Amazon is making it impossible to remove the DRM from Kindle Books
Amazon is making it impossible to remove the DRM from Kindle Books
goodereader.com
Amazon is making it impossible to remove the DRM from Kindle Books
294 comments
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I would recommend people buy their books off ZLibrary instead, where they come with no DRM.
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Don't buy Amazon products. Fairly simple concept.
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The problem is some authors signing exclusivity deal with Amazon, which means breaking the DRM and converting it is the only way to read it on a different e-reader.
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Too bad. Then theres no sale unless I can crack the DRM ¯(ツ)/¯
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The problem is some authors signing exclusivity deal with Amazon
Well then those authors can go straight to corpo-sellout hell and die a painful death, I'd rather never read a book again than buy from amazon.
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It's only takes one person to crack those books and spread them across the high seas and the only way to force authors to abandon Amazon.
There are always people who extra motivated by these challenges. The fact that these are written texts and shown on a screen means there will always be away to scrap the content off even if that involves a camera on a second device.
DRM only hurts customers who want to pay for content.
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Yep, I had a Kindle library of a few dozen books, when they started their shenanigans locking down the desktop client earlier this year I downloaded all of them, de-drmed and converted to epub with Calibre. Hosting them on Calibre-web and accessing with KOreader on a Kobo. I continue to buy books on Kobo and Google Books, which let me download copies (albeit with DRM).
Makes me wonder after all these years why Amazon is locking down ability to move books around. I wonder if they're starting to feel some real competition and feel threatened! The market of cheap e-ink Android ereaders seems to be growing more and more
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I started that process and hit a road block after getting all the books downloaded to my pc. Can you recommend any tutorials or guides that might help get everything converted?
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I wonder if they're starting to feel some real competition and feel threatened!
Probably the opposite. They're confident they won't lose sales over this because they're too firmly established as a monopoly. And they know that with Trump in office they're not going to face any pushback from the FTC.
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- https://www.gutenberg.org/
- https://openlibrary.org/
- https://www.planetebook.com/
- https://archive.org/
- https://www.smashwords.com/
- https://books.google.com/
- https://www.freetechbooks.com/
- https://www.getfreebooks.com/
- https://www.openculture.com/free_ebooks
- https://www.goodreads.com/
- https://www.oreilly.com/ (trial)
- https://annas-archive.org/
- https://pdfcoffee.com/
- https://singlelogin.re/
- https://www.ereaderiq.com/freebies/
- https://www.bookbub.com/ebook-deals/free-ebooks
- https://digilibraries.com/
- https://www.overdrive.com/
- https://manybooks.net/
there’s so many others and of course torrents
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It is remarkable how many books available for free on Gutenberg are sold in the same format on Amazon (it'd be one thing if they were special editions, new translations etc, but they're the same!)
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People out to make a quick buck are banking on suckers not knowing about Project Gutenberg, or failing to check it, or not wanting to do a couple of extra steps to get something onto their Kindle.
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Check out standard ebooks. They take public domain books and "clean" them up with really good typesetting, spelling fixes, and other things. All free too
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Standard is fantastic! The books are better quality than what they charge for on “marketplaces” and can be read for free or downloaded wholesale for a song. Add to that they host an opds catologue that fbreader can browse and you have incredibly convenient public domain books right to the ereader.
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Assuming you have a card from a participating library.
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Every time I go to checkout a book on Libby it's like 6-10 weeks' wait. If I put a hold on it then I'm just not in a place to read/listen at that time and then I feel bad for hogging it instead.
Better to just pirate or buy from a non-DRM distributor.
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Isn't goodreads owned by Amazon?
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Anyone else notice that the download interface page for Anna's archive has suddenly changed? I can't figure it out.
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The best books are on IRC.
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Fuck you Jeff!
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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.
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Koreader is quite good imo. But I only tried it recently
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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.
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I will never, ever purchase a book I can't remove the DRM from.
And there are people out there who are absolutely fanatical about book preservation. They will photograph every single page and run it through OCR and recreate an ebook just so it gets preserved. DRM is absolutely pointless and stupid.
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Exactly this. As an idiot I purchase DRM music when Microsoft had its own music store. Some years later they closed it and there was no way to validate music keys.
But thankfully I still have an old Roxio9( I think) CD, and back then Roxio didn't know what DRM was and would take the mp3 and burn it to DVD anyway, bypassing the key check, then I would just rip it back off the DVD...DRM is useless
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For real.
When I still had Netflix and Disney+ I'd want to watch a show on my PC, but I'd just get black screen with only audio, because something about my setup the DRM didn't like. (Possibly that I have USB displaylink monitors.)
So I had to watch on another device.
DRM isn't stopping content being ripped. It's just making life a pain for paying customers.
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I'm shocked at this unforeseeable turn of events.
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The current timeline is truly a constant stream of unanticipated surprises
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Switched to kobo.
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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.
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I've been with them for a couple of years now. Unfortunately the devices just doubled in price but I'm very happy with them otherwise.
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Amazon is making it impossible for me to consider a Kindle.
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again displaying, that DRM only hurts legitimate users. a pirate has never had the problem of backing up, moving or sharing his library...
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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.
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Yeah you can easily pirate any book, or even just get them 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.
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Yep, I could pirate all my books and audio books if I wanted. All it would do is fuck over the author tho.
As much as I hate audible it's the only legal choice I have for many of the books I listen to. Since basically every other legal option has out of the nearly 500 or so audio books I have less then 50 of them.
It's annoying.
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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.
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And to repurchase. Never forget that aspect of the scam. Sell but don't actually sell, make the customer keep on paying.
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This entire thing has been made needlessly complicated. Easy fix though.
- Get whatever ebook you want.
- Borrow some code from GitHub and teach a raspberry pi with a camera and a few servos to snap pictures of pages, turn the pages, snap again into a PDF.
- A script then parses all the images and OCRs them for the final PDF.
- You now own a backup of your DRM book, which you own forever. Pretty sure this is actually legal under DMCA since you are taking a backup of something you allegedly own. The encryption circumvention is irrelevant.
- now, break the law and throw the PDF on the internet to everyone. Go little bot! Go go go!
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The encryption circumvention is irrelevant.
Oh you sweet summer child, judges will bend over backwards to slap people with multi-decade-to-life charges for 'hacking,' even if the 'hacking' is just the rightsholder accidentally presenting data to you.
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To be fair, if you OCR the pages via camera, you haven't actually circumvented DRM. That means it's a completely legal backup, as the DRM on the original file was untouched and unaltered. This definitely does fall under fair use.
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Just do it in a country with reasonable laws
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They already ruled on this in favor of allowing you to back up what you already own. See video games, DVDs and CDs, video tapes, this is well established already.
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The goold old analog hole.
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Why not just remove the Amazon from the ebooks?
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amazon: finally we defeated piracy
one kid with a computer: snickers
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Anna's Archive
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We'll soon be back to monks transcribing at this rate.
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I have five published books, all without drm. Amazon better not put that shit ON my books. It's not there for a reason; I want people to share.
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The real question is how can I find out what those 5 book are without you doxing yourself.
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Curious, as someone who's an actual author, do you have any legal option at all for preventing Amazon (which I assume technically act as your publisher in this case?) to put DRM on your books, or demand them to remove DRM if they added DRM without your notice?
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Likely not, Amazon is a private market place and if their requirements to use it requires the drm his option is very likely use the drm or fuck off.
Not having good publicly controlled legal market places is one of the biggest failings of the internet.
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But have you considered that Jeff needs another few billies?
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Thank you!
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Kobo is cool Now just fyi. Works well with calibre.
The biggest issue I have is ebooks are almost all excusevly sold on amazon. I would give authors my money and not sail the high seas if it ment no DRM.
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I'm sorry but the idea that most ebooks are exclusive to Amazon is absurd. While they are trying and would love that to be true, it's just not.
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That was my first thought too, but I'm not so sure. I'd love to see data on it. I did a quick search and couldn't find any numbers, but I did find articles talking about Amazon requiring exclusivity in some cases. https://www.ingramspark.com/blog/amazon-exclusive-options-createspace-kdp-select-and-acx
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To clarify:
"Traditionally published" books and even many "self published" books are sold in all major storefronts and often on the author's website (if they have one).
The issue is that Amazon has REALLY REALLY good tools for self publishing and, at least until recently, Kindle Unlimited (?) was a great way for authors to make money without the power of a traditional publisher or the grindset for true self publishing. And Kindle Unlimited requires amazon exclusivity.
The "good" news is that Amazon is dicking everyone over with changes to Audible and the like (it is allegedly a big reason why Sanderson basically made his own publishing house) and a lot of the big names in SFF are increasingly considering their options. That is a drop in the bucket compared to Romantasy and the like, but it is not nothing.
So best recommendation is to politely nudge your favorite authors and to signal boost booktube/booktok/bookgram/whatever to keep pushing on this. One of my guilty pleasure "litrpg" authors has been open about this in the past that they use Kindle Unlimited but, at least on their discord, are increasingly looking into alternatives because so many of the diehard fans actively don't want to give Amazon money but still want to give them cash.
Just to keep adding on: Funny enough, Christopher Ruocchio's "whatever happened between him and DAW" is actually increasingly being used as an argument for why it is okay to change publishing formats. For those unaware, Ruocchio's Sun Eater series is spectacular in that it starts as Space Rome and Barbarians At The Gates before... going places. But he had scope creep and wanted to do an extra book but his publisher (DAW) had given him a specific deal and did not want to renegotiate and it was a huge clusterfuck that more or less led to him changing publishers midstream.
Which is generally acknowledged as a death sentence for a series because it makes any form of promotion nigh impossible because the old publisher actively does not want to encourage sales of new books (that is "their" money) and the new publisher can't sell the books that are generally required reading for the new ones. But between a lot of fans who had fallen in love with the series and prominent booktube influencers going REAL hard on it, he managed to successfully switch publishers and should be finishing up early next year?
But considering how many authors are in essentially the same mess where the first ten books are on Kindle but the next twenty might be on Kindle+Kobo+whatever? It is a very scary prospect that could literally end their literary career but... it is also increasingly doable.
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Nice read. I'm no longer at keyboard. Good points.
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Someone posted a comment somewhere else in this post with a list of sources of ebooks. Hope it helps!
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"Almost all"... Unless you read a very specific niche, I've rarely looked for a book that I wanted to read and not found it elsewhere. There certainly are some that are specific to KDP, but hardly "almost all".
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In fact just a few minutes ago I got another bundle from Humble that I loaded onto my kobo with no issue
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Between Kobo and Google Books I haven't had a problem of not finding a book. Are you talking about small authors self-publishing on Kindle? I could see that being an issue
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Also Canadian, though now majority owned by Rakuten.
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Boox is the best. Stock software, NO DRM. Downside is they are more expensive upfront
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Boox's Neoreader is surprisingly good, but KoReader just frog blasts it. And since it's just and Android app, it's trivial to install and keep updated
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Agreed, that they are just an android tablet makes them far more useful than most ereaders as you can install apps from the Play store. I probably use mine in the kitchen more than as a reader.
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How hard is to install KOreader on a Kobo?
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KOReader is trivial to install but I would also say it is nowhere near as "required" as it used to be for the majority of readers.
In fact, a few months (year or two?) back when amazon started this bullshit in earnest, the main dev(s) behind Calibre finally picked up Kobos and DRASTICALLY improved support for the devices. Still some wonkiness with usually having to eject and re-connect to actually update metadata but everything "just works".
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Basically a one-click install on supported devices. You just need a PC and a USB cable. Highly recommended
https://github.com/koreader/koreader/wiki/Installation-on-Kobo-devices
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Easy enough. You can also install QuillOS which an open source operating system for Kobos.
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Not to hard
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Fairly intuitive, if you can drag the right file to the right directory on the device.
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There’s no such thing as “impossible” when it comes to piracy.
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Just wait until you can only stream books, not download them, with random words replaced with synonyms using an algorithm that lets them track down who the originator of any scanned copies is.
That might sound ridiculous, but streaming-only to prevent perfect copies and hiding purchaser identifiers in the data are both DRM techniques that have been explored in other media already. There's no limit to how anti-consumer publishers can get when they think there's slightly more money to be had.
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There's no impossible because if you can see it, it can be captured and digitized, but there is a level of complication that can make it unreasonable. They could make it unreasonable to crack the drm outright and require you to screenshot/OCR it. Then they can limit the OS to make to difficult to automate capture.
Bottom line, they're just kicking payers off their network when it's easier to pirate it than to buy it through their service.
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Something something, piracy is a service problem. That’s why Spotify et al. still thrive, but more and more the Netflixes of the world are being replaced with yaaar
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The analog hole works on a lot of stuff
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but there is a level of complication that can make it unreasonable.
Lol, just read the Arch Wiki about Bluray playing. Unreasonable only takes a bit longer.
Especially engineering people get creative out of interest if they're denied access. And that's a beautiful thing.
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require you to screenshot/OCR it
So just like what people do with paper books.
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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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I've been slowly filling my wife's Kindle Oasis full of pirated books over the last 2 years. I got it initially because it had internet service everywhere and I could just email her the epubs to simplify loading things.
A couple of weeks ago, even though airplane mode is always on for this thing, (so no wifi either) -- this thing wipes something like 400 books from her library overnight. Granted, they were all pirated, but they're doing some nasty stuff there. It looks like there's renewed effort to combat this.
Sooooo, I sold it and bought her a Kobo Libra Color. Now, I just have her open up https://send.djazz.se/ -- give me the 4 digit code, and I can upload books to her that way. Goodbye Amazon. Don't let the door hit you.
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Cannot recommend Kobo enough. You can jailbreak it if you like, but I didn't get much benefit from that personally. I'm partial to the overdrive integration, but if you're loading epubs you probably aren't using that. If in the US, I'd recommend at least setting it up, since it's pretty easy and maybe more immediate for some books, but obviously she won't get to keep the epub after.
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Not that I would know from experience, but I hear there are Calibre plugins that will allow a user to pull the DRM'd book (downloaded via Overdrive) to a computer and remove the DRM.
I've read that it's a polite thing to do because you're able to return borrowed books much more quickly so other users can check them out.
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Kobo is on my Xmas list. I still have a gen 2? Kindle and it’s still pretty workable.
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That's weird and sounds like some kind of software problem. I can't see how that would happen otherwise. I have a Voyage and don't have wifi configured on it at all, just add books with calibre and it's been fine for a decade.
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It's not a software problem, the Oasis has free cellular service for life.
If you turn your Wifi off on an Android phone for example - it still scans and uses the wifi to keep track of your location, for instance. It's an anti-consumer pattern that companies are using. Airplane mode? -- Sure, for YOU. But Amazon probably still allows cell service to connect every couple of hours for exactly this kind of thing.
The error message she received wasn't sly about it either. It said something very direct along the lines of "We have determined that you are not eligible to read this book so we have removed it from your device"
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I love Amazon.
Their website makes it so easy to look up books for Anna's Archive.
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It's a great way to find the ISBN to chuck into annas or MaM
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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.
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🌏👩🚀🔫👩🚀
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I don't know why people buy an stuff like this and get surprised when this happens.
Plenty of other electronics that you have full control over.
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Plenty ? Really ? And what are those ?
Four times the prices and from four years ago ?-
Kobo e-readers are 1-to-1 alternatives that allow you to easily transfer epubs or PDFs to it with a USB cable.
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Having your cake and eating it too isn't on the menu
Kindles were loss leaders to get you in their ecosystem, just like all the shitty cheap tablets they sold.
The from four years ago part is real, but honestly, 4 year old devices read books about as well as current devices as long as you're not trying to go all fancy.
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Unless Kindle prices came way down, Boox are comparable in price, nicer in features, and allow side loading any eBook or Android APK (including the Kindle APK, if you can still get a copy of it.)
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You can read books for free on just about any general purpose computer.
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I am honestly surprised it took this long! Kindle has been around a long time and it's not like Amazon was any less evil back then. It makes me wonder if the competition has been starting to make them nervous!
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Why are people "buying" DRM infested books? They don't own anything. "Their" books can be taken away at the whim of the seller. Their rights can change with a change to the EULA. There are other legal ways to use e-readers (not Kindles) that let you keep and back up what you buy.
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Why are people doing X stupid thing that makes rich people richer at their own expense?
It's the herding and conditioning. The sheeple have not woken up.
So many things make so much more sense when we realize this.
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I have a pocketbook instead of a Kindle cause of this lol
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Was going to say, this has solidified my next ereader choice being Kobo
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Just got two kobos this month, for me and my wife. I had had one back in 2012 and wasn't reading much in recent years, but she had owned a handful of kindles before (never any other eReader) and lost all her book collection after her credit card was cloned and amazon deleted all accounts that had ever used it "for safety".
Her kobo arrived earlier and for a whole week she would come tell me all the amazing stuff she could do on it that she never thought possible. Incredible technological advancements like sending a file directly to it.
I was like "it's OK honey, you're out of that abusive relationship now"
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I mean, this is how you get me to stop buying Kindle books.
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What do you mean buy kindle books
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I stopped when they removed the "download and transfer via USB" option. Before that I bought books, downloaded a copy and removed the DRM.
Now I just download books without DRM for free.
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Tangent, but I have had an incredibly poor experience getting a library eBook onto a kindle. Libby gives out time restricted epubs - fair enough, I am actually borrowing the book, that makes sense. Kindle, despite being the "goto" ereader, and epubs being a standard format, cannot read them.
So, despite wanting to legitimately borrow and read the book, instead I am borrowing and DeDRM'ing it (which is its own convoluted process).
Why is Amazon pushing so hard for piracy? Its one thing to make their store easier to use, but breaking all other valid use cases just leaves the one remaining option...
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Amazon and Kindle have always been upfront about only supporting their proprietary format and people just chose to ignore it.
Never had any trouble with my Nook.
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I dont think that is true at all. They describe it as an e-reader and its reasonable to assume that that means it can read e-books. They even list EPUB on the supported formats section of the specs. No caveat there about only partially supporting EPUB.
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I transitioned from a Kindle to an iPad. It just works better and you can get refurbished older iPads with an excellent
OLEDscreen and warranty for less than a new Kindle in most cases.-
refurbished older iPads with an excellent OLED screen
The only iPads with OLED screens are the current generation of iPad Pro with the M4 chip. Every other iPad is an LCD screen (very good LCD, with deep blacks and very good local dimming, but still LCD).
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Yeah but the goal of a ereader is to not have to read on a normal screen but on something that look more like paper
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This is why I bought some Chinese android ereader than an amazon Kindle.
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What does this mean? What prevents me from OCRing the pages on a video that quickly goes through it?
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You are making a common mistake of being too literal with headlines! What you described is quite difficult and laborious. Nothing prevents you from doing that. Please try in the future to read headlines knowing the editor has written them to attract your attention, using a provocative word like "impossible", while the piece itself might still provide useful information. This is an important aspect of media literacy.
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Well yeah, but fearmongering about text DRM is just annoying to see. There are many battles to fight, and epub extraction from a Kindle is very low on the priority list
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Ok look an article from 1997 which predicted this very thing
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Remember to pay your local pirate.
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Yarrrrrr
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My kindle only knows about library books.
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There are so many alternative ereaders that are better than the kindle, that I don't get why people buy it.
I once borrowed one from a friend and it didn't even let me organize media in directories from a pc. The directory structure got all messed up and it was a pain to follow my study sequence. Any cheap Chinese ereader would allow that.
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Kindles are cheap. That's pretty much it. I don't think it's a great mystery. Amazon subsidizes their hardware to get you into their ecosystem even more.
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They also consistently put their ebooks on sale. I've gone cold turkey on buying from them and have noticed they often have the best prices on books. They want people to build a library and be locked in.
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Maybe my different experience comes from living in the global south. All of the are expensive in here, so kindle has no price advantage
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Which ones do you recommend?
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Not OP, but i am happy with my Pocketbook Verse pro.
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My kobos have been excellent, I've had a few over the years. MUCH sharper screens than the kindle by and large, and they support loading epubs, pdfs, cbz, all sorts of things.
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I'm pretty happy with Kobo. I've had the same model for about ten years and it's still working great. They had color temperature changing for the backlight before it was cool. The syncing to Pocket was neat before stupid Mozilla killed it, and now they've pivoted to Instapaper. Plus I can install KOreader to also read stuff on my own ebook server, though I find the Kobo firmware is quite nice so I often just stick on that.
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I mentioned some in this other comment: https://lemmy.zip/post/49532624/21704502
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The Paperwhite was magnitudes cheaper than a Kobo. I wanted a Kobo but just didn't have the funds at the time. I use the Paperwhite and have never connected it to wifi, thank God for them not tanking usb downloads. Yet.
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Tell me alternative vendors which provide good quality case and not breaking easily eink screen
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Pocketbook. But of course a lot more expensive than a Kindle since it's not subsidized by Amazon's store
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Kobo?
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I used a cybook odyssey for more than 10 years, so I guess bookeen devices can be a good choice. I'm currently using a refurbrished tolino vision 2 and the experience is also much better than the kindles I tried.
But if I had more money, I would probably have bought a device from boox. They make nice ereaders, some even with android,being much more flexible than a kindle. Devices from bigme and the meebooks also look nice, but I don't know if they have good cases.
I'm sure there are other good options around. These are just the ones I know.
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Kindle Unlimited is the big thing that keeps my wife on her Kindle. She goes through books like candy and it’s made it seriously economical without the trouble of loading it via her computer.
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I rock a Kobo and used an Onyx for almost a year and they are indeed great (Onyx especially if you want to still use Kindle and don't mind a free 5G Modem).
The issue is the ecosystem. Kindle Unlimited is, even with the current Amazon bullshit, a SPECTACULAR resource for self-published authors. And it restricts what authors can sell in terms of ebooks.
There are-ish ways around it (drying up every day as per the article). But if you are buying an ereader it is generally because you like to read a lot. And the Amazon ecosystem is still nigh unbeatable.
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My kindle is from 2011, got it for free from someone getting rid of it. It's old and dumb as shit and Amazon fortunately doesn't care about it anymore.
Since I got it, it never had an Amazon DRM-ed e-book loaded on it. I intend to keep it that way.
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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.
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How can you export it? I would love to get rid of Amazon for books
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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.
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So they encrypt it via keys they download to protected storage.
I hope their market share will tank after a few public outrages. Make sure you're not one of the victims.
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When I got a kindle (10 years ago) I did it on the basis that it was possible to strip the DRM of the books and load them on another device. I'm not going to be tied to some shitty platform for ever more. I must say though that when I have bought books on other places, the process of stripping the DRM and getting the book onto the device has been an absolute ballache - presumably the same for any device when you're not using the native store.
I won't be going back to physical books though. I bought a hardback for the first time in ages and my wrists don't like it. Nor does my partner when I'm reading while they're trying to sleep.
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Same, I used to have some Caliber extension that stripped DRM. Last used it 2-3 years ago and worked for Adobe DRM at least.
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Bad corporate behaviour is a political problem.
Here we are talking about technological solutions for political problems. Why?
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Such is the nature of the hacker spirit, for better or worse.
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Oh no, clumsy me, dropping these links, what a mess.
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They’re also facing problems ripping books from Amazon, sadly.
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Yes, but they will probably have older titles 9 out of 10 times.
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DRM on Kindle it's a known fact. That's why Richard Stallman calls it Swindle
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OK, so kindle is off the list of potential readers.
Any recommendations for a good reader that can do epub, PDF, and maybe even html with CSS?
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I have a Kobo and it does OK. Nothing special.
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I like my kobo
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Also saying Kobo. I've got the Kobo Libra Colour and love it.
It's the only ereader I've ever owned but I used the spouse's Nook and Kindle a couple of times in the past and the Kobo kills it. Granted, we're talking about a nearly new release of the Kobo vs a 5+ year old Kindle so it's not a fair comparison.
Because of eInk and auto-sleep, the battery lasts me well over a month of casual reading (~30min before bed) with the occasional multi hour weekend session. Backlight is present and is totally readable in dark areas at <10% brightness; 100% brightness is like a supernova in your face. While the Libra Colour is not specifically a note-taking tablet like a reMarkable, it does just fine for quick notes/todo lists/etc but I did splurge on the ($60) stylus. There's a "notes" application that comes pre-installed.
eBook support for writing in margins (or over text), underline/circling, highlighting, etc is really nice but occasionally the highlight is flakey when trying to highlight the end of a paragraph. That seems to have been specific to certain epubs rather than an "always" thing, but it happens in around 20% of epubs I've used.EDIT: Notes and highlights you do in an epub (and presumably other formats) are exportable to your PC via Calibre ("Annotations"). I love this because I like to highlight things I find interesting, particularly good quotes, and this gives me an easy way extract them while retaining a reference to which book it was and where exactly in the book it was. Example attached.
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Seconding a Kobo. They have Overdrive (library) integration in the US and their eink and full color options are both great.
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You might try one of the larger Kobos to be able to read PDFs comfortably. The little ones might be a bit cramped with most PDFs. For html I've never tried that with Kobo, but a lot of people swear by the Android e-ink tablets from Onyx and Boox, though those are sometimes pricey!
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I came across this giant comparison table of eReaders last time I was researching an upgrade. While it doesn't list supported file types, anything running an android operating system that lets you download apps for reading from google play would meet your needs.
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I use my remarkable 2 for that. Pretty expensive compared to other typically ebook readers but I use it to take notes too and it's basically a pen and paper replacement for me.
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Boox Go 7 Color II
Install KoReader on it (it runs Android so it's literally just installing a new app) and you've got the best reading experience out there
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I have an ereader and I've never bought an ebook. The fact that they're priced the same as paperbacks is absurd.
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I like to go check out the book I want from the library, and when it gives me the Amazon DRM version I just go search for the epub version online and download that. IIRC, completely legal as I have legal access to the book...somehow.
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IDC personally. I remember publishing houses basically forcing the Internet Archive to stop letting people downloading books during the fucking pandemic. They killed fair use, fuckem.
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So I had an e-reader once but left it in the drawer because I found reading on my phone (dark mode) was so much more convenient.
I use librera which has tts and I alternate between reading with my eyes and listening to the robot voice narration (eg while driving). Those language packs have come a long way!
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I think it was 10? years ago when I grudgingly tried a kindle because it was so ridiculously cheap and the people around me loved theirs.
The Kindle was an Ad bomb. After engaging internet only, no TV, no ads, since, 2003? (Whenever xfiles, Buffy, DS9, and Firefly were done.) The kindle hit like a sledgehammer with the native ads system. I returned the failed tablet to Amazon.
I don’t know how people live with that level of ad consumption and I grew up with TV commercials. Libby on iPad mini. It’s fine.
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I bought personally second hand kindle and jailbreaked and using koreader no other way, my device enitely always offline
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The not-ridiculously-cheap Kindles do not have any ads. Yes it's scummy and gross to sell something with built in ads, but I expect most people who "loved theirs" did not have the cheap ad-supported one, they had the more expensive models. The ad-supported cheap versions are not representative of the general quality or experience of a more common and typical Kindle.
That said, it is still a locked down piece of shit. There are much, much better options. Kobo is great hardware that is as straightforward to "hack" as copying a file into a directory, as it's running a stripped down Linux basically. Kobo with KoReader is all I need.
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Authors would be foolish to publish on Amazon. Guarantees your book will be forgotten.
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I feel like nothing is impossible.
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Impossible? So cameras and OCR don't work anymore?
If a human can see it, it can be pirated
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Few have the resources or time for that. And Google and Internet Archive were both sued for doing that with even public domain/orphaned/out of print material
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It’s a weird concept that you buy a device and then have to find an exploit that hasn’t been patched in order to do what you like with it as though you’re a hacker trying to breach someone else’s system, but it’s actually your own system you’re trying to breach.
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I need to root my Kindle...
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Might be too late. Winterbreak hasn't worked since 5.18.1 and the latest firmware is 5.18.5. If you've been updating your firmware normally, jailbreak has been unviable since around April or May, at least for the 11th and 12th gen devices.
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Buy a pocketbook and don't log into any accounts. Fuck em. I keep mine airgapped.
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There are so, so many better ebook readers to choose from. Honestly just a phone with an oled screen is better than kindle.
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Kindles are pretty decent ereaders if you don't connect them to amazon's ecosystem and just keep them in airplane mode. And unlike phones, they can hold a charge after a few years.
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No it isn't Eink is eink
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Moved away from amazon and kindle a while back
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Just imagine giving money voluntarily to Amazon.
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calibre ftw always and forever
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If you have a kindle you can hack it and load PDFs onto it. The koreader is better anyway.
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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.
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Having used both, i prefer the kobos. They just eat up everything you throw at them.
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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.
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Kobo with calibre-web sync. Hands down the best ereader I've ever owned.
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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.
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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/
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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/