Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Backing Up My Kindle Ebooks (2018)

sonyaellenmann.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 160 posts

Re: Backing Up My Kindle Ebooks (2018)

#121

Post by komali2 »

umvi wrote: post #74
sfotm wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really see religious/conservative populations going out of their way to abridge a book that includes scenes that they need need "whited out". There are plenty of other books to read, and they'd probably prefer not to support works they disapprove of, anyway. That's even assuming that the books make sense with the sex and violence torn out; if you were to read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo with everything a…

> if you were to read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo with everything a puritan found objectionable torn out of it, there wouldn't be a very sensible story left. I think you misunderstand what religious people really want. Most people with "puritanical" objections to media content are just wanting it to be less explicit (i.e. left to the imagination) - not completely whitewashed from the story. After all, most religi…

I completely understand why an author would reject anybody attempting to change the prose as you have suggested here.

Whiting out in a book, or in your own ebook copy, is one thing. Sharing, then, those edits would be like releasing a fan-cut of a movie. Doing so wholesale (the entire movie) isn't ok - sharing timestamp swaps that you can plug into VLC is a different story.

Re: Backing Up My Kindle Ebooks (2018)

#122

Post by harshreality »

maskros wrote: post #101
harshreality wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Converting ebooks doesn't destroy formatting unless you convert to a formatting-limited format like mobi or rtf as an intermediate step. kf8 and epub are roughly equivalent.

The default settings to remove/add spaces between paragraphs amounts to destroying the original formatting. KF8 is a proprietary wrapper around a regular EPUB file.

I don't think that's the default. I just reverted to default settings when trying to convert a mobi to epub, and the options to remove/insert paragraphs, linearize tables and several other obvious unwanted modifications are all disabled.

Re: Backing Up My Kindle Ebooks (2018)

#123

Post by cjsawyer »

bduerst wrote: post #105
komali2 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair, but just like I've never needed my photo backups, when I do need them (if I ever do), I'll be very, very, very glad I put in the ~3 hours of work or so a month it takes to ensure my photos are all backed up.

Doesn't Amazon let you re-download your books on your kindle? That's a little different than photos in that once the photo is gone, you don't have the opportunity to capture it again.

My concern with this thought is that eventually any company will shut down or stop supporting whatever service I’m using.

Re: Backing Up My Kindle Ebooks (2018)

#124

Post by ggg2 »

bsharitt wrote: post #45

While I try to buy non-DRM books when I can, I'm still willing to buy DRM'd books as long as the DRM is pretty breakable(and I back them up immediately most of the time). If the books on Amazon, Google, B&N, etc were to suddenly have unbroken DRM, I'd stop buying DRM'd ebooks until that issue was "fixed". Every ebook DRM format(except maybe Apple) is already trivially removable, so I wish they'd drop the farce and go…

that's the sort of elitist behaviour that plagues digital world.

dvd locked by region? don't worry, more expensive models can be bypassed by those two button presses, only the poor is really impacted.

tracking users and OS security bugs, don't worry, the latest $600+ devices will get a patch. only poor, used device buyers and developing countries models will be affected by not receiving a patch.

the modern world now is divided into the elite and the not-economically-viable-to-port-security-patches. And everytime we, the elite, dismiss something as a nuisance because we are the elite, we are making things irreparably worse.

my sugestion: do not give in to drm because you can work around it. instead pay the extra cents and get a used hardcopy. the convenience of a ebook is lost if you have to work around a drm anyway. and that way their drm sales drop to zero and they have to rethink this whole falacy.

The number of people accepting DRM content is used as a sales pitch by Pearson printing to force universities to use DRM text books that can't be resold! again, screw the poor, right?

PS: sorry for the rant. DRM makes me salty.

Re: Backing Up My Kindle Ebooks (2018)

#125

Post by anatoly »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #56
anatoly wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Download your own AAX files (using the Audible download manager or search around for some ways to do it w/o the download manager). 2. Find out your 'activation keys' using ffprobe and the inAudible-NG project, see instructions here: https://github.com/inAudible-NG/tables/blob/master/README.md . Needs to be done only once for your Audible account. 3. Use ffmpeg with --activation_bytes to convert AAX to MP3 or other…

Why is transcoding necessary even if the AAC option is used? (I was under the impression that audible used aac under the hood.) Is this avoidable?

I'm not sure. Possibly if you try ffmpeg's -a copy and such, it'll simply extract the AAC. Let me know if it works for you. I've always wanted mp3 in the past so I didn't mind the transcoding.

Re: Backing Up My Kindle Ebooks (2018)

#126

Post by maskros »

harshreality wrote: post #122
maskros wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The default settings to remove/add spaces between paragraphs amounts to destroying the original formatting. KF8 is a proprietary wrapper around a regular EPUB file.

I don't think that's the default. I just reverted to default settings when trying to convert a mobi to epub, and the options to remove/insert paragraphs, linearize tables and several other obvious unwanted modifications are all disabled.

If true, that's excellent news! I've carried around my custom Calibre settings for several years now, so I don't really know what is the default anymore. Back when I started using Calibre, the default settings were not ideal, and most Calibre converted files I've seen in the wild have used the old defaults.

Re: Backing Up My Kindle Ebooks (2018)

#127

Post by umvi »

komali2 wrote: post #120
umvi wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The vast majority of people don't feel the need to censor the content they watch because they either understand what's in the content, or simply avoid tainted content altogether Right, but said people number in the millions, and would consume said content if only there were a way to selectively censor what they find objectionable. > If you're censoring things like ASoIaF, then maybe ASoIaF isn't for you, considerin…

>Right, but said people number in the millions, and would consume said content if only there were a way to selectively censor what they find objectionable. Perhaps I'm not understanding, but if you're whiting it out, you're reading it anyway, right? So, what's the benefit? If you get to a sex scene, can you just skip it or something?

Have you ever used VidAngel? Basically it gives you a tree of content you can selectively filter before you even watch the show. You can say "filter all sex", or you can drill down into the tree and only filter "naked women" or "naked men" or even drill down and filter a specific scene if you know about it.

When you hit the timestamp of a filter, it just skips over the scene.

Books would be the same, but with the added advantage that you can easily alter the text to make it feel more natural. So instead of an explicit sex scene, you can end the chapter with a new transition where the characters enter the bedroom and close the door and it is simply implied what they did in between chapters.

Re: Backing Up My Kindle Ebooks (2018)

#129

Post by pmontra »

macinjosh wrote: post #30

By coincidence I was doing this last night because I got a new eReader (non-Kindle). I found the most reliable method was to go the the "Manage Content and Devices" page on my Amazon account and manually download each book. This method downloads a single file for each book to your machine and its in a format Calibre and DeDRM can work with. It took a while even though I only had ~80 books but it was worth the effort.

I went to that page but there is no way to download the books. What's the name of the link/button to use?

Re: Backing Up My Kindle Ebooks (2018)

#130

Post by umvi »

komali2 wrote: post #121
umvi wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you were to read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo with everything a puritan found objectionable torn out of it, there wouldn't be a very sensible story left. I think you misunderstand what religious people really want. Most people with "puritanical" objections to media content are just wanting it to be less explicit (i.e. left to the imagination) - not completely whitewashed from the story. After all, most religi…

I completely understand why an author would reject anybody attempting to change the prose as you have suggested here. Whiting out in a book, or in your own ebook copy, is one thing. Sharing, then, those edits would be like releasing a fan-cut of a movie. Doing so wholesale (the entire movie) isn't ok - sharing timestamp swaps that you can plug into VLC is a different story.

> sharing timestamp swaps that you can plug into VLC is a different story.

That is precisely what I am suggesting sharing - page numbers, paragraph numbers, length, and other metadata needed to filter the book (essentially "timestamps" for books). This metadata would tell the software where to excise sections from the ebook. People would need to own their own copy of the book, and the ewhiteout software just alters it according to the metadata input.

Post reply on HN