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Backing Up My Kindle Ebooks (2018)

sonyaellenmann.com

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Re: Backing Up My Kindle Ebooks (2018)

#21

Post by Tomte »

maskros wrote: post #9

Calibre is great, if you configure it properly. By default, converting books to another format will change the layout! Destroying the original formatting by default is unacceptable behaviour to be honest, so user beware. For Kindle, I suggest using the KindleUnpack plugin instead; which can extract the EPUB file embedded in the AZW/KF8 format file losslessly for use with EPUB based readers without having to worry abo…

How do I start with Calibre and Kindle? I've tried several times, but I cannot understand the UI.

How do I list books on my Kindle? How do I list books in my account? It's all very byzantine.

Re: Backing Up My Kindle Ebooks (2018)

#22

Post by superkuh »

Sometimes it's just better to pirate the books even if you've paid for them. The formatting and error correction is usually better and they stick to epub and mobi standards.

As an aside: I was helping a friend out who owned a Kindle recently and shocked to learn it can't read mobi or epub. Why would anyone buy such a crap e-reader?

Re: Backing Up My Kindle Ebooks (2018)

#23

Post by arkades »

superkuh wrote: post #22

Sometimes it's just better to pirate the books even if you've paid for them. The formatting and error correction is usually better and they stick to epub and mobi standards. As an aside: I was helping a friend out who owned a Kindle recently and shocked to learn it can't read mobi or epub. Why would anyone buy such a crap e-reader?

It reads mobi, just not ePub.

And I use it because it’s got the best hardware experience of the bunch, IMO.

Re: Backing Up My Kindle Ebooks (2018)

#24

Post by pavel_lishin »

superkuh wrote: post #22

Sometimes it's just better to pirate the books even if you've paid for them. The formatting and error correction is usually better and they stick to epub and mobi standards. As an aside: I was helping a friend out who owned a Kindle recently and shocked to learn it can't read mobi or epub. Why would anyone buy such a crap e-reader?

My kindle can read .mobi file sfine.

Re: Backing Up My Kindle Ebooks (2018)

#25

Post by dewey »

philtar wrote: post #8

Why is this article so high up? It's a blog post by an Amazon associate who fails at following basic instructions (dedrm tells you how to remove the new DRM and how to do it without a physical device) "hacker news"

It's probably not high up because it's a great blog post, but it sparked a discussion and with the news from a few days ago that some big provider's ebooks will stop working because of DRM issues it's a topic on people's minds.

Re: Backing Up My Kindle Ebooks (2018)

#26

Post by jxdxbx »

The easiest ebook format to strip DRM from is the Adobe DRM that various stores use. I only buy ebooks from the Google Play book store now, since DRM removal is so straightforward. (Same deDRM calibre plugin, but you just get a single encrypted ePub you can download, and adding it to calibre gives you a DRM-free ePub, which is a more industry-standard format. Converting to or from KFX or AZW3 can be error-prone.)

Re: Backing Up My Kindle Ebooks (2018)

#27

Post by ses1984 »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #14
maskros wrote: post #9

Calibre is great, if you configure it properly. By default, converting books to another format will change the layout! Destroying the original formatting by default is unacceptable behaviour to be honest, so user beware. For Kindle, I suggest using the KindleUnpack plugin instead; which can extract the EPUB file embedded in the AZW/KF8 format file losslessly for use with EPUB based readers without having to worry abo…

I've heard people complain about Calibre's EPUB conversion utility, but I've never seen anyone do a deep-dive to explain exactly why it's bad. Is it comparable to the HTML-soup that Microsoft Word spits out when you export a Word doc to HTML? FWIW, I still heed those warnings, and so I still hold on to the de-DRM'd AZW file even after I convert it to EPUB.

I don't know why it's bad, but I know the end result is poorly laid out. It's always super obvious I'm reading something passed through calibre conversion, because accent marks will be missing, intra chapter breaks will be missing, punctuation is messed up, etc.

Re: Backing Up My Kindle Ebooks (2018)

#28

Post by jxdxbx »

maskros wrote: post #9

Calibre is great, if you configure it properly. By default, converting books to another format will change the layout! Destroying the original formatting by default is unacceptable behaviour to be honest, so user beware. For Kindle, I suggest using the KindleUnpack plugin instead; which can extract the EPUB file embedded in the AZW/KF8 format file losslessly for use with EPUB based readers without having to worry abo…

I had no idea that an EPUB file was embedded in the weird Amazon formats.

I mostly agree that you want to avoid "transcoding" an EPUB. But the formatting on some official EPUBs is so bad that I like to use readers that can override the built-in formatting. I like to choose the font, spacing, hyphenation, and justification myself. (Full justification and hyphenation are my bugbears--I think they are never appropriate on smaller screens, as they lead to large rivers and too many words broken up, but are fine on large ones.)

Re: Backing Up My Kindle Ebooks (2018)

#29

Post by farss »

Don't forget to backup your marks and highlights also. I made that mistake once, and then lost my Kindle. Lost years worth of highlights and notes, so now I set up a bash script to automatically sync them to a Git repo when my Kindle is plugged into my laptop.

Re: Backing Up My Kindle Ebooks (2018)

#30

Post by macinjosh »

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.
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