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Comment by conradfr | Hacker News Reader

Is a Kindle usable without an Amazon account ?

I use my DX exclusively for reading scientific papers and stuff from Project Gutenberg, I just connect it over USB and copy PDFs/epubs/txt/html on there and everything works just fine.

So yes, it works just fine without an Amazon account. Granted I bought mine without any expectation to buy ebooks, so I can imagine this being unsatisfying for people the expect to actually purchase DRM books...

Very much so. Just use Calibre to load books and your fine.

I'm not sure how it works now, but older Kindles were just mass storage devices so you could put books there by hand.

You still can, but calibre lets you do format-conversion (since mobi is the only real format you can push to it while retaining readbility).

It also allows you to tidy up meta-data and stuff to make things look better.

It's definitely a "required" component as far as my Kindle is concerned.

I used to have Calibre, but decided not to install it on my latest system, due to this bug and the cavalier reaction to it: https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/885027

There are other ways to load books on to a kindle (Calibre, IIRC, is a piece of software that can do this). This allows you to load epubs and other files.

I believe there are legal (non-pirate) ways to buy these, but I've really no idea how good the vendors are or how wide the catalogues are.

Definitely. The Kindle will appear as any USB drive does, and you can just copy your files to it.

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