Amazon drops Linux support for generating Kindle ebooks • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon drops Linux support for generating Kindle ebooks

#111

Post by therealidiot » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 10:58 AM UTC

jmholla wrote: post #61

jwiley wrote: post #48

Others specifically mentioned Kobo as an alternative. I did a high level pass over the ecosystem before choosing them as an alternative to the Amazon monopoly, they seem somewhat equivalent to Chrome vs Firefox: - supported formats, for the Linux issue: EPUB, EPUB3, PDF, MOBI, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF, TXT, HTML, RTF, CBZ, CBR - no native linux client: not a deal breaker for me - is the company behind Kobo credible,…

I recently bought a Kobo and it wanted to connect to my WiFi before it would do anything. I ended up returning it.

Glad you mentioned this, as I would end up returning such a device too and now I don't need to waste my time

I'm looking for a new ereader and I don't want to have to register/sign in with anything to use it.

Re: Amazon drops Linux support for generating Kindle ebooks

#112

Post by solstice » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 11:28 AM UTC

solstice wrote: post #98

TavsiE9s wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's unfortunately the one we've already tried. For whatever reasons we can't seem to actually download the books that were purchased.

Are you sure? They do obscure the direct download links on the German kobo site (kobobooks.de), apparently preferring people to use their e-readers sync functionality. But last i checked I was able to download the kepub files after some browsing around in the web interface. I can't verify this now as the site isn't loading for some reason

Replying to myself here. it is indeed possible. On the website, go to "My account -> my books" (for me that's https://www.kobo.com/de/en/library) where you see all the covers of your books. Directly underneath the cover are three dots "...". Clicking on them brings up a small menu with a download option. But now that I think about it, it might also have sth to do with the fact that coincidentally, all the books I bought on Kobo seem to be without DRM (publisher is Tor.com), so maybe that's got sth to do with it as well.

Re: Amazon drops Linux support for generating Kindle ebooks

#113

Post by jordache » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 2:53 PM UTC

i hate how kindle doesn't support adobe DRM, which many libraries use for lending out ebooks.

Re: Amazon drops Linux support for generating Kindle ebooks

#114

Post by TwoNineFive » Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 1:08 AM UTC

jmholla wrote: post #61

jwiley wrote: post #48

Others specifically mentioned Kobo as an alternative. I did a high level pass over the ecosystem before choosing them as an alternative to the Amazon monopoly, they seem somewhat equivalent to Chrome vs Firefox: - supported formats, for the Linux issue: EPUB, EPUB3, PDF, MOBI, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF, TXT, HTML, RTF, CBZ, CBR - no native linux client: not a deal breaker for me - is the company behind Kobo credible,…

I recently bought a Kobo and it wanted to connect to my WiFi before it would do anything. I ended up returning it.

I have a Kobo. This is correct -- it won't let you do anything before you connect it to Wifi.

However, there is a trivial hack to get around this where you connect it to your computer via USB and manually edit a sqlite database to put in some blank entries on the registration. There are lots of posts on how to do this online. After you've done this, it works offline just fine.

Re: Amazon drops Linux support for generating Kindle ebooks

#115

Post by mzehrer » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 5:51 AM UTC

nickcotter wrote: post #109

Will this affect services like Crofflr, or do they use a different mechanism?

[crofflr dev here] The binary used by crofflr will still work and the currently used version is already years old. Alternatively it would be easy to switch to calibre based tooling.