3 ms·

What are you looking to do that you can't with your PocketBook? Regardless of hardware, the options are to play ball with lock-in and DRM schemes, to buy only

What are you looking to do that you can't with your PocketBook? Regardless of hardware, the options are to play ball with lock-in and DRM schemes, to buy only DRM-free books, or to buy books wherever and strip the DRM. I buy books from ebooks.com and then use Calibre and DeDRM to turn them into vanilla ePubs. Once you've got an ePub, just about any reader will work with it (barring older Kindles).

jruohonen 3y ago
Good advice, thanks! My requirements are pretty much similar, I reckon. In other words, I only read books (i.e., all network connections always turned off, etc.) and supply the current reader mostly with EPUBs. As for hardware and such, my PocketBook is a little slow but I still fancy its matte display. That is, I don't want another standard "computer".
kemayo 3y ago
Even new Kindles are still a bit of a pain when dealing with ePubs, unfortunately. You can't just copy them onto the device, because the Kindle itself doesn't support ePub. What Amazon did is change its Send To Kindle email/app services to support ePubs, so when you use them it handles all the converting for you. If you want to put an ePub on your Kindle without going through Amazon's services, you still need to do the manual conversion dance with Calibre or similar.
- jzb 3y ago
  Is there any reason (e.g., patents) for Amazon not to natively support ePubs or do they just want to make sure there's that extra bit of friction in using anything not from their store? (While claiming "support" for ePubs -- just with extra steps.)
  - SSLy 3y ago
    The latter, ePubs are dumb HTML+CSS+fonts containted in a zip.
  - __mharrison__ 3y ago
    The general mechanism for making Kindle books in the past (on the Amazon KDP website) was to run a tool (kindlegen) that would convert EPUBs to Kindle files. Amazon could have native support for EPUB from day 1 if they wanted to.
  - kemayo 3y ago
    Based on the rate of changes to the software for Kindles, I have to assume that their Kindle dev team is one or two people working on it in their spare time, so maybe it's lumped under the heading of "legacy format issues, we'll get to it someday". (Cynically: yes, it's probably the anti-competitive friction reason.)

jruohonen 3y ago

Good advice, thanks! My requirements are pretty much similar, I reckon. In other words, I only read books (i.e., all network connections always turned off, etc.) and supply the current reader mostly with EPUBs. As for hardware and such, my PocketBook is a little slow but I still fancy its matte display. That is, I don't want another standard "computer".

kemayo 3y ago

Even new Kindles are still a bit of a pain when dealing with ePubs, unfortunately. You can't just copy them onto the device, because the Kindle itself doesn't support ePub. What Amazon did is change its Send To Kindle email/app services to support ePubs, so when you use them it handles all the converting for you. If you want to put an ePub on your Kindle without going through Amazon's services, you still need to do the manual conversion dance with Calibre or similar.

jzb 3y ago
Is there any reason (e.g., patents) for Amazon not to natively support ePubs or do they just want to make sure there's that extra bit of friction in using anything not from their store? (While claiming "support" for ePubs -- just with extra steps.)
- SSLy 3y ago
  The latter, ePubs are dumb HTML+CSS+fonts containted in a zip.
- __mharrison__ 3y ago
  The general mechanism for making Kindle books in the past (on the Amazon KDP website) was to run a tool (kindlegen) that would convert EPUBs to Kindle files. Amazon could have native support for EPUB from day 1 if they wanted to.
- kemayo 3y ago
  Based on the rate of changes to the software for Kindles, I have to assume that their Kindle dev team is one or two people working on it in their spare time, so maybe it's lumped under the heading of "legacy format issues, we'll get to it someday". (Cynically: yes, it's probably the anti-competitive friction reason.)