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Comment by AJRF | Hacker News Reader

You can get a Kobo Reader and disable internet access to it so it never connects to a server. You can then plug it in to your computer and it shows up as a mass storage device. Then just drop PDFs, ePubs in.

I never liked Calibre, it's weirdly shoddy software, slow as a dog, and the worst UX i've ever seen in a popular app - so I needed something I could just drop my files into.

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I do the same thing with a kindle. I've never had it connected to the internet or used any amazon services with it. All my books were just moved over via usb.

The weird thing is how huge Calibre is considering, I'd wager, 90% of people (myself included) just use it to convert books and never touch 1/100th of the tools and functionality in it, not touching on the fact that it's not a shining example of intuitive software. But once you have it setup, using it as a middleman is pretty straightforward and easy.

Is there a simpler conversion tool that does as good of a job? I've literally not looked in a decade plus.

The dev behind Calibre is a Big Personality, the story was they were more willing to support a private Python 2 fork than spend the time porting Calibre to Python 3 :)

But it still is THE best way to convert books from one format to another and one of the best to fill in metadata in a compatible way.

The UX is god-awful though.

I did this with a pocketbook. I wish I could recommend it strongly, but in fact the USB port is extremely finicky (often can't charge, can't get Calibre to detect it). As it is I can only recommend it as the cheapest ebook reader that's comfortable to read from.

I've had two Pocketbooks and never encountered these issues. Sounds like you had some bad luck.

Bingo. A Kobo which never touches the internet and uses only epubs and PDFs. I should have done it ages ago.

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