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Comment by hasbot | Hacker News Reader

For the average person, it isn't. For the average person with a Kindle, buying a book from Amazon is a very smooth process. My 83 year-old mother does it easily. I pirate e-books and it's kind of a pain in the ass to get the book, convert it to MOBI format, and then transfer it to my Kindle.

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I also like the Kindle purchase experience. I usually put a sample in the Kindle, check it out, and then with a single click I can have the full book in minutes without going to my computer or phone.

Calibre provides a very good service, but it can be a bit puzzling in terms of UX, also getting certain pirate books is a big chore and might require visiting dodgy sites. But the reason I stopped downloading books is that I often ran into small issues, like footnotes or a table of contents that didn't work correctly. The last book I remember downloading was "Thinking Fast and Slow"... I ended up purchasing it on Amazon because every half page it had a word duplicated, with the duplicate slightly scrambled srcambled. It was maddening... probably planted by the author , Daniel Kahneman, as a psy-ops DRM device.

kindle handles epub books just fine (not sure how recent that is).

They also provide an email address where, if you send an email with some epubs attached, they make them magically appear on your kindle.

I was pleasantly surprised by this last week, since I got a kindle and I thought it was going to be a hassle, but nope.

This is what I do with my base model Kindle. I have its email address saved as a contact so it is super easy to send it ePubs (or PDFs!) from my phone.

I'm sure you're aware that amazon can discontinue this at any moment. My ebook reader just reads an sd card or I can use a usb cable to transfer files. That's harder to remotely kill.

You can use usb cable to transfer to kindle too

I'm aware. If they discontinue it then I'll just stick to Kindle books. That's all I'm expecting from this device anyway. For everything else I have an iPad Pro.

Internally the Kindle Paperwhite still uses MOBI: https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/2/23053408/amazon-epub-kindl...

When I tried emailing an epub this way, Amazon messed up the conversion. I've had good luck converting pirated epubs to MOBI using an online converter so I haven't changed my practice.

No they don't use mobi. Amazon has two formats newer than mobi, AZW3 and KFX. Both support more features. Using mobi is like saving your Word docs as RTF these days.

This seems to be changing.

I have an older Paperwhite; my GF has a newer one. I uploaded MOBIs to both last night (via USB) - it worked on hers, and they didn’t show on mine. I had to convert them to AZW3 and reupload for them to show in the listing.

(I’ve not checked, but it’s plausible my older model has more up-to-date firmware.)

this is new (as of may 2022) and doesn't always assume the correct epub encoding, which can insert artifacts (eg see https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web/issues/2508).

I recently transferred an epub to my Kindle Reader app, and it worked, but there was a message saying that epub capability would be removed "later this year." Make of that what you will.

This is a fairly new thing and for me has worked smoothly. I can attach a bunch of DRM-free epubs to an email addressed to my Kindle account, Amazon asks for confirmation that it's me sending them, and within about five minutes I have clean, well-formatted copies of those files on my Paperwhite.

I use a Boox eink tablet, which supports epub, mobi and pdf quite well. The large size makes pdfs useful.

Because of this support I can download directly from libgen without converting or using a different device. For books that are only available through Amazon, I have the Kindle app installed.

One could argue that you're not buying the book though, as Amazon can remove the book from your device later without your consent. And as we know, that's that a theoretical threat, it happened with the book 1984 in 2009. While you could keep your Kindle in airplane mode all the time to prevent that, if you do you will miss out on the ability to easy "purchase" and go back to a world where you have to side-load.

That's a "failing" of Amazon, not of piracy. It benefits them to make it inconvenient to put things on it manually; it encourages you to use their store instead. The Kobo supports ePub natively.

True. Not to mention most average people nowadays doing things via their smartdevice, so anything that doesn't remotely 'prepackaged' become a big hurdle to cross for them, and their time.

It remind me of whenever people discuss about OS and someone said their grandmother can use Linux just fine, hell, I'm quite sure she's just browsing with Firefox and not doing command line kung-fu.

Kindle devices support epub now, don't they? Aren't they deprecating .mobi?

If you use an Amazon account you can email them to a specific email address to get them on your device.

I don't believe they actually use ePub...they accept ePub sent via email and convert them to internal formats. Mobi is deprecated, however, though you can still read your old mobi files on Kindle.

Not sure if you over complicated it because mailing yourself the epub will convert it and send it to your kindle

A pain in the ass?

Download file > Add to Calibre > Transfer to Kindle

We're talking four clicks.

This is more complicated than it sounds. Amazon is continually trying to stay ahead of de-DRM software. In many cases you have to use older versions of the Kindle software to download, or use de-DRM software external to Calibre to do the DRM removal. I download recent purchases from Amazon directly to my Mac and the de-DRM addins in Calibre didn't do a thing to them. I haven't yet tried standalone de-DRM scripts on them.

Not once in my many years of pirating books have I come across a book I need to remove DRM from.

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