The optimist in me says they’re doing this to avoid piracy.
The pessimist in me says they’re doing this so they can purge books because of the Trump administration.
Either way, I can’t say I’m a fan.
The optimist in me says they’re doing this to avoid piracy.
Won’t pirates just buy their source copies on a different platform, so now Amazon loses the original sale as well?
The “original sale” in that case is not even pennies. So… not sure why amazon would care?
Also: Many smaller authors basically depend on kindle because of the ease of use of the web portal and incentives to do larger discounts for their audiences. One of my favorite guilty pleasures has talked about exactly this (although he IS investigating alternatives).
And, much like with video games: The Sandersons of the world will be pirated. MAYBE a Dalglish will be too. But nobody cares enough to go after a Samphire or Shel.
Reminder that piracy is a service issue.
100%. I have always pirated, but the amount of things I pirated went way, way down when Netflix had a decent library of things to watch and was affordably priced.
Absurd. Glad I have a Kobo.
Yep. Not to gloat, but I never touched Amazon’s ebook marketplace.
My current e-reader is a second-hand Kindle that has a permanent message asking if I would just please connect to a WiFi network just one time just for a moment PLEEEEEASE.
I get my books from libgen, Gutenberg, or Kobo, and keep them on my computer. They’re organized in Calibre, and I transfer them over on a USB cable.
I know I switched ages ago but I’ve never managed to port my existing library of ebooks off the kindle
It’s been a while since I tried it but from memory I had managed to extract the device keys from my kindle for DeDRM and then it wouldn’t decrypt the files with them
Wow, I just bought it last year before they discontinued it then. Interesting that only colour screens are available now. It must mean that they are at least as good though? Edit: after reading reviews, apparently not… that sucks.
The Kobo Clara Color’s screen doesn’t look any different to me with non-color eBooks than their non-color version. The only thing that’s really different is that the book cover you see when it’s powered off is in color. Now I will admit that e-ink color is not very good, but it doesn’t ruin the experience of reading just a regular book.
That’s why I avoided Kindle and picked a Kobo. Sure you can remove DRMs from the books you’ve bought. But at some point they could block you from doing that. They can change anything at anytime and there’s nothing you can do about it.
That is no different than Kobo. Thus far, Rakuten have been pretty good about not caring more than the bare minimum. But there is nothing stopping them from doing the same bullshit with firmware updates to the kobos and drm updates to the store and apps.
I am finally migrating from kindle to kobo (tried kindle to boox last year and it was bad…) but I am under no illusions that I am just hoping one company is better than another. I mean, the other is Amazon so it is a pretty safe bet. But still.
Well there’s a key difference, Kobo allows epub. I don’t think they could legally remove it from devices already on the market?
And Kindle supports mobi files? It is just that those tend to get preprocessed into azw or the other one files. Much like Kobo tends to work best if you preprocess those epubs into kepubs.
The issue is that Amazon has repeatedly changed their mobi variants to fight against de-drm tools as well as increasingly locking down their apps and even devices to make it harder to get data off (and now on) to them.
There is absolutely nothing stopping Rakuten from doing the exact same with Kobo. And people should be aware of that rather than just stanning their favorite company.
there is nothing stopping them from doing the same bullshit with firmware updates to the kobos and drm updates to the store and apps.
I never connect the Libra to any network, how can they do anything? I did actually install some updates since there were a few annoying bugs, but I just downloaded the firmware on the pc from https://pgaskin.net/KoboStuff/kobofirmware.html and updated it offline. Now all those bugs seem fixed and poor Kobo still hasn’t seen the interwebs
Ah, my deepest apologies. I was not aware there was absolutely no issue or threat to anyone because you didn’t connect a kindle to the network either.
Ugh, thanks for the warning. Time for me to download and de-drm all my old kindle books and never again buy anymore.
Try this python script: https://github.com/Jedi425/BulkKindleUSBDownloader
Source: https://social.wildeboer.net/@jwildeboer/114002221924654676
