Back when Randall Munroe released his “What if” in eBook format, it essentially was only available with DRM.
When I emailed him about it, asking for a place to buy it without DRM, he responded with DRM unfortunately being mandated by his publisher, and finished his email with a link to this comic of his:
https://xkcd.com/488/
I would recommend people buy their books off ZLibrary instead, where they come with no DRM.
Fuck you Jeff!
Switched to kobo.
again displaying, that DRM only hurts legitimate users. a pirate has never had the problem of backing up, moving or sharing his library…
Anna’s Archive
We’ll soon be back to monks transcribing at this rate.
Amazon is making it impossible for me to consider a Kindle.
I have a pocketbook instead of a Kindle cause of this lol
This is why I bought some Chinese android ereader than an amazon Kindle.
What does this mean? What prevents me from OCRing the pages on a video that quickly goes through it?
Authors would be foolish to publish on Amazon. Guarantees your book will be forgotten.
There are so, so many better ebook readers to choose from. Honestly just a phone with an oled screen is better than kindle.
As much as I hate proprietary shit, Kindle is just the best ebook reader out there. It lasts forever, in terms of both battery life and the device itself, smooth, top notch UI… etc
When I first bought my new Kindle PW, I immediately turned on Airplane mode and never turned it off. I use Calibre & DRM free ebooks and I had 0 issues.
Having used both, i prefer the kobos. They just eat up everything you throw at them.
Just chiming in as another kobo guy. I like it’s UI better personally but most importantantly it displays books, holds books, battery lasts forever, and is an eink display - like it’s an ereader, I’m not in the percentage of people who can meaningfully discern between the two.
Kobo being theoretically repairable and not supporting a trillion dollar inshittification machine was good enough for me to swap.
Kobo is a subsidiary of Rakutten, its not amazon but as far as i recall they are no saints either. But the devices are easily disconnected from all their BS, so at least some bonus points there.
I’m not gonna shill for any company, so no worries there, but our governments aren’t breaking up these monopolies so we have to. If my options are a trillion dollar company and a 10 billion I pick the 10 billion.
I wonder if a company can get to X billion dollars in revenue and not be bad.
Kobo with calibre-web sync. Hands down the best ereader I’ve ever owned.
I’ve been too lazy to set it up until now. Ahahah i guess i’ll look into it this afternoon just for the sake of it. Thanks for the kindly reminder.
Check out some of the newer versions of calibre-web like the Automated one. I would like to switch but I’m waiting to be able to factory reset both ereaders or get new ones.
I bought a kindle when amazon sold them for a special price of 25 Euro. It’s a cool device for reading books, but I found their UI horrendously cluttered and filled with “suggestions” instead of focusing on the content I already have. I have since jailbroken the device and am using koreader on the device to read my ebooks transfered as epubs via calibre.
That has the advantage that when I buy DRM-free books in epub format, I am not relying on amazon to properly convert the file to a kindle proprietary format.
Of course it’s the best there is, they have billions made on the backs of millions workers, they can and will invest so much money in a product until it eclipses everything else so they have a monopoly on a niche. After all the competitors are starved because no company that only makes ereaders will have a profit so thick to create a competing product, they can introduce things like proper DRM or whatever their heart desires.
Related, Article about how ama. used their unfairly gained wealth to copy successful products, rigged search results, to promote their own brands
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-india-rigging/
