231–240 of 288 posts
Any recommendations for alternatives? I have no problem using calibre to convert the books, and manually transfer from my PC. It just needs to read books.
I read a moderate amount I'd say, about 2 weeks average for a book, and I was using a very old and very beat-up but still functioning 4th gen Kindle until recently. However, I woke up from my stupor when Micro$oft's eBook store closed and purged their library from under everybodies butts. Giving Amazon complete control over my library is a horrible thought, so I'm out. I am now a happy Boox Go 10.3 + BookFusion user.…
Note that Boox does not release the sources for the GPL software they redistribute.
I went through this migration last year. A few things that helped: Calibre is the escape hatch. Converts everything to EPUB. Even if you don't use it day-to-day, it's the best tool for getting your library out of Amazon's format. Public domain catalogs are huge now. Standard Ebooks, Internet Archive, Gutenberg - tens of thousands of well-formatted free EPUBs. Most people don't realize how much is out there. For actua…
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Are you sure about that? Even Amazon's own sales page state: "Kindle Format 8 (AZW3), Kindle (AZW), TXT, PDF, unprotected MOBI, PRC natively; PDF, DOCX, DOC, HTML, EPUB, TXT, RTF, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP through conversion; Audible audio format (AAX). Learn more about supported file types for personal documents." implying that ePub only works through conversion. They don't support DRMed ePubs through conversion either so…
As I said, anecdotally I've already done it. Amazon only just enabled the PC "Send to Kindle" to support ePub directly instead of the old silly work around of rename the .epub to .kfx (and no other change). They've been very bad at keeping their list of formats up to date in their own documentation. Some of that perhaps because they don't want it to be so obvious and it is intentional obfuscation (to keep people usin…
I also tried renaming the ePub to a .kfx and it still did not work.
But wasn't your Kindle that you bought prior to 2013 maintained for over a decade? 13 years really.
Amazing that it's 2026 and people who write articles on tech-focused sites are still surprised that they never actually owned the books on their Kindle. Do they also think they own their steam games, or Gmail address? I'm a fan of the Roku e-readers. Affordable, hackable, and you can add your own books just by plugging it into your computer.
I assume you mean Kobo, not Roku?
Amazing that it's 2026 and people who write articles on tech-focused sites are still surprised that they never actually owned the books on their Kindle. Do they also think they own their steam games, or Gmail address? I'm a fan of the Roku e-readers. Affordable, hackable, and you can add your own books just by plugging it into your computer.
I assume you mean Kobo, not Roku?
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Nothing you've quoted is wrong per se, but it's also not the full story. Amazon removed the ability to download files from them to your computer. And they will soon be removing the ability to download files from them directly to older kindle devices. You can still download a MOBI or EPUB from anywhere else online (though I think some older kindles don't support EPUB) and transfer it via USB, and will still be able to…
Even new Kindles don't support EPUB, per-se. The Send-to-Kindle service started supporting EPUB, and converts them to AZW3 or KFX for actual delivery to your Kindle. But you cannot just USB an EPUB onto your Kindle without any conversion process. (Calibre does make it very simple, though.)
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>> An ebook has zero cost of distribution and no middlemen. 100% incorrect. ebooks still: - Have to be edited, proof read and formatted properly. - Have to have a cover design. - Unless you're distributing on your own website (which is uber rare), you still need to pay for platform fees and retailer costs for distribution. - Marketing and tech support which is the same for any book, regardless of what platform its so…
These are all fixed costs not per-unit costs. If you sell 10,000 ebooks or 10 million ebooks, the costs are basically the same. And book themselves are 500k-5MB in size typically, which is a single HTTP request, basically. Actual costs of storage and distribution are basically zero (per unit). And sure 10M books is more traffic than 10k books but we're talking $0.10/GB or less in baseline traffic. This is like Cloudf…
Because you said this:
"An ebook has zero cost of distribution and no middlemen."
and then said this:
"These are all fixed costs not per-unit costs."
Which are two different arguments.
This really feels like you made two different arguments, then I offended your sensibilities by pointing it out, so you decided to argue without knowing why, if I'm being honest.