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Comment by jjice | Hacker News Reader

I got a Kindle Paperwhite as a gift from my work and I fell in love with e-readers. Then I really didn't like how Amazon was locking down getting your own epubs onto the device (it's only gotten worse), so I quickly found Kobos were an excellent device for my use case. I found that buying ePubs online was way more available than I would have thought and now I get to keep my digital books. Just drag and drop them onto the Kobo.

Kobo also has a "sideload mode" that (despite the slightly confusing name) just remove all online features all together.

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> Amazon was locking down getting your own epubs onto the device

Curious about what has changed? I've only ever used the email method and that continues to work.

Same here re email. Though I’m considering switching to kobo anyways cuz Bezos sucks.

I have been hoping for an open e-reader to be built, and it appears someone is building one: https://hackaday.com/2026/07/14/open-book-touch-makes-crowd-... (Joey Castillo’s Open Book project, no affiliation, I just like open/sovereign tech stacks)

> But what you won’t get is locked down with DRM — the Open Book Touch uses standard EPUB and TXT files loaded from a micro SD card, and thanks to the WiFi-enabled ESP32 at its heart, it offers up a web interface that lets you manage your collection over the network.

Kobo works great in my experience though for those looking for a turnkey open-ish commercial solution.

I read on the original Openbook lite, which despite only accepting .txt files, is still a great little device. I'm excited to get the touch and not have to pre-format massive files in a text editor.

It no longer does for the first few generations of Kindles. My Kindle Keyboard (16 years old, but it still works and I still use it almost daily) is essentially a useless paperweight now, as far as Amazon is concerned. De-registering it will brick it and they shut down the "send file to e-mail" service, too. Can no longer buy and download books off Amazon either (they shut that down in 2024, afaik).

If not for Calibre, I would have absolutely no option of ever getting new books on it.

I've decided with all my commercial e-readers that the USB+calibre is my only option as I do not wish to share my reading habits with the zillionaire overlord.

There might be new and fancy UI or something, but I spend 99% of the time only flipping pages so the outdated UX is nothing compared to the privacy I get.

Ancient Basic Kindle works still nicely and so does 1st gen Paperwhite + the few Kobo's we have in the family.

So it still works as a generic ereader via Calibre? That seems like a pretty fine outcome. I don't think Amazon (or any company) should be on the hook supporting a device for 16 years. I can't think of any company which does. Dropping support for old devices frees up eng resources. If you've ever worked in a shop needing to support legacy devices, it becomes a huge burden to keep up support (especially as the supporting software/hardware starts to degrade, like 3P updates) for what becomes an increasingly small number of users. Of course, if the number of users remains significant, support should be maintained.

We have kindle scribe and a kobo at home, the kobo experience has been way more rough for epubs. On amazon all I do is access amazon.ca/sendtokindle and I can upload the same epub to my phone and ereader AND keep the current page in sync. The experience with the Kobo is absolutely not even close to that.

And I agree with you I don't like the lock in factor, but I felt more locked on a Kobo than on a Kindle

Amazon heavily subsidises the Kindle calculating they can make the money back with selling books. That's why you can get one for 70 euro.

what you mean by locking down? your epub is your epub . i read third party epubs on kindle all the time. i am not sure if i am missing something here dont understand the downvotes. I've read third party books on kindle for decades with no issues.

Amazon is making it harder and harder to copy third party books onto the devices.

by doing what? i do it all that time. did one this morning.

I gifted my sister my kindle this morning (it was unused for years) after loaded it with azw3 files converted from epub using calibre. The other options is to send epub via email. But I told her to never put it out of airplane mode and get it on WiFi because amazon has deleted my "documents" (that's what they called sideloaded books) before.

I own two kobos, a libra for fiction and an ellipsa for tech books and textbooks. Both have koreader on.

using https://www.amazon.com/sendtokindle it's trivial. I just bought the Greg Bear humble bundle (27 epub books), dragged all of them in one step, clicked the submit button and that was it. Books showed up on my paperwhite kindle in a moment. Couldn't have been easier. Books sent that way don't disappear from your device as far as I can tell - I've done similar large batch uploads for ages, and they're all still in my library, and available on all of my devices.

Why should Amazon be involved at all? Why should they know my reading habits?

Sure, those are fair questions, but they've got nothing to do with the comment I was responding to, which was about the problems with reading (originally) epub books on a kindle.

It sounds like the comment you replied to is aware of that, but prefer his (sisters) kindle to remain functional with USB transfer, hence airplane mode to prevent any unwanted software updates.

> i read third party epubs on kindle all the time.

No, you do not. Kindle has never and, as far as I am aware, to this day, does not support epubs. The only way to read epubs on your Kindle is to convert them either by Amazon's Send to Kindle service or through software like Calibre.

It has the appearance of working like this:

  1.  Epub of a book exists on a computer
  2.  User takes simple action to read that book on a Kindle device
  3.  ???
  4.  User succeeds at reading that same book

When step 3 is basically invisible, "reading an epub on a kindle" seems like a rational way to view things.

Like when Github invisibly renders Markdown into HTML for display in my browser: It seems rational to say that I'm reading a Markdown document.

Or when I print that same HTML onto paper and read it. I'm not reading the HTML nor the Postscript intermediates: I'm still reading a Markdown document.

dont care about all that. ppl are really reaching here by moving goalposts .

It's good that it works for you. Before unloading my Kindle, I was getting over 50% failures when side loading books via Send To Kindle. These were all ePubs that have subsequently worked fine on Kobo. That was completely unacceptable, and I was uncomfortable with the amount of control Amazon was exerting over the platform.

I don't hate Amazon, but I was not willing any longer to give them knowledge and control over my reading.

send to kindle is not sideloading

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