So the product lineup is now called “Kindle Paperweight” instead?
Weird.
I didnt know my Calibre server stopped working.Just another day in the life of an enshittificator.
Corporations like Amazon are a scourge. Switch to free and open formats, software and hardware. Ditch what you can. Hack and pirate what you must. Starve big tech.
I’m poor. I pirate stuff. When I can, I buy physical copies of the stuff I like.
Here’s a reminder that Boox makes amazingly good e-readers in all form factors Amazon does (including a variety of tablets!), with stylus support (USI 2.0 for smaller devices, EMR for their Note series and above), fully open (recent Android versions, regular updates, unlockable bootloader, straightforward to root devices), support KOReader, with a solid built in reader (plus support for cloud sync, including syncing books to a free 10GB Boox server storage), support for OPDS (a better way to access your library than Calibre’s sync, plus it can be utilised with most digital libraries too), and altogether quite well priced devices.
At the moment I have on my hands a Go Color 7 gen2, a Note Air5 C, and a Palma2 Pro. The experience is surprisingly good for a “random Chinese brand”, the hardware, compared to similarly priced devices, is superior (seriously, 4/6/8GB RAM, 64/128GB internal storage, SD card support), not to mention their customised e-ink waveforms (which give you near LCD-like scrolling with minimal trailing effect and little to no ghosting, something I can’t say about my Kindles…)
The only downside I found of these devices is the relatively bad battery life in locked/standby (due to Android, but you still easily get over a week per charge with average use, or about 20-22 hours of active use!), and the speakers… definitely not meant for audiobooks.
Being Norwegian it is my patriotic duty to shill for ReMarkable, it’s pretty good at being what it is.
It’s expensive, though.
Sorry but no. Abysmal hardware, shitty software that’s locked down AND crap when opened up, and horrid QA. Talking from experience.
it is definitely too closed down, haven’t had those other experiences though, I’ve had my ReMarkable 2 for quite a few years now. Then again, I haven’t tried hacking at it
The hardware weakness is super obvious if you try to add any third party apps. Slow loading times, badly exposed pen API, among other things.
in their defense, it is marketed as a device that’s limited on purpose, though
It’s more for note taking, annotation and drawing than purely reading ebooks though, the form factor alone would make it uncomfortable for long reading sessions I think
It hasn’t really been a problem for me, but I like having a big display, especially for pdfs or comics. It’s also been great for character sheets for roleplaying games - especially since they get synced to the cloud, so I can always pull them out on my phone if I forget the tablet.
The interface, marketing and development all seem to be very focused on note taking and sketching, though. I’ve used it for drawing, but the exported files are kind of crap - IMO, the best way of exporting a drawing from ReMarkable is to lay the thing on a scanner. If you want high resolution, you zoom in on your drawing and scan it in pieces.
Say it with me kids, “This is why we pirate digital media from billion dollar corporations”
this is also why i started buying physical books and using my local public library again.
My local library allows borrowing ebooks. It’s incredibly useful. I own two kindles and haven’t spent a dime at Amazon for ebooks. I do buy physical books now and then from there, but only if I really need it and can’t find elsewhere.
How do you return a borrowed ebook…?
It expires after two weeks. You can extend, just like borrowing a physical copy. Or return early, in which case it expires upon return.
I mean, yeah, sure, I guess that’s a decent solutions in terms of modern IP shit.
But like, we all know you’re not returning anything and if you wanted, you could also copy it for yourself.
I just dislike how it feels like when it was actually books, they had actual reasons to everything. There’s a queue because there’s limited copies. You need to return it and if you’re late there’s a fee, because it’s from other people’s time, etc. Nowadays that all feels like larping just to protect large companies IP’s essentially. Because digital copies don’t actually get returned.
Like when I was a kid I would’ve never thought a librarian would say “you’re not allowed to read that anymore”. Or that I couldn’t copy a thing down at home from one of their books. But now as your tokens to ebooks expire, it kinda does feel like that.
My best friend is a librarian, and they’ve stopped buying ebook licenses because the terms were awful.
The publishers only allowed an ebook to be checked out a few times before the library had to purchase a license extension. The argument was that pylhysical books face wear and tear and eventually have to be replaced, so ebooks should have to be replaced too.
It’s true that normal books do experience wear and tear, but looking at what my local library has I’d say that many or most can still least many years before needing to be retired or replaced.
As we’re seeing with Amazon, with ebooks it’s really the readers that expire over time
I find ebooks from the library to be very useful.
I’m not saying they’re not, or that the librarians are any more capitalist than they were in the 90’s. I’m just saying it feels like they are.
Jailbreaking and never turning airplane mode off has been the best decision I made with my kindle. Download from zlibrary, transfer to folder on kindle, done
second that, much more control of it
As far as I know, it might still work with Calibre
My kindle has never been connected to the interwebs. Always used Calibre, wonderful software. About two weeks ago I used it to transfer books, worked with no problems.
This is about the Kindle Store. Calibre will continue to work, it just copies files via USB, you don’t even need Calibre for that.
That’s the joke
The magic word is Calibre
Funny, my old kindle seems to be downloading e-books just fine from my self-hosted server.
Tell me more! My partner has an older Kindle, but it’s been a while since I’ve added a book for her.
Nothing special. I just run a instance of jellyfin and have a my book collection shared that way.
I’m sure not the most efficient but it works.
Got my wife a Kobo for her birthday to replace her aging Kindle. She’s bought 1 book so far and gonna look at the Library integration.
Anyone got any tips for ways to use the Kobo? For example I have Calibre on my Mac and have used that to copy books I’ve “acquired” for her, is there any benefit in self hosting Calibre? Is it possible to get her Kindle books on the Kobo or is the DRM a nightmare nowadays?
If she still has access to her Kindle account, you might be able to get the Account Key and enter that into Calibre to remove the DRM.
Is it possible to get her Kindle books on the Kobo or is the DRM a nightmare nowadays?
Calibre has a plugin for that: DeDRM
does it still work? even when I used it last you had to do some janky shit like download a specific version of kindle pc app and use that to download the book for the first time or the book would be downloaded with newer drm and stuck that way forever, and get the file from the old kindle pc app into dedrm
I haven’t used it in a few years, I use a certain anonymous rodent to get my books now.
If it doesn’t just download copies from libgen you’ve already paid once.
you can interface with calibre web via opds from eBook readers. basically you can browse and download books in your calibre server. I use koreader to do it. as for previous books she’s interested in I’d just look for them in the electronic library
You got any more specific info on how to do this? I spun up my caliber web container on my home server, but once I realized you can’t download books over the wifi, you still had to connect to a PC, I stopped hosting it.
What ebook readers are capable of this magic?
koreader is an android app, for e-book readers based on android.
from what I’ve read it can be installed on the kobo (may need root)
here’s a picture of how to set up koreader
https://wotaku.wiki/guides/manga/opds
the only thing to mind is that the opds address is not the calibre web one but
<calibre address>/opdsif I’m not wrong.Also my calibre web does have a download button for the ebooks so if there is a browser on the kobo you should be able to download them. Are you using “calibre web” or “calibre” web?
Ive been converting some pdfs to epub for the kobo and that has worked great. Its not perfect but gives a better experience than pdf. Ive also put some solo card game rules on there so a deck of cards and the kobo gives another fun on the go activity.
Good job me never ever having bought any books on amazon. I go out of my way to buy them DRM free. Good old Paperwhite Gen 1 still going strong here.
Battery completely shot in it for me. I wonder if it’s replaceable.
My older Kindle is jailbroken and does just fine. Jailbreak if you can, if you can’t don’t Kindle.
i bought one and almost didn’t use it for 2 years until i was able to jailbreak it while sill being on its factory firmware. luckily the battery is fine
Mine couldn’t for some time now. You can’t download them as files and transfer them. Amazon has become unusable for books at this point.
It’s crazy to think that Amazon literally started as a book store.
Google was a search engine. Shit is crazy.
R.I.P. Irony (100,00 BCE - 2025)
Yay, enshittification
Not to mention the super abusive stance of Amazon to writers and publishers, the sooner people stop buying Kindles and giving Amazon their money, the better.
I’ve started to realize that early gen products are often less enshittified, even if they are frequently rough around the edges, and can often be hacked into a useful state unlike the newest hardware. By a few gens in, nearly everything is a giant plastic paperweight that only wants to phone home, download “updates” all the time, and probably needs multiple SSO sign ins and a subscription just to work. I’ll keep my old Kindle 4th gen with KOreader until it breaks.
Yet another reason to not buy Kindle.
Correction: Older kindles can no longer download e-books with the stock rom
… from Amazon. Sideloading is still fine.
