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Kindle is removing download and transfer option on Feb 26th

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Re: Kindle is removing download and transfer option on Feb 26th

#181

I’m not sure why anyone buys Kindles when there are so many better options available. I bought a Kobo Clara years ago, and it supports regular MOBI and ePub files. My book purchases are no longer liked with the reader and I’ve never had a problem in all these years. And this wasn’t even the best or best value for money device I could have bought. Today there are so many other better alternatives in all price points a…

I've got an onyx boox and it has been amazing. No way on earth I'd buy a locked brick like the Kindle after my experience with the Boox.

Re: Kindle is removing download and transfer option on Feb 26th

#182

I don’t really get the Kindle hype. Kobo is a vastly better experience and the unlimited plans are more affordable. Kobo is $8 a month, $10 for books and audiobooks. Kindle is $12 flat. Kobo has g drive and Dropbox integration. Also the e-readers use the same screens (minus the “colorsoft” which is still a e-ink product).

Idk about Kobo plus, the content available on it all seems to basically be the written equivalent of shovelware (unknown authors, questionable quality). I've almost never searched for a modern book I want to read and found it available on the subscription service. Agree everything else is better though, and Amazon's equivalent subscription library could be just as bad for all I know.

I suppose it depends on what you're into but kindle unlimited is the reason I prefer the kindle to kobo. Kobo seems to just be garbage but around 1 of every 3-4 books on my TBR written at least 6 months ago is on unlimited. Almost everything else I can find at the library. The few remaining outliers I wait until a sale (physical or digital).

Re: Kindle is removing download and transfer option on Feb 26th

#183

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43046995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43039924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43041726

This comment is itself a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43070314

Except it flags it properly as dupe and doesn't include more dupes.

Re: Kindle is removing download and transfer option on Feb 26th

#184
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kobo is definitely superior to Kindle in my book. The hardware is great and it's completely open to sideloading and even modding (it runs Linux under the hood). I can't speak to their digital bookstore but they integrate with Overdrive for library borrowing.

besides books, which you can sideload very simply with kindle, what do you need to sideload to your e-reader

Adding on to what others said - I added a button that can download book files from my Google Drive, and it was as simple as copying over rclone and a one line bash script.

Re: Kindle is removing download and transfer option on Feb 26th

#185
post #58

This is especially obnoxious for books that are already DRM-free. For example, one can presently buy a Tor (the publisher, not the onion router) book from the Kindle store, download the azw3 file, use a tool like KindleUnpacker [0] to more or less losslessly convert it to ePub, and read it anywhere. There's no DRM to break! [0] KindleUnpacker follows in the IMO utterly bizarre tradition in the epub tool writing scene…

I think if decent companies like Tor ("this book is sold without drm") could unlock "download this book" in your kindle library, it would be a great thing.

also, in california with AB2426, I wonder if this would qualify as a purchase not a license.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

Re: Kindle is removing download and transfer option on Feb 26th

#186
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still download books you paid a license to Amazon for, you just have to use a Wi-Fi or 4G LTE-enabled Kindle to do it.

Assuming that you have Wi-fi and that your Kindle is compatible with it. Someone with a hardwired-only connection, an older Kindle that doesn't support Wi-fi at all, or one that doesn't support WPA3 will be stymied. (The models that don't support Wi-fi at all originally had cellular service for wirelessly downloading books, but that was sunset a few years ago. So there will be literally no way to copy new books to th…

Speaking as someone who’s pretty happy with his still-working DX — and values hardware longevity — this is half the issue precisely.

(the other half of course being what happens when material is pulled when it’s only cloud-resident and vendor administered)

Re: Kindle is removing download and transfer option on Feb 26th

#187

I spent yesterday morning downloading ALL my (~2400) Kindle books using the command line utility from https://github.com/yihong0618/Kindle_download_helper In case anyone else needs to do something similar: Log in to your Amazon account > Manage Your Content and Devices Copy the cookie and save it to a file ('cookie.txt'): https://github.com/yihong0618/Kindle_download_helper?tab=rea... Execute the Python utility (this…

Last time I tried to DeDRM my Kindle book collection, there were many books with "newer" DRM that wasn't possible to strip. Did that improve recently?

My collection is mainly .azw3 and .azw, with a handful of .tpz and azw4.

The former were trivial to strip; the latter, I'm not so sure yet. However, I have no .kfx books, so perhaps I haven't been exposed to the newer DRM?

Re: Kindle is removing download and transfer option on Feb 26th

#188

I’m not sure why anyone buys Kindles when there are so many better options available. I bought a Kobo Clara years ago, and it supports regular MOBI and ePub files. My book purchases are no longer liked with the reader and I’ve never had a problem in all these years. And this wasn’t even the best or best value for money device I could have bought. Today there are so many other better alternatives in all price points a…

>I’m not sure why anyone buys Kindles when there are so many better options available. For me, the Kobo lacks something like the Send to Kindle feature. I can send books I've obtained from outside the Kindle Store (DRM free sellers, Humble Bundle, public domain etc.) and then store them in my Kindle library. These are then synchronised across all of my Kindle devices and apps - completely for free Kobo does have inte…

A working solution for me was to deploy a little website to organize both my physical and ebooks in the same place. For physical books, it tells me where they should be. For ebooks, I can download the file, the website is light enough that it works fine with my ebook reader.

Surely there are bugs, but here it is, if you'd like to give it a spin: https://github.com/seanboyce/ubiblio

Interestingly enough, I had tried to find a way to add an 'email to my device' option, but it was too fiddly. I got it working with OAUTH + gmail, but setting it up was not exactly user-friendly. The simple download option worked much better.

Anyway just a weekend project I extended a little. Don't expect much polish :D

Re: Kindle is removing download and transfer option on Feb 26th

#189
post #166

I have a heap of graphic novels I bought for my kids that are basically unusable because Amazon moved everything into Kindle and I couldn't have them in a separate comixology app for my kids anymore and Kindle doesn't allow me to curate family books for kids as I wish. Lesson learned. No more Kindle/comixology/audible purchases in this household. I considered breaking the DRM but we never bought into their readers. I…

> If you have to do digital I think piracy is becoming the only reasonable answer.

What I do is purchase the ebook and remove the DRM, so I can read it on whatever device I want. It may be illegal but would you really consider that piracy?

Re: Kindle is removing download and transfer option on Feb 26th

#190
post #173
post #145

As of this writing I can still connect my kindle and then read the kfx file with Calibre and then convert it to azw3 or epub (with the dedrm plugin). Should I loose every way to backup my books, then probably I'd use tesseract, puppeteer and their cloud reader to re-ocr the books (it's better than nothing). Also note that the country I live in, libraries have no ebooks. Kobo drm is another nuisance.

When I try to do this, it flatly doesn't work -- I get a popup message saying "This book has DRM". I have what I believe to be the latest version of the DeDRM plugin installed in Calibre. (I am currently attempting to follow a recipe off the internet that begins with "install an old version of the PC Kindle app, disconnect from the internet before running it so you can tell it not to auto-update itself, ...". Perhaps…

I keep a file with details for myself that change every year, thanks to Amazon being a dick and I a moron for giving them money. I still use an older calibre version and a dedrm plugin fork, not the original.
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