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.
I use a library app called Libby to read non torrented books. But I’m not sure if it’s available on the kindle. It’s good to support your local library, even if it’s only digitally
Libby is able to sync with your kindle, and then you just choose “send to Kindle” on your phone when checking a book out and the book will appear in your Kindle library.
https://help.libbyapp.com/en-us/6017.htm
If you have a Kindle, this is 100% the best way to read books.
C’mon United States, do the anti-trust thing! You used to be so good at it!
Did they? There have been a few cases, sure, but in general they’ve not been good in this regard.
I am sorry, what?
Turn on PC or phone. Download ebook from torrent site. Enjoy.
It’s not difficult to switch?
Why don’t you use library genesis or Anna‘s archive?
Library Genesis is down. Maybe for good
Oddly enough, pirated ebooks are a malware minefield. And hard to find.
That said, I have about 8000.
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.
Undernet and #bookz for me somehow turned out to be easier than more popular styles of piracy.
Is bookz a channel in undernet?
yes
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
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.
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
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.
Interesting, thanks
What can you do with a jailbroken Kindle?
Actually own it.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 love my Kobo. I installed KO Reader on it and have Calibre for managing my ebooks.
Get all my ebooks from z-library or Anna’s archive.
That’s my situation too. Got the Kobo Clara Color as a Christmas present for myself (the color was like $10 more, so what the hell) after resisting eBooks for years, and I really love it.
They take almost any ebook type, but they do have their own proprietary format, KEPUB. That’s what their own store uses. Thankfully, Calibre can convert to and from it. Due to Kobo being able to more easily handle zooming in to images and things like that with KEPUB, it’s sometimes worth converting.
Nice. Mines an older Clara I bought about 5 years ago. I personally don’t have the use for a color screen, but for $10 I guess why not! Most books I read don’t have any images besides the cover
I installed KO Reader as soon as I got it and never looked back. Not as pretty as the standard Nickel (?) OS but more customisable.
I love having an e-reader. I read so much more because of it. Much more convenient, not having to worry about heavy books, holding open pages, no need to worry about proper lighting for reading. Light and small enough to bring everywhere. I will buy another immediately once this one dies.
…and for those on Linux there is ‘DeGouru’, a tool for de-DRMing internet archive books that are lending-restricted.
A bit annoying in that it is somewhat sensitive to the Python version one has installed but there are ways to manage that which I am not qualified to advise on.
My favorite sites for actual ebooks are Humble Bundle and Fantastic. But these are predominantly tech books. No idea where I’d get good fiction in epub today.
Repeat after me!.. En-shit-ti-fication!
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”
If it’s alright for Facebook, it’s alright for me. Yoho
🏴☠️
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
I wonder if this is at all related to the EU changes to eBook DRM standards, where the standard Kindle Adobe DRM isn’t compliant
Am I an idiot for enjoying my Kindle Paperwhite as an eReader, while at the same time never actually buying books from Amazon?
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
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).
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.
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
Quick shout out to oceanofpdf
