• sunbytes@lemmy.world
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      9 minutes ago

      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.

    • BitsAndBites@lemmy.world
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      5 minutes ago

      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.

  • Mellibird@lemmy.myserv.one
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    5 hours ago

    Once they started mentioning stuff like this I sold my Kindle and got a moann. Its a little odd to use at times, but I love the size and the fact that I can just throw whatever book on there that I want. I use Anna’s archive for whatever book I’m looking for or go through my friend’s calibre library and I have over 200 books on my reader. I can also use libby with no issues. Its been fantastic breaking away from being stuck in the kindleverse.

  • grahamja@reddthat.com
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    4 hours ago

    I bought a digital movie from Amazon prime in 2015. It fell off and they didnt give me a refund. The music I got from a burnt CD in 2004 is still on the C: drive of my current PC. I don’t think it pays to do the right thing in the long run.

  • Corridor8031@lemmy.ml
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    5 hours ago

    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.

    • MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works
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      4 hours ago

      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.

  • biofaust@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    So happy I just exported my collection last week and have closed forever my Amazon account the same day.

    I must say, escaping Amazon is the significant action I took in my life that was completely inconsequent on my daily living.

      • biofaust@lemmy.world
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        4 hours ago

        I used Calibre with the DeDRM plugin. But I had a very old reader, using the AZW3 format, for anything newer than that, you will also need the KFX input plugin.

        But maybe now it’s already too late for all this.

  • VeryFrugal@sh.itjust.works
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    3 hours ago

    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.

    • Kauhuhu@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      Having used both, i prefer the kobos. They just eat up everything you throw at them.

      • gusgalarnyk@lemmy.world
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        2 hours ago

        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.

        • Kauhuhu@lemmy.world
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          1 hour ago

          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.

          • gusgalarnyk@lemmy.world
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            1 hour ago

            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.

        • Kauhuhu@lemmy.world
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          1 hour ago

          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.

          • Bakkoda@sh.itjust.works
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            1 minute ago

            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.

    • Localhorst86@feddit.org
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      3 hours ago

      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.

    • jnod4@lemmy.ca
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      2 hours ago

      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/

  • brsrklf@jlai.lu
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    6 hours ago

    My kindle is from 2011, got it for free from someone getting rid of it. It’s old and dumb as shit and Amazon fortunately doesn’t care about it anymore.

    Since I got it, it never had an Amazon DRM-ed e-book loaded on it. I intend to keep it that way.

  • tomjuggler@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    So I had an e-reader once but left it in the drawer because I found reading on my phone (dark mode) was so much more convenient.

    I use librera which has tts and I alternate between reading with my eyes and listening to the robot voice narration (eg while driving). Those language packs have come a long way!

  • selkiesidhe@sh.itjust.works
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    10 hours ago

    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.

    • Eagle0110@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      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?

    • CMDR_Horn@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago

      The real question is how can I find out what those 5 book are without you doxing yourself.

  • muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works
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    13 hours ago

    This entire thing has been made needlessly complicated. Easy fix though.

    1. Get whatever ebook you want.
    2. 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.
    3. A script then parses all the images and OCRs them for the final PDF.
    4. 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.
    5. now, break the law and throw the PDF on the internet to everyone. Go little bot! Go go go!
    • ysjet@lemmy.world
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      12 hours ago

      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.

      • tomkatt@lemmy.world
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        11 hours ago

        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.

        • ysjet@lemmy.world
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          6 hours ago

          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.

          • 0x0@lemmy.zip
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            1 hour ago

            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.

            Source?
            The closest i’ve heard was a journalist being accused of hacking for the crime of choosing “view source” in the right-click menu of a web-browser.

            • ysjet@lemmy.world
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              4 hours ago

              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.

              • 0x0@lemmy.zip
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                1 hour ago

                so he only served ~2y.

                Still 2y more than he should’ve, geez…

        • dermanus@lemmy.ca
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          10 hours ago

          You didn’t circumvent it by breaking the encryption, but I’d say you still circumvented it.