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.
thus I have my personal library backed up on calibre. Wonderful software that’s been around for twenty fiveish years.
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)
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!
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.
Please pass it forward: all Kindles can now be jailbroken
What can I do with a jailbroken kindle that makes it worth doing instead of just using calibre?
Better Calibre integration.
Custom shelves and book collections on Kindle.
You literally just said the two things I wished Kindle allowed me to do natively.
I hate the fact my Kindle store books will bundle by series, but my non-kindle books will not.
Yea, I had like a 2nd or 3rd gen paperwhite and rooted it for this reason, but my partner’s wasn’t hackable until this moment. So now she can have it too.
Ok, the latter might actually be worth it. I’ll have to look into that.
Better reader, PDFs with reflow.
How would the reading experience improve for regular ebooks?
I switched from the default reader to koreader, and now I have dark mode (mine is probably about 8 years old and did not originally have this feature). Koreader has so many features and qol improvements compared to the default Kindle experience.
I’ll continue pirating, thanks.
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.
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.
Fuck that.
YARR!!
This is the way.
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.
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.
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!
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…
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.
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
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.
Or go for the Kobo, which is similarly priced as the Kindle. The Kobo Clara Colour is £150
I love how hackable Kobos are. I put KOReader on mine and it’s honestly just the best experience I could ask for.
That and the upgradeable storage… as soon as I can figure out how to solve my partition issues.
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.
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.
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.
And PocketBook. Don’t see them locking down anytime soon.
If it’s alright for Facebook, it’s alright for me. Yoho
🏴☠️
That was amusingly well timed:
I’ve jailbroken every Kindle fire I’ve ever owned, is this something new?
As it should be.
I don’t mind a monopoly on a physical product as long as I can jailbreak it, install my own custom hardware, or modify it however I want.
You don’t mind the harm to consumers and the anti-competitive results of Amazon establishing a monopoly on e-readers? Interesting take…
Amazon even has a monopoly on e-readers?? I thought that was a more evenly-shared market, with Pocketbook being the most popular, while Boox and others have a sizeable part of the pie. Where I am, Kindles aren’t even sold officially, so I don’t see them much.
My Kobo e-reader is pretty nice and takes any ol e-pub file just fine. And Calibre, a third party software for managing ebooks, has a plugin to crack Kindle files. Just sayin
And Calibre, a third party software for managing ebooks, has a plugin to crack Kindle files
Which requires being able to download those files from Amazon. Which is what this post is all about, Amazon not allowing you to download the files anymore.
I was thinking along the lines of if you already had them downloaded and wanted to switch off to something else
And Calibre, a third party software for managing ebooks, has a plugin to crack Kindle files.
Unfortunately currently broken for the latest version of Kindle for PC, which switched to a different encryption scheme. It also uses KFX file format that nobody likes, which fortunately can be converted to EPUB with another plugin, but de-DRMing doesn’t seem to work right now. It still seems to work for titles in AZW3/MOBI that didn’t get DRM update or didn’t have DRM in the first place.
It eludes me how people pay to ‘buy’ something that they cannot download in the first place. If I don’t have it as a file on my computer, I don’t own it. You wouldn’t pay to ‘buy’ a physical item if that meant only being able to look at it at the store, without the ability to take it home and do whatever you want with it.
If buying is not owning…
Just wait until they can figure out how to do this to physical items. How? Idfk bro what am I a rocket appliance?
Subscription lock
I’d love to see them put that on the big black dildo I purchase each year. Try me!
Lol
sorry vibrating/heating function locked until daily dues are paid.
Safety eject option locked until subscription is paid. “911. I have a dildo shoved in my ass and my safety eject subscription ran out. Please help!” you know, it sounds crazy and like this could never happen but I say it’s just crazy enough it will happen. Look at who the American president is. That’s all the proof you need.
I agree. However, some dishonest services allow to download, but downloaded file is DRM. It is even worse.
Most services are forced to carry DRM only versions of Ebooks by the book publishers. But there are ways of legally removing the DRM - it’s a faff but doable. I buy epubs and don’t use Kindle (haven’t for a long time) as it’s much harder to remove the DRM and actually own your books.
But way I look at it - if I bought the Kindle version of a book, I can just download a DRM free version by sailing the seas. Fuck Amazon.
It is very easy to remove DRM from kindle Books, but since you will not be avle to download them it will not be possible anymore.
i keep getting mixed msgs on this (then again, I could be misinterpreting) but it sounds like you can still download the ebook to your kindle (it will be in .kfx format), but if you plug the kindle into the computer and copy the .kfx file to it, that you should then be able to import it into calibre on your computer and the kfx plugin should strip the DRM.
i haven’t tested this to be sure yet (my kindle library is already downloaded and i’ve just been buying ebooks from Kobo since the Amazon announcement)
https://rl.bloat.cat/r/Calibre/comments/1h6wrlq/assistance_with_kfx_drm_removal_in_calibre/
DRM removal from Kindles from 2024 doesn’t seem to work, that is why they are removing it.
That’s where I’m getting conflicting info: I understand you won’t be able to “download and transfer via USB” from the Amazon website but when you download a book from the Kindle over wifi it’s still a file on your kindle that can be browsed to if you connect your Kindle to a computer via USB
Then you copy that downloaded ebook (.kfx) to your computer and import into Calibre and use the Kindle plugin that strips DRM from .kfx files.
I’m going to try that today and see if it actually works…
It is pretty obvious why they are doing this though, but it also means you don’t own them, you are renting them.
Convenience. Most people reads book once, if they finish it at all.
Am I an idiot for enjoying my Kindle Paperwhite as an eReader, while at the same time never actually buying books from Amazon?
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
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
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?
Why don’t you use library genesis or Anna‘s archive?
Library Genesis is down. Maybe for good
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!
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
To all the people who are saying “I’ll just pirate books,” you are aware you can buy eBooks from places that aren’t Amazon, right?
Have a look at https://bookshop.org/ebooks You can buy books/eBooks and support local bookstores that aren’t Barnes & Nobles or Amazon.
I’d suggest you download/archive your Kindle books and then buy your eBooks from elsewhere. You can still load those onto your Kindle.
Saying “I’m going to pirate because one specific website is changing its policy soon,” is pretty stupid.
EDIT: Turns out I was wrong about bookshop.org, you actually can’t load their eBooks into a Kindle. You need their app since they have their own DRM. Looks like I got all worked up about something without looking it up first.
Addendum: that specific site is dog shit. Imagine thinking you just bought an ebook but instead you bought a lease to some DRM shit that only works on their app.
EPUB or GTFO.
I hear you saying that, but the books I want to buy are never on those sites.
Does that provide epub when baught? Or does it lock you in with their DRM app?
Thanks for asking this, that question made me go look it up.
I found https://bookshop.org/info/ebooks
I thought you could load bookshop.org eBooks onto a Kindle, but it seems they have their own DRM and you need to use their own app…
Some of their books are DRM free, but not all. I thought they all were, but it turns out I was wrong.
So… maybe even bookshop.org isn’t the best option for Kindles.
I guess there really is only one option left…
I went researched a few years ago and concluded that there is no option for writers to be guaranteed “no piracy” and that’s why they prefer having paperbooks. (That is also after brainstorming with a few people to publish my own book if it were…) and those days i was trying to find an important book in electronic format and could not find it anywhere, the paper 10th edition version (which i eventually bought) is like 1000 pages and the e version i found was 200 ish pages summary. So my sad conclusion was that i just need a big’ol scanner at home, just so that i can scan everything that i buy in paper just because i could then keep it personally on my e-reader (and having destroyedbinding of each book i buy lmao)… is that too much to ask… my wife says no… lol
This is why I never once purchased a book from Amazon even though I have a Kindle.
Pretty pumped to jailbreak it with the new jailbreak.
New kindle jailbreak you say?
https://kindlemodding.org/jailbreaking/WinterBreak/
Supposedly works on all Kindles, I haven’t actually done a deep dive yet, just have it bookmarked since yesterday.
What can you do with a jailbroken Kindle?
Run software they don’t approve of. Like alternate reading apps that don’t need you to pipe everything through an Amazon account, read formats they don’t support, etc.
Hi. Thank you for the info.
I am looking for a new e-reader. Is there any reason why I should buy a Kindle and jailbreak it rather than get a PineNote, SuperNote, Nook device, Boox device, or a Kobo Libra?
Or would you recommend something else?
I was looking at the PineNote myself, but they stopped selling the developer version due to low demand. I’m afraid that it won’t be back until those who do own it finish writing the software for it.
According to their site and a couple others, they have recently started selling again and with what looks to be some variant of Debian on it.
Oh… I didn’t know that. Thanks for letting me know.
I have a Boox Palma 2 - their cellphone-sized thing that doesn’t have a cellular radio. I love it. They’re more expensive than kindles, though, since they’re not subsidizing their cost with ebook sales. I haven’t actually tried jailbreaking a kindle so I can’t say how good an experience that would be, but you could probably pick up a kindle of some description on the used market for dirt cheap to try it out.
The Palma was one of my top choices but I was thinking it might be a little small for me. It is one of the better looking devices.
I didn’t even think getting a used Kindle. New Kindle prices seem a little high for getting a locked system, so a used one is probably the most cost effective method.
Thanks for the suggestion.
And I have a bigger reader, since most of my library are pdf/djvu scans and they’d look unreadable on a screen any smaller.
Actually own it.
Interesting, thanks
I’ll be done with audible the moment I stop being able to liberate and archive what I pay for.
Until then, they’re helping me build my audiobookshelf
