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.
That was amusingly well timed:
I’ve jailbroken every Kindle fire I’ve ever owned, is this something new?
As it should be.
I don’t mind a monopoly on a physical product as long as I can jailbreak it, install my own custom hardware, or modify it however I want.
You don’t mind the harm to consumers and the anti-competitive results of Amazon establishing a monopoly on e-readers? Interesting take…
Amazon even has a monopoly on e-readers?? I thought that was a more evenly-shared market, with Pocketbook being the most popular, while Boox and others have a sizeable part of the pie. Where I am, Kindles aren’t even sold officially, so I don’t see them much.
reMarkable, PineNote, Bookeen, etc…
I’m not saying anybody deserve to be mistreated … but come on, at this point if you buy something from Amazon it’s Stockholm syndrome. Just do NOT. It’s that easy.
F*ck Bezos and other billionaires. Stop making them even richer from your pain. Stop your mind from being literally enslaved!
There is a whole community of people out there who will pretty much refuse to buy brand new electronics. And thats for very obvious and valid reasons.
Kindles can be found for dirt cheap if not free 2nd hand. And so many users have a kindle for this reason. Myself included. Id never throw out or discard an electronic device that continues to work. For the same obvious reasons as why i dont buy new ones.
And so this information is super relevant and important to users like me. Regardless of how much people like you might be convinced that “we had it coming” or whatever.
Sure, it’s the same problem with most of electronics, it’s the console business model, or ink printer, where the device itself is “too” cheap and companies make money on content. Unfortunately it comes with shackles. I’m all for breaking the shackles but unfortunately has to be aware of what they are getting into, not just the trouble but also potentially supporting the company promoting DRMs and more.
I work in XR and Meta/Facebook is the embodiment of that problem. The Quest is too cheap compared to alternatives like Lynx (standalone designing in France, unfortunately still running on Android but at least rootable) or even the “old” now Valve Index, which in addition to its price also requires a gaming desktop.
So… it’s a money making machine for corporations. Hopefully recycling is done in a way that provide 0 support for the corporations locking down its device, promoting its marketplace BUT also, sadly less realistic, doesn’t also prevent companies who try to sell genuine alternative that do NOT promote such business model from existing.
TL;DR: get a 2nd hand reMarkable, PineNote, Bookeen, etc…
unfortunately though, due to the same issues there isn’t a very large second hand market of those either. Like the cheapest remarkable second hand I could find was still 300$ and the cheapest pine note was 270$ for preowns.
when you compare it to the kindle which has preowns starting at 40$ it’s a hard buy
3Easier said than done. Had a quick search. In 45km of my home there is not one reMarkable, PineNone or Bookeen. There is 2 kobos. And around 200 kindles. Kindes are starting at 5 bucks for ones that look a little beat up. Kobos are 80 bucks. You can still avoid buying most books from amazon. Obviously not all. Even owning Kobo there are some books you end up buying from Amazon. They have the largest foreign language library. There are thousands of popular books which you cannot get in a foreign language anywhere else these days. And you have to acknowledge that most people in the world are not reading books in English.
Sometimes you can get a solid deal. If youre super patient or lucky. But the 2nd hand market will generally always follow the market distribution of retail.
So long as kindle is domninating. 2nd hand users are gonna be heavily pressured into buying kindle.
I wholeheartedly agree that we shouldnt support amazon and i do think they are making kindles a pain.
But i dont think you can expect people to just find 2nd hand alternatives like what you listed. Especially when you consider the demographic of people shopping for eraders.
This is why i find these kinds of comment chains futile. We all love to vote with our money, but its not that simple for a lot of people. Maybe instead of this “you get what you deserve” attitude we could put more energy towards promoting the jailbreaks and trying to make those as accessible as possible for your chineese grandma to be able to do it herself on her Windows Vista. Not to mention that there is 0 value in telling anyone that bought a new kindle that they deserve whats comming. At best they sell their kindle when they buy a kobo perpetuating the cycle. At worst they trash it and contribute the already growing problems of ewaste.
Thing is, the pinenote is €610, and the kindle paperwhite is £160, cheaper on discount.
I get your point and there’s a reason why the kindle is as cheap as it is, but I can understand why someone would see those prices and go for the kindle.
Or go for the Kobo, which is similarly priced as the Kindle. The Kobo Clara Colour is £150
I’ve had three ereaders, all three were kobo.Yet I wouldn’t recommend them anymore. There’s a mandatory online activation now. There are ways to bypass it but it’s not great.
Many models are unstable with KoReader so it’s not even an alternative anymore.
The day I replace my eReader is going to be a hard day.
I’ve bought myself a Boox Go Color 7. I love that one, even though it’s twice as expensive as a Kobo or Kindle.
I love how hackable Kobos are. I put KOReader on mine and it’s honestly just the best experience I could ask for.
Absolutely the reason I bought mine too. While we are probably a small niche, looking for this functionality was how I found Kobo in the first place.
there’s a reason why the kindle is as cheap as it is,
Indeed, cf https://lemmy.world/comment/15163037 unfortunately too cheap usually comes at a non financial cost.
And PocketBook. Don’t see them locking down anytime soon.
It eludes me how people pay to ‘buy’ something that they cannot download in the first place. If I don’t have it as a file on my computer, I don’t own it. You wouldn’t pay to ‘buy’ a physical item if that meant only being able to look at it at the store, without the ability to take it home and do whatever you want with it.
If buying is not owning…
Just wait until they can figure out how to do this to physical items. How? Idfk bro what am I a rocket appliance?
Subscription lock
I’d love to see them put that on the big black dildo I purchase each year. Try me!
Lol
sorry vibrating/heating function locked until daily dues are paid.
Safety eject option locked until subscription is paid. “911. I have a dildo shoved in my ass and my safety eject subscription ran out. Please help!” you know, it sounds crazy and like this could never happen but I say it’s just crazy enough it will happen. Look at who the American president is. That’s all the proof you need.
I agree. However, some dishonest services allow to download, but downloaded file is DRM. It is even worse.
Most services are forced to carry DRM only versions of Ebooks by the book publishers. But there are ways of legally removing the DRM - it’s a faff but doable. I buy epubs and don’t use Kindle (haven’t for a long time) as it’s much harder to remove the DRM and actually own your books.
But way I look at it - if I bought the Kindle version of a book, I can just download a DRM free version by sailing the seas. Fuck Amazon.
It is very easy to remove DRM from kindle Books, but since you will not be avle to download them it will not be possible anymore.
i keep getting mixed msgs on this (then again, I could be misinterpreting) but it sounds like you can still download the ebook to your kindle (it will be in .kfx format), but if you plug the kindle into the computer and copy the .kfx file to it, that you should then be able to import it into calibre on your computer and the kfx plugin should strip the DRM.
i haven’t tested this to be sure yet (my kindle library is already downloaded and i’ve just been buying ebooks from Kobo since the Amazon announcement)
https://rl.bloat.cat/r/Calibre/comments/1h6wrlq/assistance_with_kfx_drm_removal_in_calibre/
DRM removal from Kindles from 2024 doesn’t seem to work, that is why they are removing it.
That’s where I’m getting conflicting info: I understand you won’t be able to “download and transfer via USB” from the Amazon website but when you download a book from the Kindle over wifi it’s still a file on your kindle that can be browsed to if you connect your Kindle to a computer via USB
Then you copy that downloaded ebook (.kfx) to your computer and import into Calibre and use the Kindle plugin that strips DRM from .kfx files.
I’m going to try that today and see if it actually works…
It is pretty obvious why they are doing this though, but it also means you don’t own them, you are renting them.
Convenience. Most people reads book once, if they finish it at all.
I am sorry, what?
Turn on PC or phone. Download ebook from torrent site. Enjoy.
It’s not difficult to switch?
Try explaining how to do that to your non-techie relatives, especially the older ones who like reading. Yes, this makes is more difficult to switch.
At least my non-techy relatives don’t even know that what they’re doing is called “pirating”, lol. For them, it is just “getting media”.
I only learned that some people paid for digital media when I became fluent in English and got exposed to American social media.
Oddly enough, pirated ebooks are a malware minefield. And hard to find.
That said, I have about 8000.
Where are you going to that they are a malware issue?
Why don’t you use library genesis or Anna‘s archive?
Library Genesis is down. Maybe for good
Undernet and #bookz for me somehow turned out to be easier than more popular styles of piracy.
Is bookz a channel in undernet?
yes
Balller, thanks. I’ve been enjoying IRCHighway and the ebooks channel.
#bookz is fantastic!
Well, you should not use Amazon anything. Valuable lesson learned.
I have a first generation kindle that I bought 16 years ago. They used to be awesome, and Amazon shaped the way ecommerce worked. The lesson here is not to be fully dependent on one supplier, not to boycott everything just because it’s big.
Yeah, they were great back then. I have the first generation Kindle Paperwhite (12-ish years), though at this point I only use it to read fanfics lol
AO3 let’s you download entire fics directly in the EPUB & AZW3 format, doubt they’re ever gonna change that 😁
I use a library app called Libby to read non torrented books. But I’m not sure if it’s available on the kindle. It’s good to support your local library, even if it’s only digitally
Libby is able to sync with your kindle, and then you just choose “send to Kindle” on your phone when checking a book out and the book will appear in your Kindle library.
https://help.libbyapp.com/en-us/6017.htm
If you have a Kindle, this is 100% the best way to read books.
pretty sure that is us only
In the meantime, hackers have just released a new jailbreak and made it a more open platform than ever :^)
I’m really glad that I downloaded my entire Kindle library a month ago, and converted it all to either CBZ or Epub.
Fuck Bezos.
One tip for the audiobook-fans: Download your Audible books while you still can. It’s only a matter of time before Bezos locks those downloads too. Libation will help liberate your library into DRM-free files.
Locked-in platform closing the door. How surprising.
Accepting DRM in the first place is the problem. Hard to avoid, but still. I just got a boox; great value, can’t use adobe DRM. Didn’t have any problem there. Of course, money is going everywhere except big “publishers”, but that’s hardly an issue; they choose their business model, I choose my customer model.
they choose their business model, I choose my customer model.
Ooh, this is very pithy. I like it. I will use it.
I resisted eBooks for years, preferring physical books from the library or new/second hand stores. I got gifted a Kindle from a well meaning relative a few years ago and I have a small collection on there, mainly built up when I was commuting.
This news came just as I am backing up my own data, moving off of the big name Cloud services and going back to open source software. (In confession the convenience of M365 etc won me over so the last 10 or so years I fell into the trap!)
Anyway needless to say my 40(ish) Kindle books quickly got downloaded and archived this week. Thanks to Calibre I’ve also fixed the covers to a book series that suddenly got updated to an awful ‘new hip’ version! :)
I’m now intrigued about repurposing the Kindle hardware as it still works and I don’t want it to go to waste, but with this and other recent events I’m done personally proving data or money to these big corporate companies as much as I possibly can.
ebooks have managed to pull the same scam that game developers pulled on gamers 20 years ago.
“ebooks will be cheaper! and with the fact that we wont have to pay for printing, shipping, storage, etc, You’ll pay a lower price while the author/publisher still receive more money than they would have from the physical book! its a win/win for everyone!”
aaaand then as soon as they were accepted ebook prices became the same (or near enough) price as the physical version, and in a few rare cases, even more expensive. Resulting in the massive promised profits for publishers, and maybe authors, but no gain but lots of demerits (like obnoxious drm, and shit like amazon going onto your device to delete it cause they lost the rights or something, which has happened) for end users/readers
And thats first party, brand new books.
There is no second hand market for ebooks, like there is from physical. Si theres no browsing a place like Half Price Booked or whatever to find something that isnt in your normal wheel house but thanks to being pre-owed, its cheap enough to roll the dice on.
I wonder if this is at all related to the EU changes to eBook DRM standards, where the standard Kindle Adobe DRM isn’t compliant
i buy most ebooks from a small local bookstore. for the rest there’s still zlib
Are you buying ebooks in a physical store? How does that work?
I’ve been downloading my books but most of them are DRM so I can’t read them on anything BUT a Kindle. I’ve been thinking about getting another e-reader but I fear I’m trapped.
Just look up Kindle DeDRM, it is easy enough to remove that stuff and then even convert them to epub
Wait, people who have Kindles buy their books from Amazon?
I always just got mine from a certain private mouse tracker.
The only surprise here is that it took them this long to do it.
