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Kindle E-Readers cannot be turned off anymore
- ashton314 6y agoUgh, I hate this kind of stuff. At the same time, I’m a poor college student who finds the fact that the Kindle edition of books is often half the price of a physical copy, and everything is available through Amazon. Can anyone recommend a good ereader/publisher stack? I’ve considered trying to find ePub versions and then converting them to work on my Kindle—is that possible? Help free me from this prison!
- Hitton 6y agoConverting from epub to mobi or azw3 which are consumed by Kindle is easy. Calibre can do it and it can be even run from commandline. Problem with Kindle/Amazon is the "Kindle Unlimited" program which although profitable for authors, is bad for people who want to avoid Amazon's clutches, because it doesn't allow authors to sell ebooks elsewhere.
- falcolas 6y agoFunny story about formats, apparently Amazon recently changed their policy about what ebook formats they accept: mobi (a native format for Kindle) is no longer one of them. Source: A writer I follow had a book submission declined until they reformatted it from .mobi to .epub, and they discussed it on Facebook.
- brewdad 6y agoSeriously? Epub isn't even supported by Amazon devices, at least not my 2 year old e-ink Kindle. Is this a play to ensure their DRM gets put into as many ebooks as possible when Amazon converts the epub to a native format?
- falcolas 6y agoHonestly? I have no idea why they might do this. It's not supported on my Oasis either. The best I can come up with is pretty conspiracy-theory-ish: They're moving towards removing the ability for you to load open formats onto the Kindle directly (i.e. without going through their mail system or kindle-store purchases).
- salamandersauce 6y agoNo. Publishers can disable DRM if they want on Kindle. The reason they stopped accepting Mobi is because it's an ancient format that lacks a lot of features over ePub and Amazon's newer formats. It's like Apple not accepting 64kbps MP3s for iTunes. There's just no benefit, you can always make a just as 64kbps MP3 for your ancient device if you need it but you can't really go the other way around. Same with Mobi and ePub/Amazon's newer formats.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mdoms 6y agoI bought a Kobo and haven't failed to find a book in their store yet.
- captn3m0 6y ago>I’ve considered trying to find ePub versions and then converting them to work on my Kindle—is that possible? Calibre does this perfectly. Alternatively, if you have a jailbroken Kindle - KOReader lets you directly read EPUBs.
- salamandersauce 6y agoI wouldn't say perfectly. Amazon's own tools do a far better job than Calibre for ePub to AZW which shouldn't be too surprising because that's how they're typically made. Calibre is handy thanks to plugins but I have found it lackluster for anything more advanced than a basic Latin script novel for conversion. Stuff like Japanese where it needs to do R2L it just completely falls on it's face. Comic books don't work well either.
- AdmiralAsshat 6y ago> Comic books don't work well either. Are you trying to preserve Amazon/Comixology's "smart panel" navigation, or just get the images to display? For the smart panel nav, I can't help you, but if you all you care about is the images, I've made plenty of my own CBR/CBZs from Amazon AZWs by just pulling out the Images directory, zipping the directory, and renaming the .zip to .CBZ.
- salamandersauce 6y agoJust images. I don't care about smart panel stuff. It's easy to go AZW/ePub to CBZ/CBR but Kindles don't natively support that or at least they didn't last time I had one. Going ePub to AZW is more complicated as there is some stuff to specify that images should display full screen with no margin, whether the book is RTL or LTR, table of contents, etc.
- captn3m0 6y agoAmazon's own tool (kindlegen) isn't really supported. It hasn't been updated in years, it isn't available on the Amazon website any more even [0]. Their new offering (Kindle Previewer[1]) doesn't support Linux, so I haven't tried it out. [0]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000765211 https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000765211 [1]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000765261 https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000765...
- waterheater 6y agoI recommend the Remarkable 2. In addition to serving as an e-reader, it is an excellent notebook replacement. As a cool note about the Remarkable 2..."under that Eink screen sits a dual core 1.2GHz ARM CPU, with 1GB of RAM, running Linux... and... you can SSH into it by default!!!" [1]. [1] https://github.com/danielebruneo/remarkable2-hacks https://github.com/danielebruneo/remarkable2-hacks
- katabasis 6y agoI have a Remarkable 2 (and love it), but one downside is that it only takes DRM-free books for it's e-reader. I wish the company would partner with some publishers so that I could buy books to read on the device. At least we have Standard Ebooks[1] in the meantime! [1] https://standardebooks.org/ https://standardebooks.org/
- waterheater 6y agoPerhaps KOReader will solve your issue: https://github.com/koreader/koreader https://github.com/koreader/koreader
- waterheater 6y agoAlso, a while ago, I built a script to download all epub files from StandardEbooks. Adapt to your pleasure. https://pastebin.com/4hQm1Nzh https://pastebin.com/4hQm1Nzh
- robin_reala 6y agoIdeally you’d pull down SE books as you read them; mostly because we maintain the books regularly and you’ll be missing out on those improvements when you finally get around to reading the later 90% of the corpus.
- captn3m0 6y agoThis was my one-liner adapted from some HN comment iirc: curl -s https://standardebooks.org/opds/all | grep -oE "/(.*).epub" | cut -d '"' -f1 | grep -v "kepub" | sed '/^$/d' | sed -e"s/^/https:\/\/standardebooks.org/"|wget --no-clobber -i - I have it set as a @weekly cronjob, works well.
- andrepd 6y agoAs for eReaders, I recommend Kobo. Top hardware and the software is also easily hackable. You can manage your library with Calibre and it will read most everything you throw at it.
- bathtub365 6y agoI have OverDrive set up on my Kobo so I can check out books from my local library and read them on the device. It works great.
- salamandersauce 6y agoCheck out Boox. They make eInk Android tablets so you can just use the Kindle, Kobo, Google Play, Libby, etc. apps on it with no problems. No need to convert everything, crack DRM etc. Even those crummy textbook publisher apps work too. They are a bit pricy but they do a lot more than a Kindle and most models these days come with a Wacom pen for note taking and markup. I buy a lot of ebooks between multiple stores so having all on one device without loads of hoops is great. I ended up getting 2, a smaller one for reading books and a bigger one for marking up PDFs. Love em.
- Y_Y 6y agoLibrary Genesis will free you from that prison. It has most books and papers I've ever needed and it's less immoral than Amazon. http://libgen.gs/ http://libgen.gs/
- bathtub365 6y agoHow is this not just pirating books? This seems to be much more immoral than Amazon, and also illegal in many places.
- solarkraft 6y agoIt is pirating books.
- georgeecollins 6y agoI like my kindle, but I have noticed that my newer one has less battery life. I am not saying it got old and had less battery life, I mean new it didn't have the longevity of the old one. I leave it sitting-- I thought off-- sometimes for a few days. The power goes down. Now I know why. I love ereaders, and I have always loved using a kindle. But I realize now (too late I guess) I should have been supporting an open standard rather than becoming part of another roach motel eco-system.
- mmoskal 6y agoYou can try turning off WiFi if you don't need it. I found that to greatly improve battery life.
- yosito 6y agoI recently ditched my kindle for an Onyx Boox Note Air. No regrets.
- simion314 6y agoYou want to turn off your device? What is next ? you want to read content that we do not approve( think at the children and your grandma)? Seriously, this makes me think that soon you will not be allowed to really turn off your phone and other smart devices, then you will really have no choice then put them in your fridge when you waZnt to have a true private conversation/action.
- npongratz 6y agoMicrowave might be a good choice as well, depending on your opsec requirements -- it's a Faraday cage by design.
- falcolas 6y agoAmazon is already censoring books and manga they don't approve of on the kindle. For example, you can not buy Mushoku Tensei Vol 6 on Amazon for Kindle, even though it's still available on other platforms (and on Amazon in print form). The reason? Drawn topless children in a slave pen.
- simion314 6y agoBig companies are hypocrites, similar disgusting things they do is signaling how political correct and LGBT friendly they are and at the same time they are BFF with Saudi Arabia.
- cforrester 6y agoI don't blame them for refusing to sell child pornography regardless of the legality or the format. Media meant to trigger the pathologies of the mentally ill, such as content encouraging paedophiles to continue sexualizing children, isn't something that anyone has a duty to sell or distribute.
- falcolas 6y agoSo, a point of clarification (not sure why I didn't put it in the original, I knew it would come up): This is not sexualizing minors. Or rather, it's as sexualizing of minors as war photographer's photos of nude children on the sidelines of combat. So, while someone with the right fetishes might find it titalating, your average citizen would not find it so. Plus, it's a drawing. I realize this doesn't matter in some countries, but it's just a drawing. Even had it had been a sexual image (again, it's not), it's not victimizing anybody.
- Arrath 6y agoJoke's on them, my kindle turns itself off when it decides to precipitously drain the battery in a matter of minutes for no apparent reason. Usually when I'm boarding a long flight. Cheeky fucker.
- Google234 6y agoAn alternative explanation is that the battery has reached its end of life
- Arrath 6y agoGiven that it is a, I think, gen2 paperwhite, you are almost certainly correct in your assessment of my humorous comment. However, I don't like to generate waste so as long as it still, generally, holds its charge for weeks I'll continue to use it.
- SavantIdiot 6y agoNot following. According to TFA, it does turn off automatically, but the screen is E-Ink which uses zero power after programming. The user doesn't understand this. Why the freakout, what am I missing? (Disclaimer: I have a 2013 Kindle and I still get about a month out of each full charge.) EDIT: If you really want a freakout, how about the fact that Amazon is no longer loaning their publishing catalog to libraries. That makes owning a kindle a difficult choice. https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/10/22323434/amazon-publishing-library-lending-access-refuse-overdrive-libby https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/10/22323434/amazon-publishin...
- falcolas 6y agoKindles have background processes which do drain the battery badly. To support their search feature, they will index all of your books that are downloaded onto the kindle. They will also regularly poll the network to download new books you've purchased. And then there's bluetooth (on the Kindle Oasis). I've had an "off" kindle drain itself dry in a day from these.
- mdoms 6y ago> I've had an "off" kindle drain itself dry in a day from these. I don't believe you.
- falcolas 6y agoThat's your right, but it's a pretty useless comment. New kindle oasis, downloaded as much of my library as I could. Once downloaded, I pulled it off power (not realizing there was an indexing process). Battery goes dry, internet searches reveal the indexing process occurs with a download. Even now the Oasis can't stand up to a long-ish book's worth of reading if the network's on.
- SavantIdiot 6y ago> I've had an "off" kindle drain itself dry in a day from these. I find that hard to believe. I've left my in non-airplane mode and maybe after a week it drops 40%. Since I always leave it in Airplane Mode I'm probably seeing different behavior than OP. Plus it is an older kindle, not a fancy new one. But still: screw active Wi-Fi.
- bondarchuk 6y agoI was thinking we could do the opposite with e-readers, since they have a persistent display: it's always off, it only momentarily turns on to flip the page when you press a button.
- hazeii 6y agoMax Headroom, 1987 [0]:- Edison Carter checks out the cops busting into some girl's apartment. He and his colleague want to know the score, and the cop pulls back a cushion showing how she's hotwired her TV:- Janie Crane: "An off switch?" (looks shocked) Metrocop: "She'll get years for that. Off switches are illegal!" [0] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_(TV_series) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_(TV_series)
- throwaway81523 6y agoDo Kindles have microphones? Edit: lol, yes. This is from 2010: https://www.wired.com/2010/08/why-does-the-new-kindle-have-a-microphone/ https://www.wired.com/2010/08/why-does-the-new-kindle-have-a...
- ncmncm 6y agoObligatory Douglas Adams reference: "Mode Execute Ready"[0] If it ever really turns off, you can't turn it back on, because what is watching the button? To really turn off, it needs a switch. Which is to say, your phone also will not turn off; also, except by the battery dying. [0] "Ford flipped the switch which he saw was now marked "Mode Execute Ready" instead of the now old-fashioned "Access Standby" which had so long ago replaced the appallingly stone-aged "Off"." Adams dated his work implicitly by the word switch. "You must mean a physically bistable combined control/indicator." Red or green paint that gets covered or uncovered by moving it was once the pinnacle of industrial design chic, challenged only by designs that made it impossible to know which way was on.
- dTal 6y agoA button is a spring loaded normally-open switch. It seems to me to be perfectly possible to implement "fully powered off" in any device with physical buttons; once you've made the initial connection, you can trip a MOSFET to keep the juice flowing.
- beervirus 6y agohttps://old.reddit.com/r/kindle/comments/kt6qcu/can_you_completely_turn_off_the_kindle_oasis/ https://old.reddit.com/r/kindle/comments/kt6qcu/can_you_comp... Fixed link.
- underseacables 6y agoNot cool. I don’t trust Amazon enough not to use that always-on for nefarious purposes.