Totally did not see this coming. Like, fifteen years ago or whenever.
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Thanks for the heads-up. I’m downloading all of mine and finally making a Calibre library.
I read somwhere how to solve this
1 - factory reset
2 - deactivate wifi for life
3 - upload books with calibre
This will wipe out any content you have, as i understand
I upload books with Calibre and never had to reset anything. It’s great.
I have a kindle, but I never buy my books at Amazon. I just but them elsewhere, de-DRM them on calibre and copy them to the kindle. Not as comfortable, but okay for me.
You mixed up step 2, it’s supposed to be “Install KoReader”.
I’m planing on doing this but i fear 2 things out of pure ignorance: killing my kindle and battery usage
Get an old Kindle. The new ones make it hard for you to connect to your computer. They require you to download a “convenient” piece of software meant to allow you to transfer files. But conveniently it also makes it so you can’t transfer files easily without it.
Even just a couple of years back you could plug in your Kindle to your computer through a USB and just drag and drop files. It only reads the proprietary .mobi format but Calibre, an excellent piece of software, will automatically convert .epub files to .mobi for you and it has a great algorithm.
Then all you gotta do is look up whatever you want on libgen and for the price of one kindle you can have a virtually infinite library of books.
I’ve actually had my first generation Kindle for about ~14 years now and my newer one for about ~3 years. I won’t ever buy a new one, but the ones from ~3 years ago are excellent pieces of hardware.
You just have to disconnect it from the internet and never turn on the wifi. If you do, Amazon will fuck with your settings and make your life difficult.
Basically, if you’re on a budget a used Kindle from ~3 years ago is a great choice in my opinion. If you want something new, stay far away from Amazon.
Absurd. Glad I have a Kobo.
I know I switched ages ago but I’ve never managed to port my existing library of ebooks off the kindle
Do you want help?
It’s been a while since I tried it but from memory I had managed to extract the device keys from my kindle for DeDRM and then it wouldn’t decrypt the files with them
I did it a little while ago. Was very easy. Download books with kindle app, load them into Calibre and use a one click plugin to strip the DRM. I think this was the step-by-step I used.
The guide the other user commented looks pretty good, better than the one i followed. lol
If you run into issues let us know.
Just swapped to a Libra Colour last month and I’m feeling better about the choice every day
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The Kobo Clara Color’s screen doesn’t look any different to me with non-color eBooks than their non-color version. The only thing that’s really different is that the book cover you see when it’s powered off is in color. Now I will admit that e-ink color is not very good, but it doesn’t ruin the experience of reading just a regular book.
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I’m farsighted and have an astigmatism, so I have to read with glasses, and maybe that’s the issue, but I just held my Clara really close to my face and I don’t notice any screen door effect.
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Wow, I just bought it last year before they discontinued it then. Interesting that only colour screens are available now. It must mean that they are at least as good though? Edit: after reading reviews, apparently not… that sucks.
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At least I’m hoping that there’ll still be a spectrum of both BW and color screens available. Apparently many seem to like/prefer colour screen, and the screen door effect and worse contrast doesn’t seem to bother a lot of people. Some even prefer the more textured look of the screen door effect, though I don’t know myself as I’ve never tried a colour screen. Either way, I’d be hesitant to try one, and as I kept my Kobo Aura One for like 7 years it’ll be quite some time before I upgrade my current Kobo Libra 2. If I have some spare cash I might be inclined to try a colour e-reader as an alternative to my current one, but it’s not high on my priority list.
But yeah, it definitely seems that Kobo is pushing their colour screens as they’re only selling the Libra in colour now. Might be that they release a B/W once the hype dies out a bit though.
I switched to Kobo a few years and couldn’t be happier. I hated supporting Amazon.
Yep. Not to gloat, but I never touched Amazon’s ebook marketplace.
My current e-reader is a second-hand Kindle that has a permanent message asking if I would just please connect to a WiFi network just one time just for a moment PLEEEEEASE.
I get my books from libgen, Gutenberg, or Kobo, and keep them on my computer. They’re organized in Calibre, and I transfer them over on a USB cable.
That’s terrible…
Just fyi there is some good publishers like baen that still support and don’t plan on removing ebook format downloads.
That’s why I avoided Kindle and picked a Kobo. Sure you can remove DRMs from the books you’ve bought. But at some point they could block you from doing that. They can change anything at anytime and there’s nothing you can do about it.
That is no different than Kobo. Thus far, Rakuten have been pretty good about not caring more than the bare minimum. But there is nothing stopping them from doing the same bullshit with firmware updates to the kobos and drm updates to the store and apps.
I am finally migrating from kindle to kobo (tried kindle to boox last year and it was bad…) but I am under no illusions that I am just hoping one company is better than another. I mean, the other is Amazon so it is a pretty safe bet. But still.
there is nothing stopping them from doing the same bullshit with firmware updates to the kobos and drm updates to the store and apps.
I never connect the Libra to any network, how can they do anything? I did actually install some updates since there were a few annoying bugs, but I just downloaded the firmware on the pc from https://pgaskin.net/KoboStuff/kobofirmware.html and updated it offline. Now all those bugs seem fixed and poor Kobo still hasn’t seen the interwebs
Ah, my deepest apologies. I was not aware there was absolutely no issue or threat to anyone because you didn’t connect a kindle to the network either.
there is nothing stopping them
how can they do anything?
Just dont update and keep it off the internet I guess
Well there’s a key difference, Kobo allows epub. I don’t think they could legally remove it from devices already on the market?
Kobo allows epub
Kindle doesn’t? Mines 2 years old but my co worker got one for Xmas and theirs loads the epub I sent them no problem at all
Honestly the Kobo is better as a physical device imo but the Kindle is perfectly simple to commit crimes on if you have Calibre
I’ve always heard that they didn’t. Just checked about it and they started to support it in 2022. But it’s still not native, it gets converted to their proprietary format.
And Kindle supports mobi files? It is just that those tend to get preprocessed into azw or the other one files. Much like Kobo tends to work best if you preprocess those epubs into kepubs.
The issue is that Amazon has repeatedly changed their mobi variants to fight against de-drm tools as well as increasingly locking down their apps and even devices to make it harder to get data off (and now on) to them.
There is absolutely nothing stopping Rakuten from doing the exact same with Kobo. And people should be aware of that rather than just stanning their favorite company.
It’s pretty easy to jailbreak a Kindle and block firmware updates. But the fact that it is necessary in the first place sucks
did that a couple of days ago thankfully. goodbye amazon, you were never loved.
I found this super helpful… https://github.com/WeLackDiscipline/BulkKindleUSBDownloader/blob/manual-login/end-all-guide.md
The optimist in me says they’re doing this to avoid piracy.
The pessimist in me says they’re doing this so they can purge books because of the Trump administration.
Either way, I can’t say I’m a fan.
Por que no Los dos?
You will own nothing and like it!
both seem just as terrible to me
The optimist in me says they’re doing this to avoid piracy.
Won’t pirates just buy their source copies on a different platform, so now Amazon loses the original sale as well?
The “original sale” in that case is not even pennies. So… not sure why amazon would care?
Also: Many smaller authors basically depend on kindle because of the ease of use of the web portal and incentives to do larger discounts for their audiences. One of my favorite guilty pleasures has talked about exactly this (although he IS investigating alternatives).
And, much like with video games: The Sandersons of the world will be pirated. MAYBE a Dalglish will be too. But nobody cares enough to go after a Samphire or Shel.
Reminder that piracy is a service issue.
100%. I have always pirated, but the amount of things I pirated went way, way down when Netflix had a decent library of things to watch and was affordably priced.
I stopped pirating altogether thanks to Spotify, Netflix and Steam.
But now I’ve cancelled Netflix and I have a 24 TB NAS filled with movies
I moved from MA to NC and I miss my library every day. (I also miss other things.)
Piracy is also a “We’re underpaid and can’t afford shit in this economy” issue. It’s ethcal to pirate since the rich steals from us all the time.
I’m quite glad that I never bought fully into Kindle/Nook/Kobo and instead went with an eInk Android tablet.
Which model did you end up with? Do you like it?
I went with a Box Note Air 3C, and it’s great. I hear the new model is basically the same but faster.
Kobo and Nook ebooks are still ePUB and easy enough to free from their DRM.
Technically, official Kobo books are KEPUB, which is their own proprietary version of EPUB they use for their store, but they can read EPUB and other formats just fine. And if they don’t, Calibre solves that problem.
(Converting books to KEPUB is sometimes worth it, especially if they have illustrations mixed in with the text, because then you are able to do things more easily like zoom in to the image on the reader.)
im glad i didnt even try eink, i just went to best buy tried the cheapest tablets and the s9 fe works perfectly for me, wanted to like the p12 lenovo but the brightness was terrible on it, couldn’t see shit. I think id be dissapointed in my reading experience if eink is so much nicer, i like having options to watch media and do other stuff
I used to have a normal tablet before buying my e-reader and can say with certainty it is night and day difference. So much more comfortable to read on e-ink. Even comics are usually good in black-and-white.
Kobo connected to calibre web is the ultimate freedom/privacy ereader
I’ve got a kobo Clara HD with plenty of pirated books on it, works pretty well, would recommend
I have a Clara Color (it was like $10 more for the color version and it gives me a pretty screen when it’s powered off) and I absolutely love it. I was not a fan of ebooks until I got it. Turns out what I was not a fan of was all the other ebook readers I tried. I’m reading books on it more frequently than I ever read physical books.
Authors sometimes offer direct buy ebooks from their personal site so you can support the author directly.
Definitely switch to alternatives from Amazon. They treat their authors abhorrently too. I’ve personally been super happy with libro.fm for Audiobooks (essentially Audible, but you can download the audiobooks DRM-free)
Its possible to buy DRM free ebooks from itch.io and it is where I get everything that I can.
Adding on to this that Barnes and Noble sells DRMed ePUB files that are relatively easy to strip DRM from using Calibre.
So if you can’t find a book anywhere else, at least they don’t use a proprietary format and still allow you to download your books using their PC software.
I was a semi-early adopter in the ebook space and I have refused to get onboard with the kindle ecosystem from the start. There’s no reason for their proprietary format other than complete control over things they pretend to sell you. Amazon is also the Walmart of books and uses their position to browbeat publishers and authors into taking smaller cuts of sales.
One of my friends got a book published and I waited and waited for it to be available anywhere else. Eventually just bought what was probably a print on demand copy from Amazon because that’s the only place his publisher sold books. I never buy physical books anymore but I’d rather do that than buy a kindle book.
I hate Amazon’s proprietary format too because one time it was the only download available and my reader just can’t display it!!
Do the non-kindle e-readers link to Libby? I may eventually try to get my wife and I off our kindles and she uses that when she can.
100% yes on Nook, and as far as I know Kobo hasn’t dropped compatibility.
