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Comment by zuppy | Hacker News Reader

my biggest fear from moving out of kindle is losing access to the store. they did a good job securing most of the authors and books.

what’s your source for books and how often it happens for the books you’re looking for to be unavailable?

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Libgen, #bookz on irc, and dedrm plugin for calibre will let you get drm free copies of books you already own so you can use them however you see fit

Sadly Libgen seems to have been down for the past couple of months, there is some discussion whether it will ever come back or not.

I heard some new guys were running it federal bureau of something

Depends where you look :)

It's mostly gone now. Even on the newer domains.

https://open-slum.org/

This is why I buy an android e-ink tablet.

My needs are unique, all of our needs are unique I suppose, but I want epub but also want to use the Kindle app (in cases of them being the only place to get a book).

I worry about firmware updates(security), but also my needs do not require the tablet being online constantly. So in a case like this, not a phone, not online, I only bring the wifi up to download books from Amazon via their Android app.

Otherwise, I copy epubs over via USB.

This is the middle ground.

I've been quite happy with the Meebook E-Reader M7.

FWIW actual kindles don’t need to be online except if you are buying a book or transferring one via their website.

Older Kindles did have an optional cellular connection, but that was to make purchases easier.

Kindles aren’t limited to the Amazon store. Your kindle has an email address you can email books to, and there are ways to transfer via USB, etc.

thanks, i researched into this and bought a boox go color 7. now i can have both the kindle app (for books i can't buy anywhere else or already purchased) and new books outside of kindle app. bonus, it has text to speech which kindle doesn't really want to let you do so it won't lower audible purchases. not the same quality as audoble, of course, but free.

google search "book_name epub"

same

... but this does not replicate the kindle one-stop store experience. and looking on the kobo store doesn't help either, i wanted the experience for someone who actually migrated from kindle. i may find the books i'm looking for now, but what are the struggles for people who actually used it? do they come later than kindle, are they using multiple shops, etc.

edit; yes, i know about the pirating options. i'm not talking about those.

Kobo in my experience has all the books from big publishers, the publishers that publish paper books too. What they do not have is the stuff from Kindle Direct Publishing. This is stuff people have self-published on Kindle, I think Amazon requires exclusivity when you do that too?

In my opinion this is actually more of a blessing than a curse since I consider 99% of that garbage I don't want to sift through.

Sometimes multiple store headaches are still a necessity depending on region. Even on Amazon.

IIRC they give you a better revenue split or something of that nature if you only publish there

`filetype:epub book_name` should be tried first, in my opinion.

This is rather terrible for supporting authors though. I read a lot of scifi from small authors who self publish on kindle direct publishing, and I would rather they get my money for their work.

And yes I can pay then find the epub (and not all are available, due to small author), but the experience is then much worse.

Contact the author, send direct to paypal. this way you get freedom, they get more money

This is partially on the author, and I say this as somebody how writes as a hobby. It's not too difficult to publish on the Kobo store, and there are other stores out there. Of course, it's difficult to compete with Amazon when it comes to reach and to some small features, but they are no panacea either. For example, they don't support epub 3 with aural synchronized media, and they do something terrible to images embedded into ebooks that make them frankly useless. And they charge authors an outrageous amount for kilobyte of ebook content.

FWIW, Amazon generally doesn’t require DRM on ebooks.

I believe Amazon impose a whole bunch of conditions on people publishing on their platform. Along the lines of exclusivity and controlling where else if at all you can sell it. I'm pretty sure Corey Doctorow extensively covered this.

Yes they do. One particularly annoying one is about pricing: price can't be zero. If you write as a hobby and don't care about making a dollar, then Amazon gets in the way. Sure, you can publish in Amazon and charge 1 USD, but then you can't publish your book on your own website for free because it goes against Amazon's TOS.

There are other peeves. Covers for example: it's against the TOS to have a cover that shows female nipples, but it's okay to show male nipples. Beyond the sexism of the rule, I'm worried that the way to enforce this is to have some ML system checking all the covers and making judgements about nipples. Which means you have to ask your cover artist to not draw anything that may accidentally look like the wrong kind of nipple \o/ .

> they charge authors an outrageous amount for kilobyte of ebook content

Probably because of the kindles with 'free data' to download books.

> rather terrible for supporting authors ... scifi from small authors who self > publish on kindle ... I would rather they get my money for their work.

I would suggest you write them (each of them) a letter, or email, which:

1. Discourage them from publishing on an Amazon platform, explaining how Amazon, and DRM-laden reading, is terrible.

2. Suggest that they publish with a link allowing readers to pay them directly, or at least via a payment platform (see here for example: https://www.mightynetworks.com/resources/patreon-alternative... )

While this is right in theory, in practice I don't think you realize why those authors are there : discovery and ease of management. Your offer makes them lose both, for what gain from their POV ?

But Amazon DRM-laden reading isn’t terrible. I buy a book, it’s on my Kindle. With Kindle Unlimited, I can read tons of books for a fairly small monthly price.

Not sure what problem we’re trying to solve.

So, I had a kindle, amazon prime, everything.. until the pandemic, and here in Norway we don't have an amazon webshop of our own. Up until this point I had been buying from Amazon US. The pandemic made shipping from the US hard, and so I decided to use AmazonUK, my login worked there, so i just switched to using that one. Then shipping from the UK became hard (brexit), so I started using AmazonDE.

Then Amazon locked my account, and said I needed to prove who I am. So I did, sent in documents to prove who I was. Didn't matter, apparently I had broken some rule about using my login in different amazon stores or something. Apparently I wasn't allowed to do that.

So now I lost all my books I had bought, because Amazon decided to ban me.

If I had bought these books from any open store, I would still have my books.. but because I bought from Amazon, I've lost them all.

That's why DRM free books are important.

The problem of supporting authors who actually want to be paid more than beer money (or any money, really) for their work, for one.

There's also the problem of moving those books onto another platform once Amazon directly affects you and you wish to move onto something else. (Amazon Unlimited DRM hasn't been broken yet.)

> This is rather terrible for supporting authors though.

Supporting a terrible platform to become the main place to get books is way, way worse.

If there's no DRM-free version available to purchase, I buy from the kobo store (it's very easy to access different region stores which can impact book availability) and I then remove the DRM. Library genesis is also an option, of course.

You can browse the Kobo book store here https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebooks

What are the prices compared to Amazon's? Books are generally cheaper here in the subcontinent. I did a price comparison of 30 books and found out that Kindle editions cost significantly lesser than Kobo. And Kobo editions cost slightly higher than paperbacks.

The total amount for these 30 randomly selected books came to: Paperback price: ₹13,017 (~$149) Kobo price: ₹13,252 (~$152) Kindle price: ₹9,171 (~$105)

I found that it's often best to use google search to search the kobo store. Books sometimes have multiple editions with significant price differences. Not sure if it would make a difference in this case.

What other popular stores exist? And I assume you sideload those books to Kobo afterwards? In that case, is the experience of reading sideloaded books inferior to that of reading store bought books?

I don't know if it still works, but the last time I checked it was possible to un-DRM (de-DRM?), and convert amazon format to normal epub, and read it everywhere

Yeah there's a way to do this with Calibre + some plugins on windows. I tried on my Mac but it was unsuccessful.

Depends on which version of the DRM. KFX hasn’t been broken yet. It’s been a bit of a cat-and-mouse game where the DeDRM people make some progress then Amazon tweaks something and they have to start over. There are some workarounds that involve getting Amazon to give you an older version of the file, but then you lose the typography improvements present in later versions of Amazon’s ebook format.

I use the libby app on Kobo to get books from the library. Its just what I need. I can add epubs and pdfs from dropbox but never use that any more.

annas-archive.org

ebooks.com has loads of books on the platform, though they're DRMed. libby's great also.

no need to be locked into kindle anymore.

transferring books is also easy. you can install Calibre on your computer, connect the Kindle to it via USB and transfer. if you're into self-hosted, you can run Calibre on a server, either as an installed binary or in a container, and send books to it via email or dropbox.

Search for alternative first. If it doesn't exist: purchase and download the file from amazon and remove the DRM.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43070155 - Kindle is removing download and transfer option on Feb 26th (2025-02-16)

See title of OP ;)

This thread is about Kindle alternatives. If you don't have a Kindle at all, there's nothing to jailbreak.

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