On February 26th, Kindle customers will lose the ability to download eBook purchases directly to their PC. If you want to switch to a rival eReader brand in the future, I suggest that you use the soon-to-be discontinued “Download and Transfer via USB” feature to archive your Kindle library.
They are allowed to do that? It’s your ebooks, not their ebooks.
According to them you only have a license to those ebooks.
And Amazon owns them? I would be furious as a publisher.
Uneducated 2 cents. afaik the publishers have some kind of “part ownership”, where they can pull it out from the store whenever. The “anti-piracy” feature you get with DRMs is why many publishers actually like them tho. The part ownership thing is just icing on the cake. So no, a good chunk of publishers won’t be furious at all. DRM gives what publishers want and more, at the expense of the consumers in a way that most wouldn’t realize.
And if anything, I think it makes more sense to think that these publishers are also just granting Amazon some kind of “license” to sell their e-books.
Amazon would absolutely be destroying their relationship with a publisher though, if they decide to block the selling or access of a book to large group of people who are would-be buyers. But, at the end of the day, publishers want to know how much they’re making from putting their e-books on Amazon, and as long as that revenue is enough to satisfy their needs, they don’t need to care too much about the odd customer who had their book revoked, and they would generally be pretty shielded from any sort of disputes as long as Amazon is making those revoking calls.
No, the files are mostly owned by the publisher. That’s why you sometimes have stories where books disappear from Kindles because the rights holders revoke Amazon’s license to sell their books. It’s what happened with one version of Orwell’s 1984, ironically.
It’s ridiculous, if you ask me, but that’s the reality with Broken By Design DRM ebooks.
That’s why it’s prudent for any buyers of ebooks to download them as soon as you can, and put them in a library like “Calibre”, that way, even if Amazon loses their license to sell those publishers books, you still have access to the ebooks you bought with your money.
And that’s why it’s bad that Amazon is removing the option to download the files yourself. And why I recommend people to take their business and wallets elsewhere! Stop giving Bezos your money.And Amazaon doesn’t have to reimburse you then, since they revoked your permission to read them, which is what you paid for?
It’s not what happened when they removed 1984 off of people’s Kindles. I think somewhere in the fine print, they’ll probably have a clause that says they’re allowed to do that.
Joke’s on them, I get all my books from Z-Library anyhow.
I have a few books I bought, but even then, I grab from z-library. More portable and no DRM.
That’s fucked.
So anyway self hosting Kavita to read everything in my browser is hella convenient.
Dropping a link for the lazy/myself for later
Interesting, I’d never heard of Kavita, so have just been using Calibre all these years. Did you start out on Kavita, or did you move from Calibre, or another software?
I tend to bounce around software. I ran into it at random researching docker containers and just kind of stuck with it. I’ve got a habit of trying to containerize everything nowadays haha
I use calibre for my kindle, but kavita for web reading on any of my devices.
The calibre web server kept claiming its downloads to my device were corrupted and would just never open books. Kavita just sends the books page as a web page which gets rid of that particular issue
This is why I never once purchased a book from Amazon even though I have a Kindle.
Pretty pumped to jailbreak it with the new jailbreak.
New kindle jailbreak you say?
https://kindlemodding.org/jailbreaking/WinterBreak/
Supposedly works on all Kindles, I haven’t actually done a deep dive yet, just have it bookmarked since yesterday.
What can you do with a jailbroken Kindle?
Actually own it.
Run software they don’t approve of. Like alternate reading apps that don’t need you to pipe everything through an Amazon account, read formats they don’t support, etc.
Hi. Thank you for the info.
I am looking for a new e-reader. Is there any reason why I should buy a Kindle and jailbreak it rather than get a PineNote, SuperNote, Nook device, Boox device, or a Kobo Libra?
Or would you recommend something else?
I have a Boox Palma 2 - their cellphone-sized thing that doesn’t have a cellular radio. I love it. They’re more expensive than kindles, though, since they’re not subsidizing their cost with ebook sales. I haven’t actually tried jailbreaking a kindle so I can’t say how good an experience that would be, but you could probably pick up a kindle of some description on the used market for dirt cheap to try it out.
And I have a bigger reader, since most of my library are pdf/djvu scans and they’d look unreadable on a screen any smaller.
The Palma was one of my top choices but I was thinking it might be a little small for me. It is one of the better looking devices.
I didn’t even think getting a used Kindle. New Kindle prices seem a little high for getting a locked system, so a used one is probably the most cost effective method.
Thanks for the suggestion.
I was looking at the PineNote myself, but they stopped selling the developer version due to low demand. I’m afraid that it won’t be back until those who do own it finish writing the software for it.
According to their site and a couple others, they have recently started selling again and with what looks to be some variant of Debian on it.
Oh… I didn’t know that. Thanks for letting me know.
Interesting, thanks
I’ll be done with audible the moment I stop being able to liberate and archive what I pay for.
Until then, they’re helping me build my audiobookshelf
Piracy is the answer to the corpo over reach.
Deny the parasite profit… You are funding your enemy
It’s not an accident that I download epubs and read them on Moon+.
Amazon signaled clearly years ago that their goal wasn’t to make a convenient ebook reader, but to create an entire proprietary e-reading system designed solely to extract as much money as possible for as little value as possible. And this is just another step in that ongoing process.
I’m so in love with Anna…
Please pass it forward: all Kindles can now be jailbroken
What can I do with a jailbroken kindle that makes it worth doing instead of just using calibre?
I switched from the default reader to koreader, and now I have dark mode (mine is probably about 8 years old and did not originally have this feature). Koreader has so many features and qol improvements compared to the default Kindle experience.
Better Calibre integration.
Custom shelves and book collections on Kindle.
You literally just said the two things I wished Kindle allowed me to do natively.
I hate the fact my Kindle store books will bundle by series, but my non-kindle books will not.
Yea, I had like a 2nd or 3rd gen paperwhite and rooted it for this reason, but my partner’s wasn’t hackable until this moment. So now she can have it too.
Better reader, PDFs with reflow.
Already been doing this, but I think this will finally light the fire under my ass to move to a boox device for all my reading I’ve got the big boox, which I use for sheet music, and quite like it, so the smaller ones are no brainers
FYI, Onyx egregiously violates GPL and basically gives the finger to anyone who complains. Not that anyone is necessarily clean as a whistle and even so they’re miles better than Jeff “I dressed like a fascist before it was cool” Bezos.
I’m a big fan of Kobo, but they also used to have a connection with Walmart.
This is why I have an Android e-ink device. I can put the kindle app on it for anything from their shitty walled garden, but I also can put pretty much anything else I want on it too.
My Kobo e-reader is pretty nice and takes any ol e-pub file just fine. And Calibre, a third party software for managing ebooks, has a plugin to crack Kindle files. Just sayin
And Calibre, a third party software for managing ebooks, has a plugin to crack Kindle files.
Unfortunately currently broken for the latest version of Kindle for PC, which switched to a different encryption scheme. It also uses KFX file format that nobody likes, which fortunately can be converted to EPUB with another plugin, but de-DRMing doesn’t seem to work right now. It still seems to work for titles in AZW3/MOBI that didn’t get DRM update or didn’t have DRM in the first place.
And Calibre, a third party software for managing ebooks, has a plugin to crack Kindle files
Which requires being able to download those files from Amazon. Which is what this post is all about, Amazon not allowing you to download the files anymore.
I was thinking along the lines of if you already had them downloaded and wanted to switch off to something else
I’ll continue pirating, thanks.
This is the way.
PSA: “Archiving” is a general legal-neutral and safe term you can use with co-workers.
Wether i am also a pirate one may speculate but i am always an archivist.
Fuck that.
YARR!!
Turns out it really is archiving when government decides to go renegade and start deleting everything they disagree with or wipe from history. Archive away beautiful data horders.
It’s not just Amazon. Libraries (and Libby, the app they use) are also making it difficult to do anything but read in a browser or use Kindle.
Overdrive (which is Libby) integrates directly into the Kobo OS so you can borrow books directly on the device instead of the roundabout way you have to do it on the Kindle.
Overdrive’s being phased out and being replaced by Libby according to the 2 libraries I frequent. I wonder if it will still be supported on Kobo OS once the website and apps are shut down?
My library has used Libby for years. It’s another version of Overdrive. My library books download to Kobo fine unless they’re changing something else I don’t know about.
deleted by creator
My wife uses Libby and books go directly to her kindle.
Libraries (and Libby, the app they use) are also making it difficult to do anything but read in a browser or use Kindle.
Sadly too true. To be fair though I don’t think ANY librarian want that.
Here in Belgium we have an online library ( lirtuel.be ) that isn’t actually too bad. I looked it up and they say they provided ePub/PDF so I registered right away. Then… I discovered what they meant wasn’t ePub/PDF but rather DRMed ePub/PDF (here is an example https://www.lirtuel.be/resources/67aaf2124e480409978b68fb with ePub logo on the top right). Anyway I contacted them explaining that my ebook reader (reMarkable) does not support DRM and thus I couldn’t read the content. They pointed me to their documentation https://confluence.demarque.com/confluence/cantook-station/fr/faq/verrou-numerique-et-identifiant-adobe/qu-est-ce-qu-un-verrou-numerique-drm which implies it’s all “normal” to use that. I insisted, they didn’t reply.
Long story short, I’m either not using their service anymore or using DeGourou https://github.com/Bingwithyou/DeGourou to make the content legally loaned actually usable. Sad state of affairs but I’m convinced none of the actual librarians, namely people who care for making knowledge discoverable and accessible like that. I’m sure they’ve been coerced by same big publishers.
If this doesn’t help physical book sales, nothing will.
The only surprise here is that it took them this long to do it.
