Comment on Amazon is making it impossible to remove the DRM from Kindle Books

mesamunefire@piefed.social ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

• roofuskit@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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  • friend_of_satan@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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…

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    • roofuskit@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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      • friend_of_satan@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        I hear what you’re saying, but I’d still like to see numbers before taking a stance.

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• NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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  • mesamunefire@piefed.social ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Nice read. I’m no longer at keyboard. Good points.

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• incompetent@programming.dev ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Someone posted a comment somewhere else in this post with a list of sources of ebooks. Hope it helps!

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• miguel@fedia.io ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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".

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  • miguel@fedia.io ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    In fact just a few minutes ago I got another bundle from Humble that I loaded onto my kobo with no issue

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• dantheclamman@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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

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• panda_abyss@lemmy.ca ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Also Canadian, though now majority owned by Rakuten.

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• DaCrazyJamez@sh.itjust.works ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Boox is the best. Stock software, NO DRM. Downside is they are more expensive upfront

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  • Paradox@lemdro.id ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Boox’s Neoreader is surprisingly good, but KoReader just frog blasts it

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  • stealth_cookies@lemmy.ca ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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• SavageCoconut@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  How hard is to install KOreader on a Kobo?

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  • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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”.

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    • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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      • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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  • SatyrSack@quokk.au ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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

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  • oeuf@slrpnk.net ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Easy enough. You can also install QuillOS which an open source operating system for Kobos.

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  • dantheclamman@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Fairly intuitive, if you can drag the right file to the right directory on the device.

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  • mesamunefire@piefed.social ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Not to hard

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