On February 26th, Kindle customers will lose the ability to download eBook purchases directly to their PC. If you want to switch to a rival eReader brand in the future, I suggest that you use the soon-to-be discontinued “Download and Transfer via USB” feature to archive your Kindle library.
library genesis exists, people. anna’s archive, anyone?
digital drm is the one fucking thing they push onto us that we don’t actually have to fucking deal with. thanks to our team of
rippers and crackerspeople who hate this system.leave amazon. leave netflix. leave whatever fucking streaming service you subscribe to, and stop being sensitive about rich people’s money.
I have never more strongly considered a subscription to annas archive than when that new dropped.
A lot of books money goes to not rich people though
if you can afford it, wire the author the 50 bucks or so for the book, and explain why you did it. most of them will be thrilled to get the full 50 for the book, i bet.
if you can’t, well they wouldnt have gotten any money anyway.
Where the hell are you buying books that they cost 50 lol
Shhh he’s a pirate, he has no concept of how much media costs.
brazil. they can cost 50-150 bucks or even more here, depending on the book. technical textbooks can be even more expensive.
I resisted eBooks for years, preferring physical books from the library or new/second hand stores. I got gifted a Kindle from a well meaning relative a few years ago and I have a small collection on there, mainly built up when I was commuting.
This news came just as I am backing up my own data, moving off of the big name Cloud services and going back to open source software. (In confession the convenience of M365 etc won me over so the last 10 or so years I fell into the trap!)
Anyway needless to say my 40(ish) Kindle books quickly got downloaded and archived this week. Thanks to Calibre I’ve also fixed the covers to a book series that suddenly got updated to an awful ‘new hip’ version! :)
I’m now intrigued about repurposing the Kindle hardware as it still works and I don’t want it to go to waste, but with this and other recent events I’m done personally proving data or money to these big corporate companies as much as I possibly can.
ebooks have managed to pull the same scam that game developers pulled on gamers 20 years ago.
“ebooks will be cheaper! and with the fact that we wont have to pay for printing, shipping, storage, etc, You’ll pay a lower price while the author/publisher still receive more money than they would have from the physical book! its a win/win for everyone!”
aaaand then as soon as they were accepted ebook prices became the same (or near enough) price as the physical version, and in a few rare cases, even more expensive. Resulting in the massive promised profits for publishers, and maybe authors, but no gain but lots of demerits (like obnoxious drm, and shit like amazon going onto your device to delete it cause they lost the rights or something, which has happened) for end users/readers
And thats first party, brand new books.
There is no second hand market for ebooks, like there is from physical. Si theres no browsing a place like Half Price Booked or whatever to find something that isnt in your normal wheel house but thanks to being pre-owed, its cheap enough to roll the dice on.
i buy most ebooks from a small local bookstore. for the rest there’s still zlib
Are you buying ebooks in a physical store? How does that work?
I’ll continue pirating, thanks.
This is the way.
PSA: “Archiving” is a general legal-neutral and safe term you can use with co-workers.
Wether i am also a pirate one may speculate but i am always an archivist.
Fuck that.
YARR!!
Turns out it really is archiving when government decides to go renegade and start deleting everything they disagree with or wipe from history. Archive away beautiful data horders.
That’s fucked.
So anyway self hosting Kavita to read everything in my browser is hella convenient.
Interesting, I’d never heard of Kavita, so have just been using Calibre all these years. Did you start out on Kavita, or did you move from Calibre, or another software?
I use calibre for my kindle, but kavita for web reading on any of my devices.
The calibre web server kept claiming its downloads to my device were corrupted and would just never open books. Kavita just sends the books page as a web page which gets rid of that particular issue
I tend to bounce around software. I ran into it at random researching docker containers and just kind of stuck with it. I’ve got a habit of trying to containerize everything nowadays haha
Dropping a link for the lazy/myself for later
thus I have my personal library backed up on calibre. Wonderful software that’s been around for twenty fiveish years.
Yeah is this going to break calibre functionality? I remember using it to rip books from my kindle library but not how, exactly 🤔
Probably some kind of plugin or script to run… i forget the specifics because literally grab the kindle version, then search z-library.
It’ll break saving books you bought from Amazon, but you’ll still be able to send books you got from other places to it from Calibre. Fortunately barely any of my ebooks on my kindle are from Amazon (though my next ereader isn’t going to be a kindle, that’s for sure).
Cool guess I’ll download anything I bought from Amazon before the cutoff then it’s been ages and I can’t remember what’s there o7
There’s also calibre-web for a self-hosted option with a web interface.
IIRC it’s not as feature complete as the fat client
This. I’ve personally found it easiest to use Calibre to strip DRM & get things tidy, then use Audiobookshelf to manage both my ebooks and audiobooks
It does ebooks too?
Yep! Here’s an ebook I have hosted through Audiobookshelf, reading it over the Internet using my domain & reverse proxy.
(The top bar is shown/hidden when you tap the screen, so it’s not always in the way like this)
Thanks!
I love Calibre. I’ve recently broken my E-Reader (Tolino) but all my books are backed up on Calibre so the only loss is the hardware (still sad but not as annoying)
Joke’s on them, I get all my books from Z-Library anyhow.
I have a few books I bought, but even then, I grab from z-library. More portable and no DRM.
Already been doing this, but I think this will finally light the fire under my ass to move to a boox device for all my reading I’ve got the big boox, which I use for sheet music, and quite like it, so the smaller ones are no brainers
FYI, Onyx egregiously violates GPL and basically gives the finger to anyone who complains. Not that anyone is necessarily clean as a whistle and even so they’re miles better than Jeff “I dressed like a fascist before it was cool” Bezos.
I’m a big fan of Kobo, but they also used to have a connection with Walmart.
Piracy is the answer to the corpo over reach.
Deny the parasite profit… You are funding your enemy
Am I an idiot for enjoying my Kindle Paperwhite as an eReader, while at the same time never actually buying books from Amazon?
Same. Most news sites treating this change as a “Kindle issue” is borderline disinformation. This is an “Amazon issue”. Kindle the device isn’t changing and there is no reason to switch if you already own one (just please don’t buy a new one).
Same. I find ebooks for my family or we use Libby. I wouldn’t know how to buy a book on my kindle if I wanted to.
Nope. Mine has never connected to the www
It’s a good piece of hardware. I do the same thing. Although I recently got a Kobo and I gotta say that I do prefer the kobo slightly better. Kindle is still good shit though
I am sorry, what?
Turn on PC or phone. Download ebook from torrent site. Enjoy.
It’s not difficult to switch?
Undernet and #bookz for me somehow turned out to be easier than more popular styles of piracy.
Is bookz a channel in undernet?
yes
Balller, thanks. I’ve been enjoying IRCHighway and the ebooks channel.
#bookz is fantastic!
Oddly enough, pirated ebooks are a malware minefield. And hard to find.
That said, I have about 8000.
Where are you going to that they are a malware issue?
Try explaining how to do that to your non-techie relatives, especially the older ones who like reading. Yes, this makes is more difficult to switch.
At least my non-techy relatives don’t even know that what they’re doing is called “pirating”, lol. For them, it is just “getting media”.
I only learned that some people paid for digital media when I became fluent in English and got exposed to American social media.
Why don’t you use library genesis or Anna‘s archive?
Library Genesis is down. Maybe for good
I’m so in love with Anna…
Repeat after me!.. En-shit-ti-fication!
It’s not an accident that I download epubs and read them on Moon+.
Amazon signaled clearly years ago that their goal wasn’t to make a convenient ebook reader, but to create an entire proprietary e-reading system designed solely to extract as much money as possible for as little value as possible. And this is just another step in that ongoing process.
Wait, people who have Kindles buy their books from Amazon?
I always just got mine from a certain private mouse tracker.
