How Ebooks Have Poisoned Electronic Ink
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schmud.de
The lack of consumer-oriented legislation is the proximal cause for devices phoning home, spying on you, locking you out of the goods you've purchased (that is, dictating how you can and cannot use the good) and which resist the user's need to repair or extend.
The author's solution is to apply duct tape and glue to arrive at "ethical reading" (really, it sounds more like ethical vending). However, I think it is a problem which consumers can't buy themselves out of; pro-consumer legislation is required.
Being choosy about where you buy your ebooks is fine, but we didn't get better automotive safety standards by just being choosy about the kind of cars we buy in the first place. It was a political -- not a consumer -- process that brought about change.
You're right, but it's very hard for me to believe even halfway decent legislation will be passed. It's clear that the political process is not working for the common people, at least not in the US.
Every time I see a mutual-aid solution for a societal problem or a duct-tape-and-glue coping mechanism (like the one espoused in this article), I like to remind myself of the fundamental problem.
I wholeheartedly agree, and it snowballs. The way I see it is:
1. One time purchases are the least lucrative.
2. Subscription fees, and therefore control of device, are more lucrative than one time purchases.
3. Advertising (tracking, privacy invasion) is more lucrative even than subscription fees.
4. Both subscription and advertising combined is more lucrative than on their own.
5. There are a bunch of other upsell type models depending on the industry. This includes accessories, warranties, in-app purchases, etc. Hard to generically categorize these, but they are almost always more lucrative than one time purchases.
It's easy to see where an unfettered market will gravitate over time.
This could be solved via regulation if (big if) we had enough uncaptured legislators (and voters that held their feet to the fire), however we now have large swaths of the economy who's business models are complete non-starters if sufficiently regulated. So we'll at best end up with some inn-effective watered down regulation that has the appearance of doing something, and probably not for a while still.
It's a slow moving disaster that everyone sees, but only a minority care enough about or even want to try and fix. You know, like artificially low interest rates.
It's interesting to compare today's corporate information hoarding to the information-sharing philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie at the turn of the 20th Century, whose money was used to build 3,500 libraries.[1]
However, they were also often guided by a strict idea of noblesse obliger, which we would consider patronizing and archaic today, but which was considered an extremely serious task for them. It was fundamentally their role in society, as they saw it. They were also quite a bit more religiously motivated. This extended to the idea of public service and holding public office (of course they also held those positions as a way to help themselves to the pot, but the two ideas were often present at the same time). They saw charity as an act of duty before as an act of kindness in many instances.
The modern super wealthy no longer think of themselves as constrained by a notion of "duty", for better and for worse.
Copyright law seems to have locked most of the works in these amazing digital libraries up so that they are currently available publicly only via a search function that returns small excerpts (and even that would have been shut down had Google not prevailed in court against the Authors' Guild's claims of copyright infringement.)
At the very least, it would be nice to be able to read all of the scanned books in the Library of Congress that are out of copyright, out of print, and/or not being sold or rented by the author or publisher.
Not a chance. You can see this with the US Postal Service today, with some people arguing that it should continued to be stripped because it isn't profitable. It isn't supposed to be profitable!
I think the closest we could ever get would be an "old Netflix" approach, where you have to pay a monthly membership fee based on the number of books you want at once that turns a profit.
As for eBooks, I generally find a spot to buy them online (with or without DRM) and either rip the DRM out or pirate them after purchasing. Voila, it's just like a normal book now!
That seems unlikely. Why do you think it's given a formal legal monopoly on the service it provides?
Right, the reason it costs significantly more money to use UPS or FedEx is that it's illegal for them to charge less. Paying more puts your letter into a different legal category that is not reserved to the USPS.
Nobody cares about the mailbox. The USPS holds a monopoly on the delivery of non-urgent mail, which is defined as mail that costs below a certain price point to send.
But this answer explicitly contradicts the idea that the post office isn't supposed to be profitable. If the goal is to make sure everyone gets served at a loss, it doesn't matter that you're taking a loss.
It’s supposed to break even. It’s supposed to be a service that provides value. If it isn’t providing value, it loses its reason to exist.
You can argue that the consumer captures a lot of surplus value from the postal service. But it doesn’t exist just to please people who like public programs.
The same with libraries.
Do SNAP, Medicaid, etc. provide value? Do they "break even"?
Who/what says it has to break even at all?
Schools also do not break even.
In contrast, (nominally) private higher education seems to do pretty well financially - even "non-profit" universities. Charging up to $80K a year and/or eating billions of dollars in government grants probably helps - so they aren't exactly independent from public funding, but we consider that funding to be wortwhile in terms of research and education outcomes, even when it goes into the pockets of wealthy, elite institutions.
It has to be about 50 to 1 at this point in terms of the ratio of important mail I get compared to junk mail that goes straight in the garbage.
It doesn't have to be profitable but the cost to send mail should cover the operation. It is absurd that it is worth it for so many companies to flood people with literal garbage.
Turned out that the root folder contained a sqlite database. I opened it up, looked at the schema and inserted a new user manually. It worked just fine. No problems since.
I have no idea if the new devices are any different but given the overall quality of the thing I wouldn't be surprised if they made it so trivial to bypass their online service integration on purpose.
They changed that last month (as a software update, so it's retroactive to existing devices):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30037152 ("Kobo unveils Sideload Mode to their e-readers ")
I have a Clara HD and it's a fun little Linux device (no android nonsense, just a good old shell), Koreader is pretty great (a few rendering bugs aside) and I can even ssh into the thing _and_ pull files down from my computer with WebDAV though the koreader UI.
[0]I know about Calibre. I'm not willing to jump through any hoops for ePubs. This should be basic functionality on any ereader.
https://github.com/koreader/koreader https://github.com/baskerville/plato
The MobileRead forums[4] are quite active, you'll find a lot more there.
[0] https://github.com/koreader/koreader [1] https://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/ [2] https://github.com/baskerville/plato [3] http://pbchess.vlasovsoft.net/en/ [4] https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=223
> [0]I know about Calibre.
Amazon actually provides their own tool to produce a Kindle document from an ePub. The assumption seems to be that you'll naturally produce Kindle ebooks by writing ePubs and converting them. But the tool doesn't work!
I wanted to have line numbers floating to the left of the main text. ePubs are just HTML, and it's easy to do this. It works fine in ePub readers. But while I tried multiple different ways of accomplishing this in an ePub, none of them made it through the conversion to Kindle.
It's a filter for idiots.
One of the unfortunate things you'll realize about the (FMCG) advertising industry, is that most of the results from advertisements is made from the impressionable customers.
Impressionable people are the money makers, but they're not the savviest. Hence you're essentially building business models that are targeted at the lowest common denominator.
You don't even want the clever customers, they make you less money.
Some research has been done on "Why are the various scam emails so absolutely horrible, wouldn't they get way more hits if they actually had a native language speaker check them first?"
They concluded that the awfulness of it is a useful filter for the most gullible of the gullible. You can only string along so many people.
> Far-fetched tales of West African riches strike most as comical. Our analysis suggests that is an advantage to the attacker, not a disadvantage. Since his attack has a low density of victims the Nigerian scammer has an over-riding need to reduce false positives. By sending an email that repels all but the most gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his favor.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
You log in/create an Overdrive account on your Kobo (Libby is made by Overdrive), add your library card to your Overdrive account and you're good.
Then when you search for books on the store on your Kobo you click the three dot menu (next to the buy button) and "Borrow" will be an option if it's available from your library.
Otherwise after connecting Overdrive you can use the Libby app on your phone or wherever to borrow books, then just connect to wifi and sync your Kobo, and it automatically downloads the borrowed books
I'd be surprised if it was on purpose. More likely they know 9,999 people out of 10,000 are going to create a trackable account, and the simplest thing is to ignore the "hacker" outliers, who would probably not be particularly profitable anyway.
Maybe the devices are loss leaders and you can't afford to have many users not following up with purchases from you. Or maybe you are at risk of being sued over some shady licensing deal if you don't lock down. Or someone like Microsoft bribes you to lock out competitors. Or maybe you're just a control-freak asshole company.
Or a mix, like Sony.
I have ALWAYS side-loaded all my books using Calibre.
However - about once or twice a year, I do turn on WiFi and download OS/system updates - which actually made the device faster and more reliable, so...
In addition to "Ok, fine, you can do that thing you're doing anyway" with the recent updates, the SQlite approach works fine and has remained so for... oh, years, at least.
The stock PDF reader is fine for ebooks, but sucks for reference PDFs. However, it's trivial to install koreader, and that is good for reference PDFs. I replaced an iPad and GoodReader with a Kobo Elipsa and koreader for reference docs, and it's great. Plus, insane battery life with the backlight off.
And if you want to install some goofball bit of software, well, drop it in the right directory and don't go whining to Kobo if you break things. it's an insanely hacker-friendly device that's also a solid e-reader.
I've been following the Pine Note work with some interest, but, really, all I'd want to do with it is stuff koreader on it and use it like a Kobo.
You could have completely FOSS hardware and FOSS software, but if all of the books you want to read are owned by publishers that refuse to sell them without DRM, what's the point? You'll basically be limited to self-published, DRM free stuff and Public Domain books.
I've got a Win10 VM that exists to strip DRM from Adobe Digital Editions or whatever the current name for that abomination is. Similar VMs exist to strip Amazon DRM.
In fact I got so tired of trying to make the Kindle for PC app play nice under WINE after it inexplicably broke that I just bought an old Kindle off eBay for about 20 bucks, and am using the hardware key from that to both download the books from Amazon in .azw form, and decrypt them with DeDRM/Calibre.
But it's still a pain in the ass. And you know what's even worse? Now that it's tied to a physical hardware key, Amazon knows that this particular Kindle is older than dirt, and so it won't even give me the option of downloading some of my newer books like graphic novels or cookbooks, because it detects that those wouldn't work on it. So I can't get those to break the DRM from them.
Things are only marginally better in the Kobo world, insofar as nothing downloaded directly to my Kobo has yet posed a problem for DeDRM and OBOK. But lord help us if they ever update the ADE encryption used for the on-device books.
Fortunately, the Kindle version can be simplified greatly and doesn't quite require the complexity of the other means.
There is much to be said for that, but tastes differ, and books aren't entirely fungible. If you really prefer reading science fiction and fantasy for example, you're going to run out of public domain and Creative Commons licensed works that appeal to you pretty quickly.
Two cases are well-known in France:
Charles Baudelaire, who is considered as one of the best French poet ever, has translated some of Edgar Poe's short novels. Well... that's not even a translation, it's his own version. It's still a good reading, a remix of Pie by Baudelaire.
More recently, it was discovered that Dostoyevsky had been translated in a very polished way, to meet the bourgeoisie good taste of 100 years ago.
Very ancient books, from the Greek and Roman times (e.g. from 500 BC to 500 AD mostly, but Homer has composed his famous poems likely around 800 BC) have arrived to us from multiple sources. Philologists have made huge progress since the most recent translation available in the Public Domain. In the last 30 years, computers have also changed the field: through computation but also simply by making the various "originals" accessible through the internet. This is true as well for the Medieval Age of course.
So any translation is always - if not biased - a reflect of its epoch. I majored in History and basically, most academic books are outdated every 30 years or so. That's good since it proves progress. The art of translation and the science of philology progress as well.
We need to shorten the period before a book becomes Public Domain. In France, it's 70 years after the death of the author(s) AND the translator(s). That's too long.
If you mean legally obtaining the books you want to read, there's also the use case of home-made/unofficial copies; there are e-books floating around of books that are no longer in print (digital or dead tree versions). You'll pry my Animorphs ebooks from my cold, dead hands!
There are also certain use cases where stripping DRM is allowed by law, and in those cases, yes, you would want FOSS hardware and software.
Now I can finally revive my kobo without having it nag me for full internet access all the time. The only way it would let me transfer my local files there without some full online sync detour was opening its browser and downloading them from a python3 -m http.server :D
You should be able to mount the Kobo as a USB device and stuff ebooks into the root filesystem. What weird version of them doesn't support that?
I've occasionally struggled with getting devices mounted where it turned out to be the USB cable's fault. Sometimes they're just for charging.
Have always side-loaded books via direct USB mounting - or Calibre.
It would be really awesome to see Lineage, Graphene, or Calyx support Boox devices in the future. But I wonder if the drivers are proprietary and not reasonably reverse-engineerable.
They are not. They are typically open source. https://gitlab.indel.ch/thirdparty/linux-indel/-/blob/41ef0d...
While staying in the US I setup an Amazon account in 2010, and ordered a Kindle2 with 3G connectivity. It was fantastic! I could purchase books anywhere in the world - no WiFi!
At some point however the renewal of my US credit card did not get delivered to my Australian address and I kind of forgot about it for a while.
Last month I sorted out my credit card issues and went to buy a book, but could not - my Amazon account was locked. Support staff refused to fix it, apparently if you haven't logged in for over a year then they won't send you a password reset (I still control the associated email address!). The only option they presented to me was re-creating the account with the same email address. I lost all of my books and all of my wishlists :(
So I thought this article was going to be about that!
Last year I learned that there's a kind of LCD that has even lower power consumption (during active use) by virtue of printing a whole flip-flop onto the glass at each pixel, called the "Sharp Memory LCD": https://www.adafruit.com/product/4694 not cheap at US$45 but available, and 400×240, a high enough resolution for everyday computing tasks. There are a variety of sizes available, but this particular display advertises “50 μW static, <175 μW dynamic”, that is, 0.05–0.175 mW, which is a really substantial improvement over 100–300 or even 3. And it's transflective so you can read it in the sunlight. At last, something you could plausibly build a battery-free portable computer with! And, as a bonus, it updates fast enough to play video games on.
Pulling once on a pullstring to wind up your computer yields potentially about 25 J. At 300 mW that yields a minute and a half of usage. At 3 mW, two and a half hours of usage. At 0.2 mW, 34 hours of usage. So below 1 mW you're into solar-calculator territory; I disassembled one of those solar garden lights with an LED and a rechargeable battery in it and measured its 38 mm square panel at 8 mW.
Crazy to think that average current Android phones use batteries that are around 100 times the size of the battery on this watch!
I've not used it in that that mode, though I've certainly used it with Termux as a terminal driver. There are also freestanding displays sold. At larger sizes there is a considerable price premium.
The Max Lumi runs $800--$900 itself.
I'd be satisfied with 80×24 characters (400 × 192 pixels without grayscale). It's not optimal, but it's adequate for reading, including hypertext browsing of Kiwix, and writing, including text and code. The Nokia 84×48 pixel screen is inadequate.
It's battery powered. Consumption depends on usage patterns.
The battery on the Max Lumi 2 is 4300 mAh. Under my typical usage which includes much Web browsing, use of frontlights, and WiFi, 1--2 day battery life is typical. Optimized for e-book reading only (no radios or lights, periodic page turns), up to a week. If you're just looking at a static image ... forever.
Running as an active display, I'd expect battery usage to the lower end of the range and for the display interface itself (HDMI) to account for a good chunk of that, though this is pretty uninformed speculation.
Specs: https://onyxboox.com/boox_maxlumi2
Cutting out the middleman, if you're looking at e-ink monitors, there are the Mira and Mira Pro:
https://onyxboox.com/boox_mira
https://onyxboox.com/boox_mirapro
Again, neither offer a specific power consumption rating.
The Mira is effectively the Max Lumi display in a monitor package. No power draw spec that I see though it's drawn over USB-C.
The Mira Pro is a 25.3" E Ink Carta display with a lower dot pitch (145 dpi) at 3200x1800.16 bit greyscale.
I'd suspect that the major draw would be in the HDMI interface itself, as well as whatever the update frequency was.
With e-ink itself, persistence is free, colours are few, paints are expensive. Pagination or cell updates (e.g., text terminals) probably fare better than raster graphics. Running additional processing (e.g., Web rendering, audiobook processing, frontlights, WiFi, Bluetooth) cut into battery life, though it remains excellent.
For my purposes neither 100 mW or 10000 mW counts as "excellent battery life". Like I said, what I'm interested in is submilliwatt computing.
Enough processing for an interactive computing environment is a lot lower power than running an e-ink display, comparable to the SHARP Memory LCD. Even conventional CMOS microcontrollers like the STM32L are down around 200 pJ per 32-bit instruction, at which rate running a conventional CLI environment (150 kips, like a C64 or CP/M box) costs about 0.03 mW, though you start to run into leakage and wakeup limits, and a 3M workstation like the Sun or PERQ (1 megapixel, 1 megabyte, 1 MIPS) should cost 0.2 mW. The Ambiq subthreshold line claims closer to 30 pJ per instruction, putting the 3M performance level back down to 0.03 mW, plus 68 μA overhead, which at 3.3V is 0.22 mW. You can totally do web browsing at that speed but we're talking Elinks or Dillo, not Servo or Blink (and so not Slack or Fecebutt).
Otherwise, I've given you the information I have, and have pointed you in the directions I'm aware to point you in. My interest and awareness here is modest at best.
With one further exception.
GSeph Electronics is a YouTube channel which has given some technical e-ink demonstrations and might offer further information along the lines of your questions:
See this video demonstration of response times (not what you're looking for, what I have on hand): https://youtube.com/watch?v=KdrMjnYAap4
Video playlist: https://m.youtube.com/c/GSephElec/videos
Twitter (via Nitter): https://nitter.kavin.rocks/gsephelec
I'm curious just what you're thinking of that requires / demands a maximum of 100--1000 mW power draw.
What I'm interested in is lightness, autonomy, resilience, and durability. Batteries are terrible for these because they are heavy, they are difficult to make and repair, they spontaneously catch fire, and they wear out very quickly, typically in about two years in the case of lithium-ion batteries. Moreover, if you need multiple watts of power, it's a real hassle to recharge the battery without plugging in.
Reducing the size of batteries reduces these problems somewhat, but you need to eliminate the batteries entirely if you want a computer that can last 50 years.
As I said in my comment above:
> Pulling once on a pullstring to wind up your computer yields potentially about 25 J. At 300 mW that yields a minute and a half of usage. At 3 mW, two and a half hours of usage. At 0.2 mW, 34 hours of usage. So below 1 mW you're into solar-calculator territory; I disassembled one of those solar garden lights with an LED and a rechargeable battery in it and measured its 38 mm square panel at 8 mW.
A few years ago this sort of thing was infeasible: memory LCDs didn't exist, subthreshold processors were confined to laboratories, and SSDs were both power-hungry and slow. Now all the pieces have come together to make it possible to build a 10-MIPS workstation (burstable to 1000 MIPS), easily capable of rebuilding all of its own system software, with a screen comparable to the original Macintosh (but smaller, and readable in sunlight), with hundreds of gigabytes of storage, that runs on under a milliwatt. But it can only have a few megabytes of RAM, so it needs differently designed software.
What would such a thing be useful for when our cell phones have become pocket supercomputers with multi-megapixel displays, always-on multi-megabit internet connections, gigabytes of RAM, and teraflops vector GPUs? Well, they don't actually work very well for writing a novel, reading a book in the park, designing a circuit board, writing a video game, ssh, or even plain text email, they run out of battery after only a few hours of continuous use, they're fragile in part because they're heavy, and you have to replace them every few years, generally without the option to transfer your existing customized environment to the new hardware. They're difficult to back up (except to sharecropping PRISM landlords like Google and Apple), they stop being able to so much as set an alarm when their filesystem gets full, and they're designed to disrupt your mental focus rather than sharpening it.
I think you should be able to render epub files, PDFs, Kiwix dumps, and OpenStreetMap maps in a few megabytes of RAM, especially with modern microsecond-latency NAND flash instead of floppy disks as secondary storage, and obviously that's plenty of RAM for an editor, a GUI, a high-level programming language, or a cryptocurrency wallet. And you should be able to design it lightweight and waterproof enough to take to the park or on a camping trip; the display I linked above has 0.1 megapixels in 60×35 mm, so original-Macintosh resolution is 60×70 mm.
I have a few general concerns:
For any human-oriented computing based on accessing remote or general-distribution content, I think you'll find that as compute power gets cheaper, the response will be for payloads and tasks to become ever more complex. What used to be communicated in plain-text email, talk(1), or write(1) payloads is now wrapped in apps or JSON or HTML+CSS+JS, where the package-to-payload ratios often run 100:1 or worse. PDF documents become ever more complex and heavy. Your ultra-low-power system simply won't keep up.
I'd resurrected a 2005-era system for general use over the past few years. It was great for pretty much anything except surfing the Web. Firefox + 2-3 tabs would routinely lock the system. Terminal-mode browsers were far more viable, though much of the Web is now inaccessible to those.
So that's the first problem.
The second was a realisation I'd had a few years back that with the falling cost of SoCs and the like, a period where a full computing system would be available at less than a $1/unit price point (and falling from there at the rate of an order of magnitude every 3 Moore's cycles or so, that is, about every 6--8 years), was close.
The major problems at that point are power and comms.
Current-generation logistics tracking, particularly for orientation, shock, and temperature excursions, are based on physical detectors. These tend to change state if tolerances are exceeded and require direct observation to detect that shipping violated spec, but now when.
With a $0.10 adhesive-affixed data logger having an integrated WiFi or SIM capability, days, weeks, or months of data logging at 1s -- 1m resolution are possible. A one second resolution costs you ~2 MB storage per data channel byte month, uncompressed. And it should compress fearsome well.
Surveillance devices don't need e-ink displays ... but might be all the more interesting if they offered these.
As for solar power: the Max Lumi has a surface area of roughly 1/16 m^2 (the size of a sheet of A4 paper). With a case that has an integrated solar cell, that ought to be good for 6 W power, or 48 WH given 8 hours of irradiance per day.
(Mind: you can't use the device whilst it's charging, but ... let's roll with that.)
At a power draw of 2000-9000 mW, or 2-9W, the cell by itself could ... mostly keep up with the draw of the device itself. And if you had a battery to store that energy ... The Max Lumi with battery masses at about 500g.
My thinking is that you're far better off having your power source off-device. An external solar panel can be much larger than the device, and pull in far more energy. Again, that can be stored in various systems, and yes, batteries are a mess, but they're a pretty decent mess. For the forseable future you're sacrificing a lot of capability by excluding them.
PV charging cover does seem like an option.
A deployable array, of whatever size is suitable, would be a more flexible and IMO better option.
The notion of a computing device which could function on ambient energy is an interesting / terrifying one, so I follow you there. Low-end chips (apparently Zilog -- the Z-80 from Sinclair fame -- is one of these and popular in low-energy applications) might offer this.
With sufficiently rudimentary text formatting at least a general information device might be possible.
The original Unix ... seems like a reasonably decent candidate for this.
I really liked the Z80 idea myself, because CP/M is close to the minimum system where self-hosted development is a reasonable thing to do, and there are full free-software toolchains for it. But as it turns out, according to the datasheet, the Z80 is super power hungry, like 500 mW when it's running. Two orders of magnitude worse than the STM32L, and three orders of magnitude worse than the Ambiq chips! And there doesn't seem to be a low-power clone. Also, the Z80 isn't very good at running C, even if it's not quite as bad as the 8080 or the 6502.
Unix doesn't demand much more than CP/M, but fork() does require some sort of MMU, and writing a large system in an unsafe language probably requires some kind of memory protection for fault isolation in practice (at least an MPU). There's lots of available chips that can do milliwatt computing with the oomph of a SPARC-20 or PowerMac, but none of them have MMUs, not even PDP-11-style segmentation registers, and they also have less RAM. You'd have to compensate for the lower RAM by using secondary storage more aggressively; fortunately, secondary storage is four orders of magnitude lower latency now than it was in SPARC-20 or PowerMac days, but in the submilliwatt regime you're probably limited to I/O rates that are slower than those machines could typically manage.
If you're interested, more detailed notes can be found in Dernocua in notes/energy-autonomous-computing.html. Along with, of course, lots of marginally relevant crap.
You may be interested in the discussion about Oberon that started the other day if you missed it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30467122
On CPU architectures and such --- I'm pretty much out of my depth. I'd been in a discussion of the Z-80 a month or few back on Mastodon and asked whether or not there was still any extant usage, I was told there was. My understanding (very shallow, likely wrong) is that present gen versions of the chip are low-power, though there may well be far-better-suited options.
On low-end CPU Unices, there's Alan Cox's Fuzix. I followed some of his disucssion of that. There's been less discussion of late, and I'm not sure of specifics. IIRC that was based on 286-ish CPUs, with no MMU. Among the ports I'm aware of is the RaPi Pico. No idea where that falls in your power budget.
https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/02/23/fuzix-unix-like-oper...
The German ebook market is quite different. You can easily get DRM-free ePubs of most current books in German, most of the time only with a watermark. I don't know how large Amazon's market share is (I guess it is still very big) but you have other, viable options besides them.
If you really want to read on a Kindle (it is a very well designed piece of hardware after all, only the software is gruesome) jailbreaking it and putting koreader on it, is an option: https://github.com/koreader/koreader/releases/
But also tell the publishers whose books you wanted to buy that you would have bought from them if you got it DRM free. I can't understand why so few publishers to this.
Their margin would much bigger and Amazon's DRM is just token security. It's easily broken. Calibre does this automatically for crying out loud).
And an ecosystem that spotify and others (most recently the BBC...) have been trying to wall off like everything else.
I had a very long, and surprisingly frustrating discussion with two non-technical friends about what a "podcast" really is, and the notion of an "open standard" doesn't figure into the average person's understanding of that word at all. I say "surprisingly" because of how visceral my reaction to this was. Spotify's move to wall off podcasts was the main driver for me to cancel my 10-year subscription. I'm bracing for the day the BBC News Quiz will become irrelevant because from what I gather it will be released as a real podcast only 30 days after the fact (if at all, we'll see?) and then what's the point?
I think this is largely a PR thing: there are obvious benefits to open standards once you understand the pros and cons. But most people don't want to learn anything about how podcasts are distributed, or how messages are sent, and with corporations pushing people to proprietary solutions, most folks will just... do what the corporations tell them to do (see Google Chrome's adoption as well -- sure, it was a fast, sexy browser at first, and word of mouth helped the rep... but let's be honest, the real reason Chrome became the most used browser in the world is because grandma and mom and uncle bob all got annoyed to death on the Google Search, Google Maps, and GMail web pages that "the best experience is on Chrome").
I've tried to explain to friends and family why I prefer open standards, like RSS, and they smile and nod but I know damn well they don't get it and think it's weird that I care so much. These are the same people who don't seem upset or annoyed that the Spotify subscription they pay for constantly shoves podcasts in their face even if they don't listen to podcasts and have no intention of ever listening to them. So I guess the answer is that most people just do not know enough, do not want to know more, and do not care enough to bother.
Open standards are amazing, and the internet is going to fragment and fall apart if we keep drifting from them. Or, at the very least, turn your online experience into a dystopian nightmare where you can't control anything, even things you bought, in your own home, on the internet connection you pay for. We really need a good PR campaign to keep open standards alive and improving. Because they're really better than proprietary solutions that milk you for every last dollar and drop of attention. We just have to show the aforementioned grandma and mom and uncle bob.
> So how do I use my Kindle?
I suggest the author starts by not buying Amazon hardware and expecting good ethics.
I think it should be illegal for sellers to say you can "buy" a book when you have not bought it. It's fraud. Call it a rental or something else more honest. If I bought it, then it cannot be taken away, I can give it to someone else as long as I don't retain it, I can use it as many times as I want, and no one monitors my use without my express consent. It's not that rental and leasing is necessarily wrong, but it should be clear to customers that that is what is happening.
The first thing I do when I buy or borrow a book from Amazon is strip the DRM. I don't share the DRM-free file with anyone - it's just for me - but it lets me read when and where I want.
If you don't care about typography improvements that come in the newest version, there are ways you can download the file in an older format that is thoroughly broken.
I don't understand why some publishers ever agreed to let Amazon apply their DRM to book files. It locks their readers to Amazon and thus gives Amazon a tremendous amount of power over publishers. They should have at least demanded Amazon license their DRM to other bookstores and e-readers or, even better, never bothered with DRM.
There are publishers on Amazon who do not use DRM. Tor is a big one, but there are others.
However, I do far prefer reflowable text on an ereader. I just had to give up on the idea of one device fulfilling both use cases: you can't have a 100g, one handed, two week battery device that you can read in a sunbeam as well as a device that can handily render a PDF and allow smooth zoom, pan and searching.
what infernal patents are you talking about? Your claims are fairly typical of what I see on HN around this topic and if you look at my comment history, you'll see how no one seems to be able to provide any substance or evidence. You'll also see how I've explained that it is PHYSICS that limits the performance of electrophoretic displays.
That's interesting, I'm the opposite to you. I much prefer to reading books using an e-ink screen.
I have a Kobo Clara HD e-ink reader. It has a 300 PPI screen which is very comfortable to read from. I can read for long periods without getting fatigued. I can't do that using IPS colour monitors or tablets, even the high-resolution screens. With an e-ink screen I can read properly, not skim-read like I do on a monitor or tablet.
My thoughts on whether an e-ink reader is suitable or not:
- Small e-ink screens (e.g. 6 inch) are only suitable for paperback-sized, text-only books (fiction or non-fiction)
- Small e-ink screens are not suitable for reading PDFs
- A general rule of thumb when deciding whether to purchase an e-book: If the physical book is larger than a paperback size, then it is unlikely to be suitable for an e-ink screen (unless the book is text-only).
- Small e-ink readers are not suitable for any books with complex layouts, layouts designed for larger books, or books with colour graphics: charts, diagrams, photos, etc. Amazon, in particular, encourage publishers to convert as many books as possible to Kindle format regardless of whether those books are suitable for e-ink screens.
Further, author points out a lawsuit filed against Amazon from 2021, but I believe they're missing a crucial piece of history. The ebook ecosystem was originally poisoned by Apple who was found guilty of collusion; unfortunately by the time the challenges and ruling was complete, the damage had been done and publishers had decided to entrench themselves. We are seeing the repercussions of it today.
What could have been a thriving, open ecosystem was ruined by corporate greed, and there is plenty of blame to go around.
I look forward to wider availability of graphic novels on color e-ink displays, though.
I'm the same. Unless it's a native epub, where it wasn't converted from print, it's frustrating.
I wish there were some system whereby these typos could be corrected and the results committed to, i.e., a GitHub repo. Does any project like this exist?
Effectively, there's what hardware can do, the economics of the hardware market itself, and what the content (software for PCs, books, articles, and audio for ebook players) producers and markets demand.
In theory, and from a technical perspective, e-ink is pretty fantastic. I can carry well north of 1,000 books and articles in a form-factor the size of an A4 writing tablet. (The physical dimensions could of course be smaller, though that size works well with both human eyes and much printed material.) The capability to have multi-terrabyte storage currently exists (see high-end Apple iPad devices), and at a couple hundred TB, another few generations of storage development, you could literally carry the entire US Library of Congress around in your purse or satchel (roughly 200 TB at 5 MB per volume, ~42 million volumes).
What we read and how and why has a huge impact on how the devices are used (I treat mine as a large reference library). And how the marketplace and property regime is structured has a huge impact on what the permitted capabilities of devices are.
Our fundamental problem is that the business model the book-publishing market was built on is no longer at all compatible with technological capabilities. It's possible to locate and access any of millions of books within a few seconds.
What introduces obstacles to this is the mechanism of markets and property rights, neither of which now serve the interests of either readers or authors.
Information is a public good. It should be supported as same. This will create disruption, and the old giants will not go quietly. They will, I'm reasonably certain fall.
I'm not sure what will rise in their place.
There are multiple configuration files list the api locations that beacon reading information regardless of how books were loaded. Though if you care about tracking you also have to find and replace any mention to facebook, google and a few other places (in eReader.conf).
sed 's/\(http\)\(.*\)/http:\/\/localhost/g'
One of the few places selling his books legally to Brazillians was a site named "Fictionwise". I bought a lot of copies there, I would have bought physical copies if they existed, but that wasn't an option.
The one day, Barnes and Noble bought Fictionwise, and just batantly said if you don't live in US you can't use the site anymore, and you won't be able to download the books you paid for, unless you are from US.
Lesson hard learned, never again I bought an e-book. My kindle is just collecting dust.
Then send it over to the Kindle using email.
If I like a book after 50-60 pages, I purchase an .epub file and then convert it through Calibre and load it.
Kindle is the worst device imaginable for reading research papers or technical books. It's black and white, for god's sake! And small.
I have a separate tablet for reading papers, especially skimming new ones from arXiv.
When, reading in detail, I do it through Okkular in my Linux desktop.
So, basically, turned into a crappy Kobo. They're far better for this sort of use, the hardware is solid, you can hack it however you care, and it chews on just about everything.
Is that too much to ask of the Industry and all the Entrepreneurs? :-)
PS: I use a Nexus 10 currently which is slowly dying on me.
Use Kobo or Pocketbook and be happy.
The e-reader problems described in the article remain. But e-ink itself is being foolishly held back by the patent owners.
Here we go again. A massive claim made with great confidence, and yet complete lack of any substance or evidence.
> e-ink itself is being foolishly held back by the patent owners.
Sigh... see my comment history. HN repeats this ridiculous claim again and again.