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Amazon is discontinuing Kindle for PC on June 30th

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Re: Amazon is discontinuing Kindle for PC on June 30th

#121

Post by asveikau »

UltraSane wrote: post #115
asveikau wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What OCR do you guys use? I have only seen OCR that makes a lot of errors. Having it be usable requires tons of manual review. I probably wouldn't trust an LLM to do that review because it may introduce its own errors. Edit: downvoters, would you like to answer my question? I would genuinely like to know. I thought based on the confidence of the comment above there must be a super accurate OCR I've never heard of, bu…

Modern OCR is VERY accurate. Heck Adobe Acrobat Pro OCR was essentially perfect 20 years ago.

Can you name a good open source one? I have spent many hours in the current decade correcting OCR errors. Mostly tesseract.

Re: Amazon is discontinuing Kindle for PC on June 30th

#122

Post by wl »

UltraSane wrote: post #115
asveikau wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What OCR do you guys use? I have only seen OCR that makes a lot of errors. Having it be usable requires tons of manual review. I probably wouldn't trust an LLM to do that review because it may introduce its own errors. Edit: downvoters, would you like to answer my question? I would genuinely like to know. I thought based on the confidence of the comment above there must be a super accurate OCR I've never heard of, bu…

Modern OCR is VERY accurate. Heck Adobe Acrobat Pro OCR was essentially perfect 20 years ago.

One of my hobbies is typesetting modern editions of a certain type of rare, obscure old books that were poorly typeset to begin with. Modern OCR—and I’ve tried plenty of tools—is still rather error prone in my application.

Re: Amazon is discontinuing Kindle for PC on June 30th

#123

Post by hollandheese »

cyberpunk wrote: post #54
wrxd wrote: post #12

I’m so happy I downloaded all my Kindle books when I still had a chance and then moved to the Kobo ecosystem, which albeit not perfect is much much better

I was kinda amazed to find out how hard it was to buy a kobo libra colour in .de -- apparently there's some kind of cartel thing going on where amazon somehow convince entire markets not to sell their competitors products. I had to order it from Hungary or something iirc.

That's because Kobo's sister company Tolino operates in Germany. It has nothing to do with Amazon.

Re: Amazon is discontinuing Kindle for PC on June 30th

#124

Post by davkan »

snailmailman wrote: post #85
boneitis wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"or use these devices in any way"? My jailbroken Kindle has been sitting in a drawer for a while, but I do go into phases where I am using it heavily for months at a time. But, what I'm really getting at is, I don't find myself having to undertake the procedure to root a Kindle on a regular basis. Could someone clarify for me -- if I nab another secondhand device from eBay after May 20, will I be able to jailbreak it…

Generally speaking, they auto update, and the latest firmware is always patched to not be jailbreakable. However airplane mode easily dodges the auto update process, and new vulnerabilities are found to enable jailbreaking eventually . When I bought mine, it was updated to the latest firmware. I wanted to jailbreak mine, the method was “there isn’t one yet” so I set it in airplane mode. For a bit I manually copied al…

Yeah once you jailbreak you can replace the ota binary with a dummy and it won’t update anymore.

Personally i would not buy a kindle with the intent to jailbreak it, just buy a kobo.

The exception being if you want a scribe. There is no other 10” 300dpi ereader. I bought mine from an eBay seller who had one on the correct version and jailbreaking it was a bit anxiety inducing, given the cost and the fact I had no use for it if it were unsuccessful.

Re: Amazon is discontinuing Kindle for PC on June 30th

#126

Post by davkan »

dml2135 wrote: post #38
nightski wrote: post #27

I have a smattering of books on Kindle, mostly fiction/novels. But the vast majority of my book conllection consists of non-fiction/textbooks and I recently switched to Booklore on my NAS. I have over 900 textbooks and can access them anywhere via a WireGuard VPN. It's so slick! Booklore seems great, but I'll admit there may be even better options. However this is the future of books for me. I'd like to start replaci…

There was some whole blowup with Booklore over it being vibecoded by a single maintainer recently. I think the project has changed ownership since then, but be cautious. I use Calibre + Calibre Web. Definitely a bit old and clunky, but reliable.

Booklore was nuked by the maintainer after the blowup and no longer exists. Mostly it was not vibecoded, just the last few releases. The other contributors have since forked it as grimmory and have already done a first release that removes the telemetry etc. Grimmory is great imo and seems to be in good hands now.

Re: Amazon is discontinuing Kindle for PC on June 30th

#127

Post by random_human_ »

tim333 wrote: post #71
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #5

Combined with the announcement that they're killing the old Kindles as well...this is 100% about preventing people from liberating DRM from their books. Full stop. They are closing each and every remaining hole.

I wonder if it'll actually work? At the moment you can pretty much go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis and download whatever.

Nowadays AA [1] is IMO a better choice for users, but aside from that I cannot imagine these changes making much of a difference. There's plenty of ebook sources (Kobo, public libraries, etc) whose DRM are trivial to break (meaning Adobe and, as of a few weeks ago, LPCM). For what little content is exclusive to Kindle, it will just end up like WEB-DL content from streaming services: a handful of knowledgeable uploader with a KU subscription ripping content en masse—and good luck stopping them.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive

Re: Amazon is discontinuing Kindle for PC on June 30th

#128

Post by cyberpunk »

hollandheese wrote: post #123
cyberpunk wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was kinda amazed to find out how hard it was to buy a kobo libra colour in .de -- apparently there's some kind of cartel thing going on where amazon somehow convince entire markets not to sell their competitors products. I had to order it from Hungary or something iirc.

That's because Kobo's sister company Tolino operates in Germany. It has nothing to do with Amazon.

Ah that makes a little more sense. Do they jut rebrand kobo devices to tolino? I see they also have a colour e-reader but i can’t really tell if it’s the same device or not…

Re: Amazon is discontinuing Kindle for PC on June 30th

#129

Post by wrxd »

vlod wrote: post #65
wrxd wrote: post #12

I’m so happy I downloaded all my Kindle books when I still had a chance and then moved to the Kobo ecosystem, which albeit not perfect is much much better

Would you mind elaborating on the problems you have with the Kobo? I'm thinking of getting one of these once my kindle dies.

It works well and I haven’t had any issue. It doesn’t get full marks because it’s not an open device itself but more a device that’s easy to hack.

For example, most books in the kobo store have DRM (to be fair I don’t think it’s entirely their choice), albeit an easy one to break.

You see people here recommending “get a Kobo and install koreader”. That works and there is a one-click install process but it’s still an hack.

Another common thing to do is to keep the stock reader but tweak a file to point the store API to a self-hosted Komga/Calibre Web Automated/Grimmmory instance to get your own books in the system. Again, it works well enough but it’s not like these are documented API.

The bottom line is: it works very well and you can very easily tweak it but the way you tweak it are hacks (reasonable clean ones) rather than officially supported features. Thats why it loses a few marks

Re: Amazon is discontinuing Kindle for PC on June 30th

#130

Post by wrxd »

wrxd wrote: post #129
vlod wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind elaborating on the problems you have with the Kobo? I'm thinking of getting one of these once my kindle dies.

It works well and I haven’t had any issue. It doesn’t get full marks because it’s not an open device itself but more a device that’s easy to hack. For example, most books in the kobo store have DRM (to be fair I don’t think it’s entirely their choice), albeit an easy one to break. You see people here recommending “get a Kobo and install koreader”. That works and there is a one-click install process but it’s still an…

Said that, if you are not in the business of self-hosting, you can easily load books via USB or and it even has Dropbox or Google Drive integrations that work out of the box if you prefer network synchronisation
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