- cross-posted to:
- Technology@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- Technology@programming.dev
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I would recommend people buy their books off ZLibrary instead, where they come with no DRM.
This is why I bought some Chinese android ereader than an amazon Kindle.
We’ll soon be back to monks transcribing at this rate.
I have a pocketbook instead of a Kindle cause of this lol
Switched to kobo.
I bought my first ereader this summer and got a Kindle and hated it. Returned it and got a Kobo. Its fantastic, I can just load my ebooks like it’s an external drive. I dont have to email all my ebooks to Amazon just to get them on my own device.
I’ll be switching to kobo next time round, but I’ve never not been able to dump books onto my kindle by usb. I do it with my phone over USB sometimes. Since when has not doing that been a thing?
I’ve been with them for a couple of years now. Unfortunately the devices just doubled in price but I’m very happy with them otherwise.
Fuck you Jeff!
Anna’s Archive
It annoys me so much that they have convinced anyone that this stuff is for protecting against piracy of something like that, while this is just another tool for them to force you into using their platform and ecosystem. It does nothing against piracy.
Books were among the first things to be pirated and are still among the easiest because the amount of data is so small. People we’re doing that on dial up Internet.
Yeah you can easily pirate any book, or even just get then free at the library. This just fucks over the authors and people who want to buy their books legally. People don’t buy books because they have to, they want to.
As much as I hate proprietary shit, Kindle is just the best ebook reader out there. It lasts forever, in terms of both battery life and the device itself, smooth, top notch UI… etc
When I first bought my new Kindle PW, I immediately turned on Airplane mode and never turned it off. I use Calibre & DRM free ebooks and I had 0 issues.
Having used both, i prefer the kobos. They just eat up everything you throw at them.
Just chiming in as another kobo guy. I like it’s UI better personally but most importantantly it displays books, holds books, battery lasts forever, and is an eink display - like it’s an ereader, I’m not in the percentage of people who can meaningfully discern between the two.
Kobo being theoretically repairable and not supporting a trillion dollar inshittification machine was good enough for me to swap.
Kobo is a subsidiary of Rakutten, its not amazon but as far as i recall they are no saints either. But the devices are easily disconnected from all their BS, so at least some bonus points there.
I’m not gonna shill for any company, so no worries there, but our governments aren’t breaking up these monopolies so we have to. If my options are a trillion dollar company and a 10 billion I pick the 10 billion.
I wonder if a company can get to X billion dollars in revenue and not be bad.
Kobo with calibre-web sync. Hands down the best ereader I’ve ever owned.
I’ve been too lazy to set it up until now. Ahahah i guess i’ll look into it this afternoon just for the sake of it. Thanks for the kindly reminder.
Check out some of the newer versions of calibre-web like the Automated one. I would like to switch but I’m waiting to be able to factory reset both ereaders or get new ones.
I bought a kindle when amazon sold them for a special price of 25 Euro. It’s a cool device for reading books, but I found their UI horrendously cluttered and filled with “suggestions” instead of focusing on the content I already have. I have since jailbroken the device and am using koreader on the device to read my ebooks transfered as epubs via calibre.
That has the advantage that when I buy DRM-free books in epub format, I am not relying on amazon to properly convert the file to a kindle proprietary format.
Of course it’s the best there is, they have billions made on the backs of millions workers, they can and will invest so much money in a product until it eclipses everything else so they have a monopoly on a niche. After all the competitors are starved because no company that only makes ereaders will have a profit so thick to create a competing product, they can introduce things like proper DRM or whatever their heart desires.
Related, Article about how ama. used their unfairly gained wealth to copy successful products, rigged search results, to promote their own brands
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-india-rigging/
I have five published books, all without drm. Amazon better not put that shit ON my books. It’s not there for a reason; I want people to share.
Curious, as someone who’s an actual author, do you have any legal option at all for preventing Amazon (which I assume technically act as your publisher in this case?) to pot DRM on your books, or demand them to remove DRM if they added DRM without your notice?
But have you considered that Jeff needs another few billies?
The real question is how can I find out what those 5 book are without you doxing yourself.
Thank you!
This entire thing has been made needlessly complicated. Easy fix though.
- Get whatever ebook you want.
- Borrow some code from GitHub and teach a raspberry pi with a camera and a few servos to snap pictures of pages, turn the pages, snap again into a PDF.
- A script then parses all the images and OCRs them for the final PDF.
- You now own a backup of your DRM book, which you own forever. Pretty sure this is actually legal under DMCA since you are taking a backup of something you allegedly own. The encryption circumvention is irrelevant.
- now, break the law and throw the PDF on the internet to everyone. Go little bot! Go go go!
The encryption circumvention is irrelevant.
Oh you sweet summer child, judges will bend over backwards to slap people with multi-decade-to-life charges for ‘hacking,’ even if the ‘hacking’ is just the rightsholder accidentally presenting data to you.
To be fair, if you OCR the pages via camera, you haven’t actually circumvented DRM. That means it’s a completely legal backup, as the DRM on the original file was untouched and unaltered. This definitely does fall under fair use.
Theoretically, yes. Realistically, judges historically believe anything prosecutors tell them about hacking and circumvention.
There’s been people thrown in jail for the rest of their life for the crime of clicking a public URL that the company didn’t intend to be public.
In general I agree, but I am going to have to ask you for a source on that last one.
Looks like I mixed up two different cases- the cause of one, and the duration of another.
weev (who apparently is a giant asshole) was the one who got sent to jail for accessing a completely public URL AT&T wished he didn’t in 2010. The EFF took up his case. His sentence was later vacated by another court because so many civil rights lawyers kept joining his team pro-bono so the court tossed it out on a blatant technicality to get the issue to go away, so he only served ~2y.
As for the CFAA being used to slap people with life sentences, there’s too many examples to know which one I was mixing it up with. Aaron Swartz is the classic example.
You didn’t circumvent it by breaking the encryption, but I’d say you still circumvented it.
Just do it in a country with reasonable laws
The goold old analog hole.
Don’t buy Amazon products. Fairly simple concept.
The problem is some authors signing exclusivity deal with Amazon, which means breaking the DRM and converting it is the only way to read it on a different e-reader.
Too bad. Then theres no sale unless I can crack the DRM ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It’s only takes one person to crack those books and spread them across the high seas and the only way to force authors to abandon Amazon.
There are always people who extra motivated by these challenges. The fact that these are written texts and shown on a screen means there will always be away to scrap the content off even if that involves a camera on a second device.
DRM only hurts customers who want to pay for content.
The problem is some authors signing exclusivity deal with Amazon
Well then those authors can go straight to corpo-sellout hell and die a painful death, I’d rather never read a book again than buy from amazon.
Yep, I had a Kindle library of a few dozen books, when they started their shenanigans locking down the desktop client earlier this year I downloaded all of them, de-drmed and converted to epub with Calibre. Hosting them on Calibre-web and accessing with KOreader on a Kobo. I continue to buy books on Kobo and Google Books, which let me download copies (albeit with DRM).
Makes me wonder after all these years why Amazon is locking down ability to move books around. I wonder if they’re starting to feel some real competition and feel threatened! The market of cheap e-ink Android ereaders seems to be growing more and more
I wonder if they’re starting to feel some real competition and feel threatened!
Probably the opposite. They’re confident they won’t lose sales over this because they’re too firmly established as a monopoly. And they know that with Trump in office they’re not going to face any pushback from the FTC.
I started that process and hit a road block after getting all the books downloaded to my pc. Can you recommend any tutorials or guides that might help get everything converted?
I used this guide from a thread on Reddit. It relies on Calibre and a set of plugins https://www.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/1c2ryfz/2024_guide_to_dedrm_kindle_books/
Awesome, thanks!
- https://www.gutenberg.org/
- https://openlibrary.org/
- https://www.planetebook.com/
- https://archive.org/
- https://www.smashwords.com/
- https://books.google.com/
- https://www.freetechbooks.com/
- https://www.getfreebooks.com/
- https://www.openculture.com/free_ebooks
- https://www.goodreads.com/
- https://www.oreilly.com/ (trial)
- https://annas-archive.org/
- https://pdfcoffee.com/
- https://singlelogin.re/
- https://www.ereaderiq.com/freebies/
- https://www.bookbub.com/ebook-deals/free-ebooks
- https://digilibraries.com/
- https://www.overdrive.com/
- https://manybooks.net/
there’s so many others and of course torrents
Assuming you have a card from a participating library.
Shoutout to Anna.
Have you noticed that the download interface page for Anna’s archive has suddenly changed? I can’t figure it out!
Anyone else notice that the download interface page for Anna’s archive has suddenly changed? I can’t figure it out.
It is remarkable how many books available for free on Gutenberg are sold in the same format on Amazon (it’d be one thing if they were special editions, new translations etc, but they’re the same!)
You can also use Book Bounty to integrate LibGen support into Readarr. It’s a workaround for one of Readarr’s biggest weaknesses, as torrents historically aren’t great for ebooks.
Didn’t readarr get discontinued a few weeks ago?
It was officially unsupported, but it still works just fine if you use a third-party metadata provider. There haven’t been any breaking changes on the backend, so (unless sites change things) it will continue to work fine.
The best books are on IRC.
I mean, this is how you get me to stop buying Kindle books.
What do you mean buy kindle books
