Say it with me kids, “This is why we pirate digital media from billion dollar corporations”
this is also why i started buying physical books and using my local public library again.
My local library allows borrowing ebooks. It’s incredibly useful. I own two kindles and haven’t spent a dime at Amazon for ebooks. I do buy physical books now and then from there, but only if I really need it and can’t find elsewhere.
How do you return a borrowed ebook…?
It expires after two weeks. You can extend, just like borrowing a physical copy. Or return early, in which case it expires upon return.
I mean, yeah, sure, I guess that’s a decent solutions in terms of modern IP shit.
But like, we all know you’re not returning anything and if you wanted, you could also copy it for yourself.
I just dislike how it feels like when it was actually books, they had actual reasons to everything. There’s a queue because there’s limited copies. You need to return it and if you’re late there’s a fee, because it’s from other people’s time, etc. Nowadays that all feels like larping just to protect large companies IP’s essentially. Because digital copies don’t actually get returned.
Like when I was a kid I would’ve never thought a librarian would say “you’re not allowed to read that anymore”. Or that I couldn’t copy a thing down at home from one of their books. But now as your tokens to ebooks expire, it kinda does feel like that.
My best friend is a librarian, and they’ve stopped buying ebook licenses because the terms were awful.
The publishers only allowed an ebook to be checked out a few times before the library had to purchase a license extension. The argument was that pylhysical books face wear and tear and eventually have to be replaced, so ebooks should have to be replaced too.
It’s true that normal books do experience wear and tear, but looking at what my local library has I’d say that many or most can still least many years before needing to be retired or replaced.
As we’re seeing with Amazon, with ebooks it’s really the readers that expire over time
I find ebooks from the library to be very useful.
I’m not saying they’re not, or that the librarians are any more capitalist than they were in the 90’s. I’m just saying it feels like they are.
Hell Yeah.
Does anyone else just read on their phone? I use Librera ebook reader in dark mode. The app even reads to me with tts while I’m driving.
Haven’t picked up a paper book in over 10 years!
Just another day in the life of an enshittificator.
Switch to free and open formats, software and hardware. Ditch what you can. Starve big tech.
Here’s a reminder that Boox makes amazingly good e-readers in all form factors Amazon does (including a variety of tablets!), with stylus support (USI 2.0 for smaller devices, EMR for their Note series and above), fully open (recent Android versions, regular updates, unlockable bootloader, straightforward to root devices), support KOReader, with a solid built in reader (plus support for cloud sync, including syncing books to a free 10GB Boox server storage), support for OPDS (a better way to access your library than Calibre’s sync, plus it can be utilised with most digital libraries too), and altogether quite well priced devices.
At the moment I have on my hands a Go Color 7 gen2, a Note Air5 C, and a Palma2 Pro. The experience is surprisingly good for a “random Chinese brand”, the hardware, compared to similarly priced devices, is superior (seriously, 4/6/8GB RAM, 64/128GB internal storage, SD card support), not to mention their customised e-ink waveforms (which give you near LCD-like scrolling with minimal trailing effect and little to no ghosting, something I can’t say about my Kindles…)
The only downside I found of these devices is the relatively bad battery life in locked/standby (due to Android, but you still easily get over a week per charge with average use, or about 20-22 hours of active use!), and the speakers… definitely not meant for audiobooks.
Being Norwegian it is my patriotic duty to shill for ReMarkable, it’s pretty good at being what it is.
It’s expensive, though.
It’s more for note taking, annotation and drawing than purely reading ebooks though, the form factor alone would make it uncomfortable for long reading sessions I think
Sorry but no. Abysmal hardware, shitty software that’s locked down AND crap when opened up, and horrid QA. Talking from experience.
it is definitely too closed down, haven’t had those other experiences though, I’ve had my ReMarkable 2 for quite a few years now. Then again, I haven’t tried hacking at it
The hardware weakness is super obvious if you try to add any third party apps. Slow loading times, badly exposed pen API, among other things.
I’m poor. I pirate stuff. When I can, I buy physical copies of the stuff I like.
Older kindles can still have ebooks transfered directly to them via usb cable
If I got an old kindle; how easy is it to jailbrake it and install a better system?
I just did it for the first time yesterday with an old Kindle I had lying around. It was super easy with this website: https://kindlemodding.org/
The hands of fate are kind today.
I got 3 kindles off eBay for the price of 1 new. 2 successfully jail broken (and 1 ready to be jail broken. Just on the fence of making another account, or gamble my main one again)
There’s always Google Books. You can still upload pdfs. Granted this makes Kindles useless and only works on Apple and Google, but fuck Amazom, amirite?
Got my wife a Kobo for her birthday to replace her aging Kindle. She’s bought 1 book so far and gonna look at the Library integration.
Anyone got any tips for ways to use the Kobo? For example I have Calibre on my Mac and have used that to copy books I’ve “acquired” for her, is there any benefit in self hosting Calibre? Is it possible to get her Kindle books on the Kobo or is the DRM a nightmare nowadays?
Is it possible to get her Kindle books on the Kobo or is the DRM a nightmare nowadays?
Calibre has a plugin for that: DeDRM
does it still work? even when I used it last you had to do some janky shit like download a specific version of kindle pc app and use that to download the book for the first time or the book would be downloaded with newer drm and stuck that way forever, and get the file from the old kindle pc app into dedrm
I haven’t used it in a few years, I use a certain anonymous rodent to get my books now.
If she still has access to her Kindle account, you might be able to get the Account Key and enter that into Calibre to remove the DRM.
you can interface with calibre web via opds from eBook readers. basically you can browse and download books in your calibre server. I use koreader to do it. as for previous books she’s interested in I’d just look for them in the electronic library
You got any more specific info on how to do this? I spun up my caliber web container on my home server, but once I realized you can’t download books over the wifi, you still had to connect to a PC, I stopped hosting it.
What ebook readers are capable of this magic?
Any Kobo can install KOReader with a minor firmware update (that only needs to be done once). There’s instructions here: https://github.com/koreader/koreader/wiki/Installation-on-Kobo-devices It supports OPDS out of the box (though IMO is a little unintuitive to use)
I don’t download them on kindle anyway, it’s not even connected to the Internet. Just put the files on it manually, works fine.
At least for the kindle platform, they’ve stopped offering a USB option a while ago, precisely to keep people from circumventing their planned obsolescence.
Absolute cunt behavior. Glad I have an old one then.
Old or new, doesn’t matter. They stopped allowing you to download books licensed (“sold”) through the kindle shop in order to prevent you from putting them onto your device via cable.
…which makes “cunt behaviour” even more accurate. ;)
What a bunch of cunts jesus fucking christ
Did the firmware expire or something? How would it know to prevent USB transfers if it’s the same OS as before? If you have to have it online when you’re uploading or something I guess that would be the way. I’ve never owned a kindle so I’m not really sure. My old af nook still takes books through the micro USB slot fine.
They’ve misunderstood. They’re referring to the function where customers could download the book files directly instead of in the app, and then transfer the files to their kindle.
No misunderstanding, that’s precisely what I meant and linked to.
At least with kindle books bought from amazon you have to use their own software to transfer. They stopped the old app working which could download books to your computer so now they just have to check if the kindle it is connecting to is attached to your account and on a software version they support.
Good job me never ever having bought any books on amazon. I go out of my way to buy them DRM free. Good old Paperwhite Gen 1 still going strong here.
As far as I know, it might still work with Calibre
This is about the Kindle Store. Calibre will continue to work, it just copies files via USB, you don’t even need Calibre for that.
That’s the joke
Can books be transfered via USB even on the 2013-era Paperwhite? I’ve always used the email feature in Calibre-web to send books to my Kindle (even for books I’ve paid for) - I didn’t realise it was doable over USB!
Have a Kindle Paperwhite (1st gen). Have send over USB, through Calibre - software, never used the web one -, books and documents in various formats. Never had an issue.
Yes, it’s basically just a USB drive, no special software required.
My kindle has never been connected to the interwebs. Always used Calibre, wonderful software. About two weeks ago I used it to transfer books, worked with no problems.
Mine couldn’t for some time now. You can’t download them as files and transfer them. Amazon has become unusable for books at this point.
It’s crazy to think that Amazon literally started as a book store.
R.I.P. Irony (100,00 BCE - 2025)
Yay, enshittification
Not to mention the super abusive stance of Amazon to writers and publishers, the sooner people stop buying Kindles and giving Amazon their money, the better.
Google was a search engine. Shit is crazy.
Jokes on Amazon I already jail broke mine and can directly download books from my Calibre server to it, KOreader ftw
My older Kindle is jailbroken and does just fine. Jailbreak if you can, if you can’t don’t Kindle.
i bought one and almost didn’t use it for 2 years until i was able to jailbreak it while sill being on its factory firmware. luckily the battery is fine
And yet, my ancient Kobo just keeps on ticking along.
