Submitted 2 weeks ago by dantheclamman@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
there’s so many others and of course torrents
It is remarkable how many books available for free on Gutenberg are sold in the same format on Amazon (it’d be one thing if they were special editions, new translations etc, but they’re the same!)
People out to make a quick buck are banking on suckers not knowing about Project Gutenberg, or failing to check it, or not wanting to do a couple of extra steps to get something onto their Kindle.
Check out standard ebooks. They take public domain books and “clean” them up with really good typesetting, spelling fixes, and other things. All free too
Standard is fantastic! The books are better quality than what they charge for on “marketplaces” and can be read for free or downloaded wholesale for a song. Add to that they host an opds catologue that fbreader can browse and you have incredibly convenient public domain books right to the ereader.
Shoutout to Anna.
Have you noticed that the download interface page for Anna’s archive has suddenly changed? I can’t figure it out!
You can also use Book Bounty to integrate LibGen support into Readarr. It’s a workaround for one of Readarr’s biggest weaknesses, as torrents historically aren’t great for ebooks.
Didn’t readarr get discontinued a few weeks ago?
Assuming you have a card from a participating library.
Every time I go to checkout a book on Libby it’s like 6-10 weeks’ wait. If I put a hold on it then I’m just not in a place to read/listen at that time and then I feel bad for hogging it instead.
Better to just pirate or buy from a non-DRM distributor.
The best books are on IRC.
Isn’t goodreads owned by Amazon?
Anyone else notice that the download interface page for Anna’s archive has suddenly changed? I can’t figure it out.
I’m shocked at this unforeseeable turn of events.
The current timeline is truly a constant stream of unanticipated surprises
I will never, ever purchase a book I can’t remove the DRM from.
And there are people out there who are absolutely fanatical about book preservation. They will photograph every single page and run it through OCR and recreate an ebook just so it gets preserved. DRM is absolutely pointless and stupid.
Exactly this. As an idiot I purchase DRM music when Microsoft had its own music store. Some years later they closed it and there was no way to validate music keys.
But thankfully I still have an old Roxio9( I think) CD, and back then Roxio didn’t know what DRM was and would take the mp3 and burn it to DVD anyway, bypassing the key check, then I would just rip it back off the DVD…DRM is useless
For real.
When I still had Netflix and Disney+ I’d want to watch a show on my PC, but I’d just get black screen and no audio because something about my setup the DRM didn’t like, possibly that I had USB displaylink monitors.
So I had to watch on another device.
DRM isn’t stopping any pirates. It’s just making life a pain for paying customers.
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.
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.
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…
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.
Nice read. I’m no longer at keyboard. Good points.
Someone posted a comment somewhere else in this post with a list of sources of ebooks. Hope it helps!
"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".
In fact just a few minutes ago I got another bundle from Humble that I loaded onto my kobo with no issue
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
Also Canadian, though now majority owned by Rakuten.
Boox is the best. Stock software, NO DRM. Downside is they are more expensive upfront
Boox’s Neoreader is surprisingly good, but KoReader just frog blasts it
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.
How hard is to install KOreader on a Kobo?
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”.
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
Fairly intuitive, if you can drag the right file to the right directory on the device.
Not to hard
Why not just remove the Amazon from the ebooks?
Back when Randall Munroe released his “What if” in eBook format, it essentially was only available with DRM.
When I emailed him about it, asking for a place to buybit without DRM, he responded with DRM being mandatory by his publisher, and finished his email with a link to this comic of his:
xkcd.com/488/
amazon: finally we defeated piracy
one kid with a computer: snickers
This entire thing has been made needlessly complicated. Easy fix though.
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.
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.
Just do it in a country with reasonable laws
They already ruled on this in favor of allowing you to back up what you already own. See video games, DVDs and CDs, video tapes, this is well established already.
The goold old analog hole.
I’ve been slowly filling my wife’s Kindle Oasis full of pirated books over the last 2 years. I got it initially because it had internet service everywhere and I could just email her the epubs to simplify loading things.
A couple of weeks ago, even though airplane mode is always on for this thing, (so no wifi either) – this thing wipes something like 400 books from her library overnight. Granted, they were all pirated, but they’re doing some nasty stuff there. It looks like there’s renewed effort to combat this.
Sooooo, I sold it and bought her a Kobo Libra Color. Now, I just have her open up send.djazz.se – give me the 4 digit code, and I can upload books to her that way. Goodbye Amazon. Don’t let the door hit you.
Cannot recommend Kobo enough. You can jailbreak it if you like, but I didn’t get much benefit from that personally. I’m partial to the overdrive integration, but if you’re loading epubs you probably aren’t using that. If in the US, I’d recommend at least setting it up, since it’s pretty easy and maybe more immediate for some books, but obviously she won’t get to keep the epub after.
Not that I would know from experience, but I hear there are Calibre plugins that will allow a user to pull the DRM’d book (downloaded via Overdrive) to a computer and remove the DRM.
I’ve read that it’s a polite thing to do because you’re able to return borrowed books much more quickly so other users can check them out.
Kobo is on my Xmas list. I still have a gen 2? Kindle and it’s still pretty workable.
That’s weird and sounds like some kind of software problem. I can’t see how that would happen otherwise. I have a Voyage and don’t have wifi configured on it at all, just add books with calibre and it’s been fine for a decade.
It’s not a software problem, the Oasis has cell service.
There’s no such thing as “impossible” when it comes to piracy.
There’s no impossible because if you can see it, it can be captured and digitized, but there is a level of complication that can make it unreasonable. They could make it unreasonable to crack the drm outright and require you to screenshot/OCR it. Then they can limit the OS to make to difficult to automate capture.
Bottom line, they’re just kicking payers off their network when it’s easier to pirate it than to buy it through their service.
Something something, piracy is a service problem. That’s why Spotify et al. still thrive, but more and more the Netflixes of the world are being replaced with yaaar
The analog hole works on a lot of stuff
but there is a level of complication that can make it unreasonable.
Lol, just read the Arch Wiki about Bluray playing. Unreasonable only needs a bit longer.
require you to screenshot/OCR it
So just like what people do with paper books.
Just wait until you can only stream books, not download them, with random words replaced with synonyms using an algorithm that lets them track down who the originator of any scanned copies is.
That might sound ridiculous, but streaming-only to prevent perfect copies and hiding purchaser identifiers in the data are both DRM techniques that have been explored in other media already. There’s no limit to how anti-consumer publishers can get when they think there’s slightly more money to be had.
Tangent, but I have had an incredibly poor experience getting a library eBook onto a kindle. Libby gives out time restricted epubs - fair enough, I am actually borrowing the book, that makes sense. Kindle, despite being the “goto” ereader, and epubs being a standard format, cannot read them.
So, despite wanting to legitimately borrow and read the book, instead I am borrowing and DeDRM’ing it (which is its own convoluted process).
Why is Amazon pushing so hard for piracy? Its one thing to make their store easier to use, but breaking all other valid use cases just leaves the one remaining option…
I have a kobo ereader, it connects to my local library through the overdrive system and I am soooo happy.
That’s what they want. If you don’t agree don’t get a kindle.
Amazon and Kindle have always been upfront about only supporting their proprietary format and people just chose to ignore it.
Never had any trouble with my Nook.
Really? I’ve never had an issue. Libby sends me directly to Amazon to “check out” the book, so I don’t have to upload it to the Kindle manually.
I transitioned from a Kindle to an iPad. It just works better and you can get refurbished older iPads with an excellent OLED screen and warranty for less than a new Kindle in most cases.
I don’t know why people buy an stuff like this and get surprised when this happens.
Plenty of other electronics that you have full control over.
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.
I would recommend people buy their books off ZLibrary instead, where they come with no DRM.
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.
I love Amazon.
Their website makes it so easy to look up books for Anna’s Archive.
Switched to kobo.
Why are people “buying” DRM infested books? They don’t own anything. “Their” books can be taken away at the whim of the seller. Their rights can change with a change to the EULA. There are other legal ways to use e-readers (not Kindles) that let you keep and back up what you buy.
Amazon can go suck a fuck!
Ok look an article from 1997 which predicted this very thing
I mean, this is how you get me to stop buying Kindle books.
Anna’s Archive
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.
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.
There are so many alternative ereaders that are better than the kindle, that I don’t get why people buy it.
I once borrowed one from a friend and it didn’t even let me organize media in directories from a pc. The directory structure got all messed up and it was a pain to follow my study sequence. Any cheap Chinese ereader would allow that.
again displaying, that DRM only hurts legitimate users. a pirate has never had the problem of backing up, moving or sharing his library…
Kyrgizion@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Don’t buy Amazon products. Fairly simple concept.
LaggyKar@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
The problem is some authors signing exclusivity deal with Amazon, which means breaking the DRM and converting it is the only way to read it on a different e-reader.
Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Too bad. Then theres no sale unless I can crack the DRM ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Well then those authors can go straight to corpo-sellout hell and die a painfully death, I’d rather never read a book again than buy from amazon.
Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
It’s only takes one person to crack those books and spread them across the high seas and the only way to force authors to abandon Amazon.
There are always people who extra motivated by these challenges. The fact that these are written texts and shown on a screen means there will always be away to scrap the content off even if that involves a camera on a second device.
DRM only hurts customers who want to pay for content.
dantheclamman@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yep, I had a Kindle library of a few dozen books, when they started their shenanigans locking down the desktop client earlier this year I downloaded all of them, de-drmed and converted to epub with Calibre. Hosting them on Calibre-web and accessing with KOreader on a Kobo. I continue to buy books on Kobo and Google Books, which let me download copies (albeit with DRM).
Makes me wonder after all these years why Amazon is locking down ability to move books around. I wonder if they’re starting to feel some real competition and feel threatened! The market of cheap e-ink Android ereaders seems to be growing more and more
restingboredface@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
I started that process and hit a road block after getting all the books downloaded to my pc. Can you recommend any tutorials or guides that might help get everything converted?
merc@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Probably the opposite. They’re confident they won’t lose sales over this because they’re too firmly established as a monopoly. And they know that with Trump in office they’re not going to face any pushback from the FTC.