I can’t help but always worry that one day I’ll need paper books. I don’t know what it is, but I feel like I should start collecting paper books instead of every single book I have is on my Kobo. Which do you do? If you get paper books, is there a source that sells cheaper books. Books are kind of pricey where I look.
I prefer ePub. Much more convenient for me than a paper book.
On the other hand, paper books have only one thing to offer that sometimes holds:
I’ve recently bought a Kobo, and had great success removing the DRM from my Kindle library, then loading all my books there onto my Kobo. Just food for thought that such a thing is possible
I don’t know, there are a couple of books that have Adobe DRM on them at every bookstore where I found the book.
Are you saying, it’s possible to get Amazon books onto a non-Kindle device? That’s actually pretty much the only bookstore where I never looked at before.
Unpopular take and I might get beaten up for it, but if you have already paid for the book and you can’t take it with you because it has DRM, then IMHO, it’s ok to pirate it. You paid for it, it’s yours and they’re taking it away from you because you chose not to use their device.
That’s basically my attitude. As usual, piracy is a service problem.
100%. I’d like to support people who work hard on their products, but corporations love to be the unnecessary middleman that enshitifactes things along the way.
When my grandmother passed, my grandfather took most of her books to her favorite local buy/sell/trade bookstore and got a pile of store credit for my brother and I. It took us over a decade to spend it all, and we probably only had $300 or $400 in that account to start with. But the store sold most books for less than $5. Amazon is out here charging $25 for a 40 year-old book as an ebook, and there’s no equivalent to buy/sell/trade secondhand bookstores in the ebook space.
Unfortunately, the easiest way is to have an old kindle on your count with DRM that’s been beaten. Then you can download the files like you’re going to copy them via USB to that device, and use that device’s serial with the de-DRM calibre extension and it’s pretty easy.
I haven’t found an equally effective way without it, though I haven’t looked as much as the first method works for me.
You can rip Audible audiobooks with Libation. It’s not applicable to ebooks, but worth just tacking on since we’re on the subject of Amazon lock-in.
The method I used actually (currently) doesn’t require a physical Kindle. I just had to download a specific version of Kindle for PC (Version 2.3.70682) and was able to quickly and easily use the Calibre extension to remove the DRM.
I’m not super confident it’ll always work, so I’m not planning on buying more books from Amazon, but it’s a good solution to pull my existing library into the ePub world.
There’s also not a battery attached. That’s a pretty big plus.
In my use case it doesn’t have any relevance, as my device lasts for months with one charge. During that timespan I have plenty of opportunities to charge.
Which device is that? My Kobo sage needs charge every 3 days or so and that’s the only thing I dislike about it. They messed up big time for not making the battery bigger on it.
Some of the original kindles had ridiculous battery life without a backlight and turning off the wifi. Wifi and backlight kills most ebook readers.
I still have my kindle from a long time ago and it still gets around a week of battery life. I also have a kobo (because the kindle has some blotches on the screen) and it works wonderfully. It can work for about a week with heavy reading…but only if the backlight is mostly off and wifi is off.
I always have the backlight off, but I need to turn off the WiFi then to see. I thought koreader turns off wifi automatically, but I’ll double check