Say it with me kids, “This is why we pirate digital media from billion dollar corporations”
this is also why i started buying physical books and using my local public library again.
Hell Yeah.
My local library allows borrowing ebooks. It’s incredibly useful. I own two kindles and haven’t spent a dime at Amazon for ebooks. I do buy physical books now and then from there, but only if I really need it and can’t find elsewhere.
How do you return a borrowed ebook…?
It expires after two weeks. You can extend, just like borrowing a physical copy. Or return early, in which case it expires upon return.
I mean, yeah, sure, I guess that’s a decent solutions in terms of modern IP shit.
But like, we all know you’re not returning anything and if you wanted, you could also copy it for yourself.
I just dislike how it feels like when it was actually books, they had actual reasons to everything. There’s a queue because there’s limited copies. You need to return it and if you’re late there’s a fee, because it’s from other people’s time, etc. Nowadays that all feels like larping just to protect large companies IP’s essentially. Because digital copies don’t actually get returned.
Like when I was a kid I would’ve never thought a librarian would say “you’re not allowed to read that anymore”. Or that I couldn’t copy a thing down at home from one of their books. But now as your tokens to ebooks expire, it kinda does feel like that.
My best friend is a librarian, and they’ve stopped buying ebook licenses because the terms were awful.
The publishers only allowed an ebook to be checked out a few times before the library had to purchase a license extension. The argument was that pylhysical books face wear and tear and eventually have to be replaced, so ebooks should have to be replaced too.
It’s true that normal books do experience wear and tear, but looking at what my local library has I’d say that many or most can still least many years before needing to be retired or replaced.
As we’re seeing with Amazon, with ebooks it’s really the readers that expire over time
I find ebooks from the library to be very useful.
I’m not saying they’re not, or that the librarians are any more capitalist than they were in the 90’s. I’m just saying it feels like they are.
The magic word is Calibre
Funny, my old kindle seems to be downloading e-books just fine from my self-hosted server.
I’ve been using raw text files for my books, sent locally over USB, and that’s the way it’s gonna stay until my reader craps out
There’s not really any advantage of using txt files over open standard drm-free epubs. You can still generate them yourself using txt editors or publishing software, you can still load them over USB. But epubs give you quality of life features on eReaders like title pages, table of contents, chapter headers, formatting markers like bold and italics.
My reader formats epubs really terribly, the text is almost always way too small, and requires some grotesque horizontal scrolling for most books.
On the other hand .txt just works, and handles resizing just fine
you are almost certainly doing something wrong
I really don’t care. I’ve tried several different ways to get it to cooperate with epubs, and at a certain point it isn’t worth it when I already have a viable solution.
What reader are you using?
It’s a kindle D01100
An eReader’s literally only job is to format, reflow, render and display ePubs. If you have one that can’t do that, then it is a fancy coaster at best.
Ok? I’m still going to read books as .txt files anyways, because it does so.
can’t you just load epub with calibre or another sync to? I’m pretty sure that’s what I do because that’s what I’m doing
IMO for personal use “drag and drop into the correct directory” is an infinitely better organisational system than tag based libraries, especially for pirated books. I’m not going to sync my books across 10 different devices since I don’t need more than 1 reader, so it doesn’t make any sense for me to waste time using tags, let alone fix them for every book I download.
Or just drag and drop the epub.
Yeah I strongly prefer epub for chapters and text formatting.
I’ve tried that in the past, but it doesn’t seem to care how the epub is put on it, it always displays epubs horribly
are you doing something to convert to epub from another format? i don’t have the issue you’re describing when loading epub directly or when converting from mobi with calibre. the format is dynamic unlike PDF, so the font size and page width shouldn’t be fixed like that. it should look and behave pretty much like kindle mobi or your text files
Nope. Raw epub to reader and it doesn’t handle it.
Kobo gang where you at?
8 year old libre still kicks kindles ass
I have an older Aura that isn’t allowed library books. :/
Correction: Older kindles can no longer download e-books with the stock rom
… from Amazon. Sideloading is still fine.
I have a kindle that I’ve had for ages. It has been jailbroken for a while and I’ve been loading my own epubs onto it. They make it easy with the 1 click send to kindle stuff but that locks you in to their ecosystem.
Good thing I put mine in airplane mode when I first got it and never updated firmware. I load books like its a flash drive.
I’ve started to realize that early gen products are often less enshittified, even if they are frequently rough around the edges, and can often be hacked into a useful state unlike the newest hardware. By a few gens in, nearly everything is a giant plastic paperweight that only wants to phone home, download “updates” all the time, and probably needs multiple SSO sign ins and a subscription just to work. I’ll keep my old Kindle 4th gen with KOreader until it breaks.
I got 3 kindles off eBay for the price of 1 new. 2 successfully jail broken (and 1 ready to be jail broken. Just on the fence of making another account, or gamble my main one again)
Jokes on Amazon I already jail broke mine and can directly download books from my Calibre server to it, KOreader ftw
YSK, there’s a large number of older Kindles that can be jail broken.
I just ssh pirated .mobi files into mine
Older kindles can still have ebooks transfered directly to them via usb cable
Does anyone else just read on their phone? I use Librera ebook reader in dark mode. The app even reads to me with tts while I’m driving.
Haven’t picked up a paper book in over 10 years!
Any suggestions for which Kindle to get off of ebay for jailbreaking purposes, when they start showing up en masse?
why not get a kobo clara bw instead
As someone who owns a Clara bw, I can vouch. They’re good little devices.
Clara colour is also awesome if you’re not reading exclusively bw. It does have slightly worse low light visibility because of the filter layers though.
Whatever e-reader you get make sure it’s one that you can jailbreak to install koreader, beyond that it’s just personal preferences. Do you want hardware buttons or a touchscreen? Are you happy with a lower resolution? Do you need integrated light for the display?
Why get something just to jail break it when open alternatives exist?
Pocket Book is the most “open” I believe
Kobo is good and has a store
Onyx, exists, though I couldn’t tell you much - they are expensive.
Because old kindles are about to show up on ebay for like $10-20 - how much do those open alternatives cost? They’ll be useless bricks to a lot of people - some will figure out how to use them in different ways, some will throw them away, and some will try to sell them for dirt cheap.
