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Comment by henry2023 | Hacker News Reader

henry2023

Then don’t buy from them, plenty of venues

I’ve purchased and backed up over 700 kindle books over the years. The day Amazon made backups impossible I switched to Kobo and have never looked back.

Amazon can can go forth and multiply with itself.

Backups aren't impossible, its just a bit harder than it used to be.

That said, Kobo is great if they have the book you're looking for.

Many with trade offs. I recommend the pocketbook 4. You can disable recommendations easily, and the unit mounts as a disk so you can read and write books as if it were an SD card.

No internet required. No sync software required. It’s quite nice!

Ditto. It's also significantly lighter weight than competing readers (at least when I bought mine), has physical buttons, has color models, and has really good battery life possibly because it runs a custom Linux instead of Android.

I really liked my PocketBook InkPad Lite. After the one-time firmware update, I put it into airplane mode permanently, and always just updated DRM-free books on by plugging it in as USB Storage, and `rsync`-ing `~/doc/` to it.

The update script was pretty much this (on a laptop set up not to automatically mount removable filesystems):

    #!/bin/sh -x
    DeviceMountPoint="/media/pocketbook"
    mount "$DeviceMountPoint" || exit 1
    cd ~/doc || exit 1
    rsync -crltv . "${DeviceMountPoint}/."
    Status=$?
    umount "$DeviceMountPoint"
    exit $Status

And the `/etc/fstab` entry was something like:

    /dev/disk/by-id/usb-USB-FS_PocketBook_MYSERIALNUMBER-0:0 /media/pocketbook vfat user,noauto 0 0

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