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Comment by ben7799 | Hacker News Reader

I've backed up my eBooks from time to time & cracked some books over the years that I had purchased & wanted to put on another device but a lot of the time I don't worry about it.

I got my first kindle in 2010 and bounced over to Barnes & Noble for a while with a Nook but then came back to the Amazon ecosystem. I've bought hundreds of books over the years.

But just like paper books there are a lot of books that I read once and never look at again. They aren't priceless treasured objects for me.

The thing with Amazon.. people complain a lot, but their ecosystem just works the best in the eBook space. I actually find it a lot less annoying than some of the shenanigans with other digital stores like the iTunes store over the years. I haven't tried Kobo but B&N was always a hot mess compared to Amazon. Tons of annoyances in the store & device software that Amazon had right from day 1. And you were paying more for a worse experience.

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> their ecosystem just works the best in the eBook space

I just want ebooks. I don't want an 'ecosystem in the eBook space'. If I had a similar paper book ecosystem 'in the paper book space' I'd have some giant foreign corporation insist that before I was permitted to read I must buy a bookshelf from them. Then all their books would have to be on that shelf. Then if there's a book they don't sell, or for which I choose another retailer, I'd need to buy a different shelf. Then every time I want to read a damned book I have to first know which corporation's mandated shelf it's on.

The whole DRM-ebook business stinks. I do buy the odd one from Amazon if I can't get it anywhere else, but the DRM goes immediately on download.

Fair, but just like I've never needed my photo backups, when I do need them (if I ever do), I'll be very, very, very glad I put in the ~3 hours of work or so a month it takes to ensure my photos are all backed up.

How do you back up your photos?

By copying them to harddisks, and burning the important ones to blurays.

Doesn't Amazon let you re-download your books on your kindle?

That's a little different than photos in that once the photo is gone, you don't have the opportunity to capture it again.

Assuming Amazon doesn't just decide to delete it [1], sure.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18am...

Seems that those books were added to the store by a company that didn't have the rights. I'm not sure that's a widespread problem.

I'm not sure the distinction is relevant. The fact is, Amazon can and will remove your books at any time and there is nothing you can do about it.

Right, but in setting a pattern of behavior that they will remove books whenever they want, Amazon only seems to do it when there are bad actors involved.

My concern with this thought is that eventually any company will shut down or stop supporting whatever service I’m using.

Some books with Amazon's DRM have a limit on the number of devices it can be used with. Sometimes the limit is very low, such as only 1 or 2 devices. This makes it difficult to re-download some books.

I've run into this, especially with science or reference books. And was impossible to fix on my own because the original download was to an old Kindle that's now sitting in a box somewhere in the garage, or to the Kindle app on an old phone that's no longer in my possession.

I suppose that could be fixed with a call to Amazon's customer service who could probably de-register those old devices in their system. But who wants to deal with that? Every book I've ever bought from Amazon has been cracked and backed up.

I had been willing to put up with the DRM. Didn't want to go to the hassle of re-downloading and processing hundreds of books. But when I ran into the "This book has reached its license limit and cannot be downloaded", that was the last straw.

> But just like paper books there are a lot of books that I read once and never look at again. They aren't priceless treasured objects for me.

Traditionally your books could have been donated, or given to friends and relatives. DRM prevents those things. It really sounds like you might be better off using a library to borrow ebooks than to buy them. You're already basically just paying for a rental.

I have a Kobo and haven't had any complaints (though they're often not as cheap as Amazon though).

P.s. I wasn't sure if you were saying this, but I don't think Kobo has anything to do with B&N.

I was just mentioning that I haven't really given Kobo a shot... so I could be in the dark and Kobo is better.

But I hear enough through the woodwork that I have been under the impression using Kobo would be trading off annoyances with some things better & some worse. Mostly what I hear is Kobo often has some hardware advantages but has some different software annoyances.

What format the book uses is a very minor concern to most of us who just read the books. Epub vs Mobi vs KF8 or whatever has no impact on me 99% of the time. The only time it'd really matter is hopping around between platforms and having to convert stuff.

If Kobo started having a huge advantage I'd be more likely to buy a Kobo and keep my Amazon library with Amazon and start buying Kobo books there. I wouldn't go on a big project to convert all my Amazon bought books to a Kobo compatible format. Cause once done I wouldn't actually need/want to re-read all those books on the Kobo.

To me, Kobo has a major advantage with the “warm toned” backlight on the Clara HD. I switched from kindle just for that.

On kobo, the dedrm process involves installing the kobo desktop software (windows/Mac only), which syncs the books to your desktop. From there you can snatch the ebook from the file manager and put it in calibre. There’s an “obok” dedrm plug-in.

If you switch from kindle to anything else, you will lose the ability to download your kindle purchases. You need an active kindle account/device to download ebooks from the kindle library (this wasn’t always the case).

Obok can grab the books straight from your Kobo using the Calibre plugin. No need for the desktop software.

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