Someone posted a comment somewhere else in this post with a list of sources of ebooks. Hope it helps!
Comment on Amazon is making it impossible to remove the DRM from Kindle Books
mesamunefire@piefed.social 5 months ago
Kobo is cool Now just fyi. Works well with calibre.
The biggest issue I have is ebooks are almost all excusevly sold on amazon. I would give authors my money and not sail the high seas if it ment no DRM.
incompetent@programming.dev 5 months ago
dantheclamman@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Between Kobo and Google Books I haven’t had a problem of not finding a book. Are you talking about small authors self-publishing on Kindle? I could see that being an issue
DaCrazyJamez@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
Boox is the best. Stock software, NO DRM. Downside is they are more expensive upfront
Paradox@lemdro.id 5 months ago
Boox’s Neoreader is surprisingly good, but KoReader just frog blasts it
stealth_cookies@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
Agreed, that they are just an android tablet makes them far more useful than most ereaders as you can install apps from the Play store. I probably use mine in the kitchen more than as a reader.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
To clarify:
“Traditionally published” books and even many “self published” books are sold in all major storefronts and often on the author’s website (if they have one).
The issue is that Amazon has REALLY REALLY good tools for self publishing and, at least until recently, Kindle Unlimited (?) was a great way for authors to make money without the power of a traditional publisher or the grindset for true self publishing. And Kindle Unlimited requires amazon exclusivity.
The “good” news is that Amazon is dicking everyone over with changes to Audible and the like (it is allegedly a big reason why Sanderson basically made his own publishing house) and a lot of the big names in SFF are increasingly considering their options. That is a drop in the bucket compared to Romantasy and the like, but it is not nothing.
So best recommendation is to politely nudge your favorite authors and to signal boost booktube/booktok/bookgram/whatever to keep pushing on this.
mesamunefire@piefed.social 5 months ago
Nice read. I’m no longer at keyboard. Good points.
miguel@fedia.io 5 months ago
"Almost all"... Unless you read a very specific niche, I've rarely looked for a book that I wanted to read and not found it elsewhere.
There certainly are some that are specific to KDP, but hardly "almost all".miguel@fedia.io 5 months ago
In fact just a few minutes ago I got another bundle from Humble that I loaded onto my kobo with no issue
SavageCoconut@lemmy.world 5 months ago
How hard is to install KOreader on a Kobo?
dantheclamman@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Fairly intuitive, if you can drag the right file to the right directory on the device.
mesamunefire@piefed.social 5 months ago
Not to hard
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
KOReader is trivial to install but I would also say it is nowhere near as “required” as it used to be for the majority of readers.
In fact, a few months (year or two?) back when amazon started this bullshit in earnest, the main dev(s) behind Calibre finally picked up Kobos and DRASTICALLY improved support for the devices. Still some wonkiness with usually having to eject and re-connect to actually update metadata but everything “just works”.
mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
Yeah, the wonkiness is particularly apparent on .cbz files. I got a color Kobo to read comics, but .cbz files don’t natively support metadata embedding. (It’s basically just a .zip file, so you could embed the data in the file… But the Kobo wouldn’t read it without actually open in the file.) Getting the comics to actually list the author and series has been a big struggle.
Oftentimes, comics will outright disappear from the kobo’s book list in Calibre, meaning you can’t even manage them at all; Pushing the file again doesn’t help because it’s already on the device, but Calibre can’t read the database so it’ll try anyways. The only solution when it happens has been to completely factory reset the kobo. Which is… Not a great solution.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
Yeah. CBZ files have no metadata (I think there is actually a semi-standardized way to add it but almost nobody does?) so it won’t work well with metadata based systems. From discussions we had back in the day, the cbz/r/7z/tgz/whatever archives were mostly a necessary evil for file sharing. As long as you didn’t modify the scans, people could re-compress or whatever their files and still have a good chance of coming up as alternatives in DC++ and the like. And, at the time, PDF readers were basically Adobe Acrobat and not much else.
These days? Nobody really used DC++ anymore and the general etiquette is to keep an un-touched version in your torrent folder if you want to seed. And basically every web browser is a better PDF reader than anything before 2020. So there isn’t much value in not just reformatting to a PDF and removing the need for a special cbz reader.
All that said: I haven’t followed the changelog, but it might be worth checking if you have the latest Calibre version. Basically all the package managers are months, if not years, out of date and a LOT of work has been put in to making Kobos a first class citizen.
oeuf@slrpnk.net 5 months ago
SatyrSack@quokk.au 5 months ago
Basically a one-click install on supported devices. You just need a PC and a USB cable. Highly recommended
https://github.com/koreader/koreader/wiki/Installation-on-Kobo-devices
roofuskit@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I’m sorry but the idea that most ebooks are exclusive to Amazon is absurd. While they are trying and would love that to be true, it’s just not.
friend_of_satan@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Tha was my first thought too, but I’m not so sure. I’d love to see data on it. I did a quick search and couldn’t find any numbers, but I did find articles talking about Amazon requiring exclusivity in some cases. ingramspark.com/…/amazon-exclusive-options-create…
roofuskit@lemmy.world 5 months ago
100% they have pressured some smaller publishers and authors into exclusivity, especially self published authors that use their print on demand services. But most books you can find at competing digital storefronts.
friend_of_satan@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I hear what you’re saying, but I’d still like to see numbers before taking a stance.
panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
Also Canadian, though now majority owned by Rakuten.