as you’re not trying to go all fancy.
It’s just matter of time before they’re all locked down, even the bad ones from 2020.
Just like android where basically it’s all bootloader locked, except for a few suspiciously special models like the Pixel. Or a “new” 1000$ model with hardware from 2018.
Instead of pretending there isn’t a problem because there are still option, you should realize the WINDOW IS CLOSING
A Raspberry Pi with an E-INK screen is surprisingly doable.
The raspberry pi has no low power modes / suspend states, to prevent it being used as a cell phone or tablet.
The standalone eink display are also very expensive, more than a entire eink reader and there is very little choice and they cannot be harvested from a working device.Low power states is a good call,
Looks like there’s a lot of work on using ESP32 for this kind of thing, even a couple open projects, but they end up bit-banging the screen into submission. not super elegant.
You can get 7" eink panels for $50.
Unless Kindle prices came way down, Boox are comparable in price, nicer in features, and allow side loading any eBook or Android APK (including the Kindle APK, if you can still get a copy of it.)
I don’t think you’ve used anything but a Boox in a long time, and have forgotten what the standard is. Boox has 1/10 the battery life, takes forever to wake up, and doesn’t support deep sleep properly (so it either drains battery when sitting idle, or shuts off entirely taking 5+ minutes to power back on). It’s decent hardware with very badly designed software. Neither Kobo or Kindle devices have these problems, they have battery that actually lasts, deep sleep when idle for any length of time, and power back up, even from deep sleep in 10 seconds or less.
Agreed, the battery life is way worse. I find the features of full unlocked Android to be a worthwhile trade.
But my point is that the prices of various eInk Android tablets aren’t unreasonable anymore.
Edit: Although, for anyone worried - I literally don’t remember the last time I charged my Boox. It was sometime last month - and I read with it most days.
The battery life can be fine, when configured with conservative screen refresh settings.
But I think there is still a difference - when I binge-read something for many hours multiple days in a row, I’ll notice that I need to recharge my Boox sooner than my Kindle needed.
Oh yeah definitely. It’s a slow EInk Android tablet on a very old version of Android. If you need more than just an EReader it’s the only reputable brand.
You can read books for free on just about any general purpose computer.
My wife doesn’t let me bring the Thinkpad to bed anymore
I am honestly surprised it took this long! Kindle has been around a long time and it’s not like Amazon was any less evil back then. It makes me wonder if the competition has been starting to make them nervous!
It annoys me so much that they have convinced anyone that this stuff is for protecting against piracy of something like that, while this is just another tool for them to force you into using their platform and ecosystem. It does nothing against piracy.
Yeah you can easily pirate any book, or even just get them free at the library. This just fucks over the authors and people who want to buy their books legally. People don’t buy books because they have to, they want to.
Yep, I could pirate all my books and audio books if I wanted. All it would do is fuck over the author tho.
As much as I hate audible it’s the only legal choice I have for many of the books I listen to. Since basically every other legal option has out of the nearly 500 or so audio books I have less then 50 of them.
It’s annoying.
Books were among the first things to be pirated and are still among the easiest because the amount of data is so small. People we’re doing that on dial up Internet.
And to repurchase. Never forget that aspect of the scam. Sell but don’t actually sell, make the customer keep on paying.
I have five published books, all without drm. Amazon better not put that shit ON my books. It’s not there for a reason; I want people to share.
The real question is how can I find out what those 5 book are without you doxing yourself.
Curious, as someone who’s an actual author, do you have any legal option at all for preventing Amazon (which I assume technically act as your publisher in this case?) to put DRM on your books, or demand them to remove DRM if they added DRM without your notice?
Likely not, Amazon is a private market place and if their requirements to use it requires the drm his option is very likely use the drm or fuck off.
Not having good publicly controlled legal market places is one of the biggest failings of the internet.
But have you considered that Jeff needs another few billies?
Thank you!
