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’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.
I am sorry, what?
Turn on PC or phone. Download ebook from torrent site. Enjoy.
It’s not difficult to switch?
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.
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?
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!
Why don’t you use library genesis or Anna‘s archive?
Library Genesis is down. Maybe for good
Locked-in platform closing the door. How surprising.
Accepting DRM in the first place is the problem. Hard to avoid, but still. I just got a boox; great value, can’t use adobe DRM. Didn’t have any problem there. Of course, money is going everywhere except big “publishers”, but that’s hardly an issue; they choose their business model, I choose my customer model.
they choose their business model, I choose my customer model.
Ooh, this is very pithy. I like it. I will use it.
If this doesn’t help physical book sales, nothing will.
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.
I’ve been downloading my books but most of them are DRM so I can’t read them on anything BUT a Kindle. I’ve been thinking about getting another e-reader but I fear I’m trapped.
Just look up Kindle DeDRM, it is easy enough to remove that stuff and then even convert them to epub
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).
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
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
My solution was to just redownload all my books from z-lib after I bought them already.
I’ve been monkey paw’d with my wish “Z library becoming the most convenient eBook platform”
I’m so in love with Anna…
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 🤔
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
Probably some kind of plugin or script to run… i forget the specifics because literally grab the kindle version, then search z-library.
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)
deleted by creator
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.
reMarkable, PineNote, Bookeen, etc…
I’m not saying anybody deserve to be mistreated … but come on, at this point if you buy something from Amazon it’s Stockholm syndrome. Just do NOT. It’s that easy.
F*ck Bezos and other billionaires. Stop making them even richer from your pain. Stop your mind from being literally enslaved!
And PocketBook. Don’t see them locking down anytime soon.
There is a whole community of people out there who will pretty much refuse to buy brand new electronics. And thats for very obvious and valid reasons.
Kindles can be found for dirt cheap if not free 2nd hand. And so many users have a kindle for this reason. Myself included. Id never throw out or discard an electronic device that continues to work. For the same obvious reasons as why i dont buy new ones.
And so this information is super relevant and important to users like me. Regardless of how much people like you might be convinced that “we had it coming” or whatever.
Sure, it’s the same problem with most of electronics, it’s the console business model, or ink printer, where the device itself is “too” cheap and companies make money on content. Unfortunately it comes with shackles. I’m all for breaking the shackles but unfortunately has to be aware of what they are getting into, not just the trouble but also potentially supporting the company promoting DRMs and more.
I work in XR and Meta/Facebook is the embodiment of that problem. The Quest is too cheap compared to alternatives like Lynx (standalone designing in France, unfortunately still running on Android but at least rootable) or even the “old” now Valve Index, which in addition to its price also requires a gaming desktop.
So… it’s a money making machine for corporations. Hopefully recycling is done in a way that provide 0 support for the corporations locking down its device, promoting its marketplace BUT also, sadly less realistic, doesn’t also prevent companies who try to sell genuine alternative that do NOT promote such business model from existing.
TL;DR: get a 2nd hand reMarkable, PineNote, Bookeen, etc…
unfortunately though, due to the same issues there isn’t a very large second hand market of those either. Like the cheapest remarkable second hand I could find was still 300$ and the cheapest pine note was 270$ for preowns.
when you compare it to the kindle which has preowns starting at 40$ it’s a hard buy
I got a secondhand Kobo on eBay for less than $100, almost in new condition (the seller just forgot to include the charging cable, but luckily I had plenty of spare micro-USB cables). It’s a 2018 model, but it has 8 GB of storage, plenty for most people, and a nice 6" 300 PPI screen with warm light and dark mode. It’s more than sufficient.
Point being, alternatives are out there. reMarkable and Boox aren’t exactly equivalent devices, since those are meant as more e-ink note-taking tablets, not dedicated e-readers. You could probably find a 2018 Kobo Clara HD for around $40-50 used nowadays as well… and it has more features than the equivalent 2018 Kindle.
Yeah it seems I misunderstood what those tablets were,
I did find the old Samsung Tab tablets that would do pretty decent job though, those are somewhat around the same price range too, like 70-140ish range preowned
And looking into the kobo clara series it does look like those are about 120-130 second hand currently so not as bad
3Easier said than done. Had a quick search. In 45km of my home there is not one reMarkable, PineNone or Bookeen. There is 2 kobos. And around 200 kindles. Kindes are starting at 5 bucks for ones that look a little beat up. Kobos are 80 bucks. You can still avoid buying most books from amazon. Obviously not all. Even owning Kobo there are some books you end up buying from Amazon. They have the largest foreign language library. There are thousands of popular books which you cannot get in a foreign language anywhere else these days. And you have to acknowledge that most people in the world are not reading books in English.
Sometimes you can get a solid deal. If youre super patient or lucky. But the 2nd hand market will generally always follow the market distribution of retail.
So long as kindle is domninating. 2nd hand users are gonna be heavily pressured into buying kindle.
I wholeheartedly agree that we shouldnt support amazon and i do think they are making kindles a pain.
But i dont think you can expect people to just find 2nd hand alternatives like what you listed. Especially when you consider the demographic of people shopping for eraders.
This is why i find these kinds of comment chains futile. We all love to vote with our money, but its not that simple for a lot of people. Maybe instead of this “you get what you deserve” attitude we could put more energy towards promoting the jailbreaks and trying to make those as accessible as possible for your chineese grandma to be able to do it herself on her Windows Vista. Not to mention that there is 0 value in telling anyone that bought a new kindle that they deserve whats comming. At best they sell their kindle when they buy a kobo perpetuating the cycle. At worst they trash it and contribute the already growing problems of ewaste.
FWIW my point isn’t about shaming people, it’s to make buyers fully aware of the consequence of their actions, both political and ecological. My point is to show that actual alternatives exist and yes they are more rare and expensive (probably also because they are rare, which is by design for Amazon, they do have scale in mind from the founding of the company, they undercut in order to dominate all marketplaces!). I genuinely wish the options I listed were both cheaper and more available. Now… it’s a bit like buying clothes from Primark vs e.g. Patagonia. The pricing is radically different, and their are both selling clothes, but I’d argue they are NOT the same products, including the ecological impact. So… again, not trying to shame anyone, solely show that alternatives, with different trade off, do actually exist TODAY. Every time one person try to go with the cheap and popular, they are tipping the scale to, IMHO, worst solutions for everyone else, including the 2nd hand market.
Thing is, the pinenote is €610, and the kindle paperwhite is £160, cheaper on discount.
I get your point and there’s a reason why the kindle is as cheap as it is, but I can understand why someone would see those prices and go for the kindle.
there’s a reason why the kindle is as cheap as it is,
Indeed, cf https://lemmy.world/comment/15163037 unfortunately too cheap usually comes at a non financial cost.
Or go for the Kobo, which is similarly priced as the Kindle. The Kobo Clara Colour is £150
I’ve had three ereaders, all three were kobo.Yet I wouldn’t recommend them anymore. There’s a mandatory online activation now. There are ways to bypass it but it’s not great.
Many models are unstable with KoReader so it’s not even an alternative anymore.
The day I replace my eReader is going to be a hard day.
I’ve bought myself a Boox Go Color 7. I love that one, even though it’s twice as expensive as a Kobo or Kindle.
I love how hackable Kobos are. I put KOReader on mine and it’s honestly just the best experience I could ask for.
Absolutely the reason I bought mine too. While we are probably a small niche, looking for this functionality was how I found Kobo in the first place.
That and the upgradeable storage… as soon as I can figure out how to solve my partition issues.
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?
