It's a one-time setup and no longer requires conversion.
Granted, it's less of having eliminated a step and more like having shifted the workflow, now having to load into KOReader as the new "default" state if you ever have to reboot the device.
I can put on a custom wallpaper. That you cannot do this without jailbreaking is largely also an ideological/philosophical issue, IMO. And, it's a fun icebreaker if another Kindle user in public walks by and sees a whacky wallpaper. Then, I can share my enthusiasm with hacking or tinkering with computers in general and sometimes that will carry into another line of conversation if everyone's in a conversing mood (of course, without pontificating or breaking out into a lecture about the evils of bigcorp, DRM, etc... I know some people are really bad about that).
Not everyone wants to dump time into tinkering with their Kindle like that, I get it. And honestly, mine collects dust these days, as I find it more difficult to ramp up reading momentum with it, whereas I can more easily (and inadvertently) binge-read if I grab the smartphone thinking I'm just going to squeeze in a few paragraphs, even if the experience is worse.
If you have mixed feelings about Calibre (e.g., powerful, but the GUI looks unpleasant to you), you can use Calibre to help you convert books to EPUB format, then put them in something like a `~/doc/` directory on your laptop, with descriptive filenames.
Then you can read on your laptop, such as with `foliate`, and also sync to an ereader that lets you mount it as USB storage, with a script for which the key part is:
cd ~/doc && rsync -crltv . "${DeviceMountPoint}/."
Authors also need to unhook from Amazon, and here are some reasons why:
- They keep at least 30% of the cut, but much more if you dare to include high quality images in your e-books. That map you spend a week or two creating? It'll be a messy blur in a kindle.
- If you are not a best-seller, Amazon brings you nothing in terms of discoverability. In fact:
- the moment a potential reader lands on your book's page, Amazon will show them ads for other books. Consider that that potential reader may have come there after you paid for ads in Amazon or in some other platform, or after you spent a day doing in-person marketing at an arts fair. That's just asinine.
The discoverability issue affects me the most as a reader, since Amz keeps surfacing ten-a-dime stories that happen somewhere in USA, mention starwars three times per page, and involve werewolves.
> That map you spend a week or two creating? It'll be a messy blur in a kindle.
There's a funny thing going on with maps in books.
Fantasy novels frequently include maps, and some people are pretty vocal about how much they appreciate those maps. But the maps are never relevant to the story at all; you'd lose absolutely nothing by leaving them out of the book.
History books also tend to include maps. The maps are much less detailed, and it's rare for people to make appreciative comments. But the maps are in there, even though the authors appear not to really care for them, because they're necessary to understanding most of what's going on. As far as relevance to the text is concerned, history books have a much more severe undersupply of maps than fantasy novels have an oversupply, and the fantasy oversupply is considerable.
And yet, somehow, all of the popular demand is for fantasy novels to have more maps and for history books to have fewer.
I love maps on books. And illustrations and schematics. But the kindle experience with all of those is so bad, even slowing down the device, that I may prefer to skip them. And because the kindle device drags down all the other platforms (e.g., kindle on ipad), then the experience on other platforms is also bad. Authors may be better served by hosting their digital books on their websites, but that also comes with its own sets of problems :-( .
It's a different story on physical media, for example a well-made hard cover.
It seemed promising when it launched, but I switched to Goodreads (before the Amazon purchase) and haven't been able to find the time to look for an alternative since.
1. Jailbroken my old Kindle to freeze the software version.
2. Use it to get new books from Amazon, and then import them into Calibre. Calibre can then de-DRM them, with the help of the dr-DRM plugin. It only needs the Kindle's serial number to work.
3. In addition to Calibre Desktop, I'm also running Calibre Web with the same database (my book database is on a network drive). Calibre Web also has OPDS server support.
4. I'm now reading books from a reMarkable tablet that has KOReader installed. It also has OPDS support, so I can browse my library from it and download books as needed.
5. I'm also using Storyteller to align Audible books and the Amazon Kindle eBooks, synchronizing them.
Stuff that doesn't work:
1. Position sync between audiobooks and physical books. KOReader does have a position sync protocol, but translating its position into an aligned position is not trivial.
2. Automatic audiobook alignment when new books are added.
3. I'd love to use a Kindle Oasis with 4G with my eSIM to be able to sync the reading position. This was _the_ killer feature of Kindles for me.
Yep. You can also sync to your own self-hosted book platform like Calibre-Web or Komga instead of or alongside the Kobo store. That way you can easily sync books from multiple stores.
Or just buy a Kobo and be done with Amazon without any kind of hacking.
Whenever someone on HN complains about Kindles, someone else recommends Kobo. But I never see anyone recommending the Nook.
I haven't used a Nook in close to a decade, but when I did, it was very hackable. I even used a $5 one from Goodwill as an e-ink photo frame. Are the modern Nooks as bad as Kindles now?
I love my Kobo Forma except for the fact that the battery life is complete trash. I’m pretty sure Kobo did not replace the battery on the refurbished device I purchased :(
I have battery problems with my kobo Libra. When I'm using it to read at night, there's no warning from night to night between when it has mostly full battery and then being unable to use it without a charge.
I discovered recently that if you sideload a book onto the Kindle via Calibre, Amazon can delete them silently at some later stage if they decide you didn't purchase it from Amazon. This includes public domain works.
It's allegedly a result of how Calibre manages tags in order to display covers but still feels deeply wrong.
There are two main tag values for Kindle books: EBOK and PDOC.
EBOK is intended for store content. (ebooks)
PDOC is intended for user content. (personal documents)
In the past, only EBOK got cover thumbnails. So Calibre tagged books as ebok to get cover thumbnails.
This changed in a relatively recent firmware update for 7th gen and later Kindles, so now PDOC tagged books get cover thumbnails too. (Sept 2022)
I assume that Amazon just looks at the EBOK tag, assumes its an expired loan or something, and deletes it. Since that thread says only EBOKs get deleted. Calibre still tags as EBOK by default. A possible solution is to tag as PDOC instead. That thread mentions the problem started in 7/2021
Perhaps, but try explaining to my wife why all her public domain Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte novels that I carefully loaded for her vanished from her Kindle just because she turned the wifi on.
That’s super annoying, but it is still straightforward to sideload books in a way that works with Amazon sync, via either the email address or uploading through Amazon.
In the Kindle app for Android, Amazon is constantly deleting stuff that you downloaded from it. Why do you think "if they decide you didn't purchase it from Amazon" is relevant?
There are certain genres of which 90% of authors are publishing exclusively on Amazon, because all other authors in that genre are too and that's where the customer base is. They all publish under Kindle Unlimited, which allows readers with a subscription to read unlimited books (of which authors get paid a certain % of that months total KU profit).
That phenomena isn't a coincidence, a large percentage of readers in this genre will have KU because almost the entire genre they love is on there. To sign up for KU requires authors to agree to an exclusive publishing agreement, meaning they can't publish their ebooks on other platforms. This means that the majority of that genre will never migrate to other platforms.
I've got a nook and always try and buy eBooks through Barnes and noble. Not because I have anything against amazon but because I want physical book stores to survive. Its been a long time since I bought a physical non technical book for myself but I love taking my kids to B&N and letting them roam around and find something to read.
I've been a Kindle user for over 15 years, but I finally stopped buying Kindle books after Amazon removed the "Download & Transfer via USB" option, effectively eliminating the ability to remove DRM.
It's a shame. I kept my original Kindle (1st gen) around for a long time just so that I could go to "Manage my Content" and then Download the Book via USB for that older device to get an AZW3 file rather than the really locked down KFX format because DeDRM'ing it was easier.
You can still remove DRM with Calibre and the PC Kindle app (not sure if it works for the latest versions of the Kindle app, but the older versions can still download books fine anyway).
That said, I've switched to Kobo a long time ago. It's easy to de-DRM, and under the encryption there's a bog standard EPUB with some minor Kobo-specific extensions - and no additional image compression, which is important for comics and manga. I have a Kobo reader too, but these EPUBs work everywhere and don't suffer from any AZW->whatever conversion issues.
It produces EPUB3 files with embedded audio aligned with the text. Use Libation and Calibre to strip your DRM or use Libro.fm to buy audiobooks without DRM.
ACSM download, DRM-stripping and uploading to Dropbox can be automated with a python script if you buy from the Kobo store. It requires Calibre, but you just need it for the CLI. Another python library is needed for automating the ACSM auth and download. KOReader's UI is awful, but once you get the hang of it, importing books from Dropbox to read on your Kindle device is pretty nice.
48 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 57.7 ms ] threadWhy not just convert them to mobi and read them with the native reader?
Granted, it's less of having eliminated a step and more like having shifted the workflow, now having to load into KOReader as the new "default" state if you ever have to reboot the device.
I can put on a custom wallpaper. That you cannot do this without jailbreaking is largely also an ideological/philosophical issue, IMO. And, it's a fun icebreaker if another Kindle user in public walks by and sees a whacky wallpaper. Then, I can share my enthusiasm with hacking or tinkering with computers in general and sometimes that will carry into another line of conversation if everyone's in a conversing mood (of course, without pontificating or breaking out into a lecture about the evils of bigcorp, DRM, etc... I know some people are really bad about that).
Not everyone wants to dump time into tinkering with their Kindle like that, I get it. And honestly, mine collects dust these days, as I find it more difficult to ramp up reading momentum with it, whereas I can more easily (and inadvertently) binge-read if I grab the smartphone thinking I'm just going to squeeze in a few paragraphs, even if the experience is worse.
If only there was a national (or global) digital library of ebooks.
Then you can read on your laptop, such as with `foliate`, and also sync to an ereader that lets you mount it as USB storage, with a script for which the key part is:
- They keep at least 30% of the cut, but much more if you dare to include high quality images in your e-books. That map you spend a week or two creating? It'll be a messy blur in a kindle.
- If you are not a best-seller, Amazon brings you nothing in terms of discoverability. In fact:
- the moment a potential reader lands on your book's page, Amazon will show them ads for other books. Consider that that potential reader may have come there after you paid for ads in Amazon or in some other platform, or after you spent a day doing in-person marketing at an arts fair. That's just asinine.
The discoverability issue affects me the most as a reader, since Amz keeps surfacing ten-a-dime stories that happen somewhere in USA, mention starwars three times per page, and involve werewolves.
There's a funny thing going on with maps in books.
Fantasy novels frequently include maps, and some people are pretty vocal about how much they appreciate those maps. But the maps are never relevant to the story at all; you'd lose absolutely nothing by leaving them out of the book.
History books also tend to include maps. The maps are much less detailed, and it's rare for people to make appreciative comments. But the maps are in there, even though the authors appear not to really care for them, because they're necessary to understanding most of what's going on. As far as relevance to the text is concerned, history books have a much more severe undersupply of maps than fantasy novels have an oversupply, and the fantasy oversupply is considerable.
And yet, somehow, all of the popular demand is for fantasy novels to have more maps and for history books to have fewer.
It's a different story on physical media, for example a well-made hard cover.
It seemed promising when it launched, but I switched to Goodreads (before the Amazon purchase) and haven't been able to find the time to look for an alternative since.
There is one based on ActivityPub called BookWyrm.
https://joinbookwyrm.com/
https://openlibrary.org/
1. Jailbroken my old Kindle to freeze the software version.
2. Use it to get new books from Amazon, and then import them into Calibre. Calibre can then de-DRM them, with the help of the dr-DRM plugin. It only needs the Kindle's serial number to work.
3. In addition to Calibre Desktop, I'm also running Calibre Web with the same database (my book database is on a network drive). Calibre Web also has OPDS server support.
4. I'm now reading books from a reMarkable tablet that has KOReader installed. It also has OPDS support, so I can browse my library from it and download books as needed.
5. I'm also using Storyteller to align Audible books and the Amazon Kindle eBooks, synchronizing them.
Stuff that doesn't work:
1. Position sync between audiobooks and physical books. KOReader does have a position sync protocol, but translating its position into an aligned position is not trivial.
2. Automatic audiobook alignment when new books are added.
3. I'd love to use a Kindle Oasis with 4G with my eSIM to be able to sync the reading position. This was _the_ killer feature of Kindles for me.
https://open-slum.org/
Whenever someone on HN complains about Kindles, someone else recommends Kobo. But I never see anyone recommending the Nook.
I haven't used a Nook in close to a decade, but when I did, it was very hackable. I even used a $5 one from Goodwill as an e-ink photo frame. Are the modern Nooks as bad as Kindles now?
It's allegedly a result of how Calibre manages tags in order to display covers but still feels deeply wrong.
Long thread here: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=340936
There are two main tag values for Kindle books: EBOK and PDOC.
EBOK is intended for store content. (ebooks) PDOC is intended for user content. (personal documents)
In the past, only EBOK got cover thumbnails. So Calibre tagged books as ebok to get cover thumbnails.
This changed in a relatively recent firmware update for 7th gen and later Kindles, so now PDOC tagged books get cover thumbnails too. (Sept 2022)
I assume that Amazon just looks at the EBOK tag, assumes its an expired loan or something, and deletes it. Since that thread says only EBOKs get deleted. Calibre still tags as EBOK by default. A possible solution is to tag as PDOC instead. That thread mentions the problem started in 7/2021
That phenomena isn't a coincidence, a large percentage of readers in this genre will have KU because almost the entire genre they love is on there. To sign up for KU requires authors to agree to an exclusive publishing agreement, meaning they can't publish their ebooks on other platforms. This means that the majority of that genre will never migrate to other platforms.
They might be able to also integrate with Hardcover API for syncing your books list as well as using WebDAV protocol for syncing locally book files.
https://github.com/readest/readest
That said, I've switched to Kobo a long time ago. It's easy to de-DRM, and under the encryption there's a bog standard EPUB with some minor Kobo-specific extensions - and no additional image compression, which is important for comics and manga. I have a Kobo reader too, but these EPUBs work everywhere and don't suffer from any AZW->whatever conversion issues.
https://storyteller-platform.gitlab.com.io/storyteller/
It has a server and mobile apps for reading.
It produces EPUB3 files with embedded audio aligned with the text. Use Libation and Calibre to strip your DRM or use Libro.fm to buy audiobooks without DRM.
For book deals, try bookbub. There are regularly deals on kobo which you can get notified of.
If I cant get an ebook via Kindle or Google Books its usually available on libgen.