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Comment by mrdevlar | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly why I didn't buy an Amazon product as an eink reader.

I want control over the things I own, I don't want them to exist locked up in a walled system where corporations can yank my ownership of something I paid for whenever they feel so inclined.

The people who were warning us about DRM back in the 90s exactly expected this future.

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I have a kindle for more than a decade and I never bought a book on amazon or anywhere else. I use it as a reader, it's never been connected to internet

Same. I keep it as a reader for my mother and upload books to it using USB.

Where do you source your books? I love my Kindle as an ereader and I get the books from my library, which sends them to my Kindle via Amazon. So I am connected to the internet.

I read classics and old books, the authors are long dead so I don't feel bad about downloading these. If you mostly read niche or brand new books it probably isn't as good. You can find a lot on project Gutenberg, archive.org, &c.

Note that if you ever do, it'll delete stuff you've added to it. I connect mine to the net every week or so (I like the translate feature, and use some pocket-to-kindle thing), but if I ever leave it for over a month or so it deletes my books. (Fortunately it's easy to get them back from calibre, but very annoying.)

Same. The blog says, "Download & Transfer via USB" option will no longer be available, but "You can continue to sideload e-books on your Kindle via USB cable".

What is the difference? How is sideloading different from normal USB Transfer?

You can transfer books you make or download elsewhere to the reader over USB but Amazon is no longer going to let you download the files from them. Amazon books will only transfer directly to your reader over Wi-Fi.

Thanks for clarifying.

My Kobo Clara 2 shows up as a USB mass storage device, and I can just drag and drop pretty much any kind of document.

There's also a sqlite database in there that contains, I think, all of the device's settings and other data, including some crypto stuff for the DRM books that I bought in Kobo's store.

It did insist on an account when I first used it, though. This can be worked around by fiddling with the sqlite database, but I just signed up instead.

It's even easier to skip account creation now - just add a line to a config file

https://old.reddit.com/r/kobo/comments/mt2f30/how_to_bypass_...

That is the exact opposite of this problem.

Download over usb allows you to download the kindle ebook purchased on amazon to your computer. That gives you an offline copy of your ebook. You can then download it to your kindle over usb.

But since you have the file, you can ALSO send this file to another ebook reader. I believe some ebook readers like pocketbook can read .azw files directly. Readers like kobo might need conversion to epub or kepub.

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