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Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

- What is the latest word (as of 2020) on reading Kindle books on the ReMarkable? Is there a tool that makes it easy to buy Kindle books and strip them of their DRM?

- Is the ReMarkable capable of running an open source OS behind the hood? Is it a hacker-friendly piece of hardware in case ReMarkable runs out of business in the future?

I was thinking about getting the ReMarkable 2 if only because my Kindle's display is too small. For ebooks it's okay but I do would like to be able to use an eink reader for sheet music as well.

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> What is the latest word (as of 2020) on reading Kindle books on the ReMarkable? Is there a tool that makes it easy to buy Kindle books and strip them of their DRM?

You go to amazon.com/myk, switch to the Content tab, three dots next to the book, Download & transfer via USB. You then drag-and-drop them into Calibre with this add-on set up: https://github.com/apprenticeharper/DeDRM_tools

There's some initial setup required to get your decryption key (easy if you have their e-reader — just enter the key you'll find in device info, slightly complicated if you don't), but once that's done, the friction for decrypting ebooks is pretty negligible.

You'll have to convert them to epub or PDF to be able to read them on ReMarkable, but that's as easy as right-clicking a book within Calibre and choosing "convert".

Most of the other ebook decrypters are basically slapping some interface on top of this Calibre plugin and hiding it behind a paywall.

> You'll have to convert them to epub or PDF to be able to read them on ReMarkable, but that's as easy as right-clicking a book within Calibre and choosing "convert".

There is a significant omission here. Converting Epub to PDF doesn't necessarily yield a good quality.

As a matter of fact, at some point I was so annoyed by the relatively nondeterministially poor quality (I stress "relatively"), that now, every time I purchase something from the Kindle store, I download and use the pirated PDF version, which is never worse than the Calibre output (I guess pirates actually use Calibre and tweak the process per-book).

It's very annoying to highlight a converted ebook, and find 80 pages into it, that the conversion cut text lines/diagrams in half.

>Converting Epub to PDF doesn't necessarily yield a good quality.... at some point I was so annoyed by the relatively nondeterministially poor quality...

Is this ever true! I use three different workflows for converting ePub to PDF, and then look through each one and pick the one that converted best for that particular book. Generally speaking, the default Calibre conversion is almost always the weakest.

Yeah, I don't think I've ever been happy with an epub conversion. I've always assumed the pirated pdfs are sold in some countries, so they are incentivized to clean up the conversions. I've just gone back to dead-tree library books, but selection and availability isn't always the best.

Just as a tip - everything on Remarkable is PDF. Yes, it reads epub files but it then converts them to a PDF for viewing. On RM1 this could be a bit annoying if you are the type to change the font style or size as it then must recreate the pdf - that can take more than a few seconds on a large file.

I've taken to using calibre or similar programs to output the epub as a pdf (with my preferred sytle at RM screen dimensions). I've also bulk cropped pdf's to the RM screen size instead of using the built in crop feature.

Does the ReMarkable have an ePub reader? My existing ebook collection is mostly DRM-free ePubs.

On the rm1 you can install KOreader which works very well.

It has an integrated reader as well I think but I never tried, I heard it's not great.

Yes - this is primarily how I use mine. It doesn't have close to the polish of something like iBooks unfortunately, but it works.

See, this is the main problem about buying new technology. The device is marketed as a graceful solution for all your "paper needs."

My principle need for a tablet has always been ebook consumption. The ebook readers on Linux I've seen all look like hot garbage. Sure, Calibre allows you to manage massive ebook collections. Now let me have a book experience that doesn't look like 1999.

Removing DRM from kindle books and converting to PDF, and shipping them as PDFs to the remarkable cloud to sync to the device, are independently solved problems, available as OSS.

To my knowledge there is no tool that does both. Nor, better, that also includes the purchase and download steps at Amazon.

I personally have automation for all 3 individually but have not wired them together. I think there is a nice little business awaiting someone who does that.

Epub would be better than PDF for the use case. AFAIK, you can't reflow text in PDF, so if the page size isn't exactly matched to the device size, all you can do is pan&zoom. Yuck.

Not necessarily, as a significant part of a reading experience is the reader.

For example, I'm bound to a specific PDF reader that has a very powerful annotations system. The last time I checked Epub readers, there was nothing that satisfied my requirements.

A couple of additional notes:

- the downside of reflowing is that you may not be able to take annotations that require absolute positioning

- for almost all the PDF books I've read (books; magazines are a different story, but that won't work with Epub anyway), a 3:2 10" tablet is enough; if the text is not large enough, good PDF readers can mass-crop the pages. Of course, there are ugly exceptions - books that have a different text positioning on odd and even pages (I hate them).

Which reader is that?

It's Xodo. It has a good range of annotations, they work well, and they're very immediate to use/switch. It also has good enough scroll/zoom capabilities (its locking functionality is a bit lacking, but it's still good enough).

I don't imply it's best suited for everybody, that's the reason why I didn't specify the name.

> Is there a tool that makes it easy to buy Kindle books and strip them of their DRM

Yes, the most common one is Calibre, which is also great for converting formats and bulk operations. There is a "DeDRM Plugin" for it on GitHub that does what you're asking.

> Is the ReMarkable capable of running an open source OS behind the hood?

Yes, and there has been some success with this including Parabola-rM. However, there seems to be no open driver for the radio chipset (so no WiFi!).

The ReMarkable is already running an open source OS behind the hood. It's a bit complicated, the UI isn't open, but it's just running on linux, you can write and run your own programs.

Is it an ARM Debian-based distro or Android or something else?

It's definitely an ARM linux distro, I'm not entirely sure which one to be honest.

It is a customised yocto Linux iirc.

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