The Bitter Reality of Ebooks and the Kindle Model
1–10 of 65 posts
Re: The Bitter Reality of Ebooks and the Kindle Model
#2Jeez, run calibre already.
Re: The Bitter Reality of Ebooks and the Kindle Model
#3"As of 16/08/2023, Amazon’s checkout button for Kindle ebooks is labeled “Buy Now”.
Just as on Steam you 'Buy' and on Steam it'll tell you the number of games you "Own".
For books, I de-DRM them and I can then read them in other clients, notably The Books app from Apple.
Re: The Bitter Reality of Ebooks and the Kindle Model
#4Not the ideal solutions, but they work: Try https://libgen.rs/ or https://zlibrary.to/
Re: The Bitter Reality of Ebooks and the Kindle Model
#5Regarding taking your Kindle books with you... the standard recommendation is to use the DeDRM plugin[1] for Calibre to convert your DRM'd books into plain old ePUBs.
My understanding (I'm not a lawyer) is that this is perfectly legal to do in the US, because you're allowed to remove DRM from content you've purchased (a license to) for personal use.
Re: The Bitter Reality of Ebooks and the Kindle Model
#6Not the ideal solutions, but they work: Try https://libgen.rs/ or https://zlibrary.to/
I love libgen.
I know we've switched completely away from indie bookstores and consolidated them into the behemoths, but I wonder if there's a future where authors and readers can win with cheap ebooks without so many middle men.
Even when I do think of buying an ebook, so often there's a $15 price tag. Purely as a consumer, that doesn't ever seem like a good deal to me.
Re: The Bitter Reality of Ebooks and the Kindle Model
#7All true but at the end of the day, just buy a physical copy to support the author ,download the ebook from libgen or whatever and just use the kindle as hardware. In some way I admire people who try to abide by all the 50 pages of legalese you're forced to agree to but I couldn't be bothered with it.
Especially all the books she lost that were associated with the account. If anyone had bought something from me once and lost access because Amazon screwed them over, you can't convince me there's one author in the world who'd care about you pirating it.
Re: The Bitter Reality of Ebooks and the Kindle Model
#8Yeah, this just can't stand under the absurdity of trying to apply a dead-tree-world model to a digital world.
I don't know how to get there, but the DRM thing just needs to burn down.
Re: The Bitter Reality of Ebooks and the Kindle Model
#9Not the ideal solutions, but they work: Try https://libgen.rs/ or https://zlibrary.to/
I love libgen. I know we've switched completely away from indie bookstores and consolidated them into the behemoths, but I wonder if there's a future where authors and readers can win with cheap ebooks without so many middle men. Even when I do think of buying an ebook, so often there's a $15 price tag. Purely as a consumer, that doesn't ever seem like a good deal to me.
Idk about globally, but at least in sweden it is usually far cheaper to buy pockets than it is to buy ebooks. Makes no god damm sense.
Re: The Bitter Reality of Ebooks and the Kindle Model
#10All true but at the end of the day, just buy a physical copy to support the author ,download the ebook from libgen or whatever and just use the kindle as hardware. In some way I admire people who try to abide by all the 50 pages of legalese you're forced to agree to but I couldn't be bothered with it. Especially all the books she lost that were associated with the account. If anyone had bought something from me once…
If you're downloading from libgen anyway, you might as well buy the kindle version to support the author, instead of the dead trees. Or any other ebook, or the audible.