Kobo Clara BW VS newest paperwhite VS smth less popular but still good. Not interested in color. Libra 2 seems very interesting but very hard to find.
Kobo Clara BW VS newest paperwhite VS smth less popular but still good. Not interested in color. Libra 2 seems very interesting but very hard to find.
If you want to sideload your own books and continue to be able to do so, steer clear of any Amazon device.
As someone who has sideloaded a ton of books onto their kindle, why?
They’re making it harder and harder to do so apparently and to download the books that you buy from their store.
I don’t trust that they won’t make a strong push to lock you into the Amazon ecosystem.
And, bluntly, I don’t trust Bezos, especially after all of this election bullshit he pulled with WaPo where he personally got involved. The chances are now non-zero that Kindle could censor books. If a tyrannical regime told Bezos to remove a list of books from Kindle devices I think he’d roll over and do it. And that’s not right. They’re the customer’s books - they bought them and they get to decide what they read without censorship. And to be clear, I don’t care which way the censorship goes. We shouldn’t be censoring books - full stop.
I used to be such a kindle Stan but I don’t think they will let me have full control over an expensive device that I buy and books that I buy on their platform.
I de-drm every book I buy and side load it onto my devices because no company in the future should be able to tell me what books I can read. I’m currently using a Kobo but if they start fucking around too (no signs of this yet…) I’ll find a device that will respect my freedom.
From what I’ve heard, the newest generation doesn’t show up as an external drive when you plug it into a computer.
Just looked this up. It looks like the new generation just shows up as an MTP device instead of an external drive. That doesn’t stop sideloading books onto the device, it works as before.
However, they’ve seemingly stopped allowing the “download and transfer” option for Amazon-bought books, which was an easy way to get them into Calibre and remove their DRM. So that’s something to keep in mind for sure if you want to buy ebooks from Amazon.
Ah ok, I hadn’t looked into the details as I was already interested in moving away. For me, I’m still set on moving away, as I know that it’s easier to avoid buying on Amazon if I just have a different device.
Amazon is increasingly hostile with Calibre, especially within the past year or two. Things like intentionally destroying included book covers/thumbnails for books uploaded by Calibre, intentionally breaking Collection editing via Calibre so you have to do it on the Kindle directly, and not allowing users to download their Amazon-purchased books into Calibre.