Don’t buy Amazon products. Fairly simple concept.
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.
Too bad. Then theres no sale unless I can crack the DRM ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This. All of these problems are solved by people not giving money. But often it seems difficult for people to actually stand behind principle when the time comes – convenience is a helluva drug.
- 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
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/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.
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.
There are so, so many better ebook readers to choose from. Honestly just a phone with an oled screen is better than kindle.
Switched to kobo.
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.
@BitsAndBites @Lushed_Lungfish also also, if you’re local library uses overdrive/Libby you can just have free books, easy peasy
Yes, the ability to use Overdrive directly on the Kobo to checkout or return titles is so much nicer!
I’ll be switching to kobo next time round, but I’ve never not been able to dump books onto my kindle by usb. I do it with my phone over USB sometimes. Since when has not doing that been a thing?
Since at some point recently. You can still email files (epub not mobi now) to your kindle, but usb transfer doesn’t work any more.
Have you got a link to more info about it? I can’t find details anywhere.
Your “Send to Kindle” email address is in your profile details, under devices and apps. In the app (Android) it’s under settings.
Sorry, I meant any more details about sending books to kindle via USB - I’ve never had any issue doing this.
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.
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.
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.
I originally had planned on doing that, but honestly I’ve not plugged my kobo into my computer since I in earnest set it up. Out of the box I jailbroke it, then I realized I liked it a lot and didn’t want to get confused as to what I was recommending to friends/family vs what was actually jailbreak stuff, so I decided I’d reset it and use it the standard way for a bit to get the hang of it. Once I did that I’ve never had a need to plug it into a computer and figured it wasn’t worth the effort.
I hope I’m not considered impolite for using it as intended, though I totally understand people who would want to do as you suggested. Anything to decrease hold times lol. Also not that I would know from experience, but I imagine others greatly respect and appreciate the people who do that, provide the means to do that, or the end results of that.
Bonus points for no jailbreak required : D I didn’t even realize there was a jailbreak for it (or what benefits there are to jailbreaking it… I should do some research but I haven’t found anything I couldn’t do with the stock firmware and it sounds like you generally came to the same conclusion).
Mine is using the stock firmware, wifi off unless using Overdrive, but I plug it into my computer to charge and load it with books. It just shows up as a mass storage device like a USB thumb drive and you can copy/paste books onto it (or use Calibre). After disconnecting it will scan for new/changed files and auto-import any recognized formats into the reader application.
The benefits to jailbreaking it are that you can change the layout of the device, remove store icons, and just in-general tidy up the UI a bit. I haven’t seen anything game-changing from the jailbreak; like adding apps or something.
