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/
I would recommend people buy their books off ZLibrary instead, where they come with no DRM.
We’ll soon be back to monks transcribing at this rate.
again displaying, that DRM only hurts legitimate users. a pirate has never had the problem of backing up, moving or sharing his library…
I have a pocketbook instead of a Kindle cause of this lol
Was going to say, this has solidified my next ereader choice being Kobo
This is why I bought some Chinese android ereader than an amazon Kindle.
Switched to kobo.
I bought my first ereader this summer and got a Kindle and hated it. Returned it and got a Kobo. Its fantastic, I can just load my ebooks like it’s an external drive. I dont have to email all my ebooks to Amazon just to get them on my own device.
I’ll be switching to kobo next time round, but I’ve never not been able to dump books onto my kindle by usb. I do it with my phone over USB sometimes. Since when has not doing that been a thing?
Fuck you Jeff!
Whaaat? There’s Android for jailbroken Kindles? Back in my day the only thing you could do with a jailbreak was installing a slow version of KOReader that didn’t really work very well.
Koreader is quite good imo. But I only tried it recently
Welcome to the future but honestly, android is liable to break, I’ve been rocking this for a year and had to a factory reset already. Luckily, out of the box it has all I need.
Anna’s Archive
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.
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.
Yeah you can easily pirate any book, or even just get then 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.
I bought a digital movie from Amazon prime in 2015. It fell off and they didnt give me a refund. The music I got from a burnt CD in 2004 is still on the C: drive of my current PC. I don’t think it pays to do the right thing in the long run.
🌏👩🚀🔫👩🚀
Once they started mentioning stuff like this I sold my Kindle and got a moann. Its a little odd to use at times, but I love the size and the fact that I can just throw whatever book on there that I want. I use Anna’s archive for whatever book I’m looking for or go through my friend’s calibre library and I have over 200 books on my reader. I can also use libby with no issues. Its been fantastic breaking away from being stuck in the kindleverse.
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As much as I hate proprietary shit, Kindle is just the best ebook reader out there. It lasts forever, in terms of both battery life and the device itself, smooth, top notch UI… etc
When I first bought my new Kindle PW, I immediately turned on Airplane mode and never turned it off. I use Calibre & DRM free ebooks and I had 0 issues.
Having used both, i prefer the kobos. They just eat up everything you throw at them.
Just chiming in as another kobo guy. I like it’s UI better personally but most importantantly it displays books, holds books, battery lasts forever, and is an eink display - like it’s an ereader, I’m not in the percentage of people who can meaningfully discern between the two.
Kobo being theoretically repairable and not supporting a trillion dollar inshittification machine was good enough for me to swap.
Kobo is a subsidiary of Rakutten, its not amazon but as far as i recall they are no saints either. But the devices are easily disconnected from all their BS, so at least some bonus points there.
I’m not gonna shill for any company, so no worries there, but our governments aren’t breaking up these monopolies so we have to. If my options are a trillion dollar company and a 10 billion I pick the 10 billion.
I wonder if a company can get to X billion dollars in revenue and not be bad.
Kobo with calibre-web sync. Hands down the best ereader I’ve ever owned.
I’ve been too lazy to set it up until now. Ahahah i guess i’ll look into it this afternoon just for the sake of it. Thanks for the kindly reminder.
Check out some of the newer versions of calibre-web like the Automated one. I would like to switch but I’m waiting to be able to factory reset both ereaders or get new ones.
I bought a kindle when amazon sold them for a special price of 25 Euro. It’s a cool device for reading books, but I found their UI horrendously cluttered and filled with “suggestions” instead of focusing on the content I already have. I have since jailbroken the device and am using koreader on the device to read my ebooks transfered as epubs via calibre.
That has the advantage that when I buy DRM-free books in epub format, I am not relying on amazon to properly convert the file to a kindle proprietary format.
Of course it’s the best there is, they have billions made on the backs of millions workers, they can and will invest so much money in a product until it eclipses everything else so they have a monopoly on a niche. After all the competitors are starved because no company that only makes ereaders will have a profit so thick to create a competing product, they can introduce things like proper DRM or whatever their heart desires.
Related, Article about how ama. used their unfairly gained wealth to copy successful products, rigged search results, to promote their own brands
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-india-rigging/
So happy I just exported my collection last week and have closed forever my Amazon account the same day.
I must say, escaping Amazon is the significant action I took in my life that was completely inconsequent on my daily living.
How can you export it? I would love to get rid of Amazon for books
I used Calibre with the DeDRM plugin. But I had a very old reader, using the AZW3 format, for anything newer than that, you will also need the KFX input plugin.
But maybe now it’s already too late for all this.
