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I live in a country where the selection of available books, especially in English, is very limited. Buying online from foreign markets comes with a long list of
by ahmedfromtunis 3mo ago
I live in a country where the selection of available books, especially in English, is very limited. Buying online from foreign markets comes with a long list of administrative hurdles and limits.
If it were not for Anna's Archive and Z-Library, I would've never been able to read the books that shaped who I am today, or keep my passion for learning alive.
Thanks, AA and ZLib! (Also, thank you to the authors whose books and knowledge I consumed without being able to pay them back.)
- jvm___ 3mo agohttps://send.djazz.se/ https://send.djazz.se/ This is key for getting epubs to your Kobo.
- christofosho 3mo agoCalibre? https://calibre-ebook.com/ https://calibre-ebook.com/
- ahmedfromtunis 3mo agoThanks, but I don't use e-readers as they are not available here. I've been using MoonReader for many years now and settled on pretty good parameters that make the reading experience very comfortable on both my phone and my tablet.
- subscribed 3mo agoMoon reader is amazing. I love mine so much I don't see a point of having a separate book reader.
- pull_my_finger 3mo agoI don't understand what this is doing. Can't you sideload any ebook onto a kobo anyway? Never had an issue on my Clara
- TFNA 3mo agoI’ve noticed that people today often bristle at any suggestion that one connect a device to a phone or computer with a cable – on Reddit, one will often get downvoted for this. Apparently, a lot of younger people are hardly aware this is possible and it strikes them as overly complicated or for old people. People want to wirelessly transfer stuff, and what the OP linked to is a popular way to do that with Kobo.
- esrauch 3mo agoI'm old enough to have used computers before having any Internet, and in 2026 the idea of plugging in devices to transfer files to it does feel like a fiddly relic of the past to me.
- sureglymop 3mo agoYes. You can literally ssh into a kobo. I usually just put my books on a WebDAV share that is mounted on the kobo.
- jvm___ 3mo agoSideload without cables is challenging. I download epubs from zlib but then they're on my phone and transferring them to my Kobo is arduous. This makes it easy.
- andrepd 3mo agoHandy, but a book lover with an ereader probably already uses Calibre :)
- Brian_K_White 3mo agoI don't recall ever needing anything special on my Aura H2O. It's one of the reasons I chose Kobo in the first place. Just copy any file onto it. If you mean stripping drm I used Calibre for that but mostly I just avoid buying books with drm where possible.
- Salgat 3mo agoThis is a genius way to farm ebooks while providing a useful service. I personally just use Google drive though.
- Almondsetat 3mo agoOr... just a USB cable?
- elrostelperien 3mo agoI agree that a USB cable is the most practical option. However, the aforementioned site is useful in a specific scenario: if your Kobo is very old, macOS won't recognize it.
- drnick1 3mo agoIf other operating systems interact with the Kobo well, the problem clearly lies with MacOS.
- jvm___ 3mo agoI the zlib app on my phone. No clean way from my phone to on my Kobo.
- Almondsetat 3mo agoAgain, a USB cable
- jvm___ 3mo agoDo you own a USB c to micro-USB to get the file off my phone?
- Almondsetat 3mo agoThe are $5 or less on amazon.
- jvm___ 3mo agoOr a book goes from zlib to my Kobo and I don't leave the toilet.
- Cider9986 3mo agoOn my Kindle I use KOReader Zlibrary plugin which allows you to download books from within the reader. It's more convenient then any send-to-kindle workflow. https://github.com/ZlibraryKO/zlibrary.koplugin https://github.com/ZlibraryKO/zlibrary.koplugin
- pipes 3mo agoLook, fair enough from your perspective. But a lot of those books probably wouldn't exist if the author couldn't make some money from their work. I can't find the post but years ago on Reddit an author posted stats showing when her book turned up pirates online, real sales for it collapsed. Because of this I make a point of buying books, programming books especially. Yes I download pdfs, I use them as previews. This has led to buying way more than I would have. Anyway, I appreciate this doesn't apply if you live somewhere that these books can't be purchased. But everyone praising these sorts of sites tends to look at them from only a positive perspective.
- bawolff 3mo ago> But a lot of those books probably wouldn't exist if the author couldn't make some money from their work. I think that's at least a bit debatable. People thought that about (normal) libraries back in the day, but it ended up having the opposite effect. Not to mention out of print books or academic books which is a big usage of sites like these, since lots of people prefer physical books and only reach for pdfs as a last resort.
- brookst 3mo agoCan you imagine if we didn’t have libraries and someone tried to create them today? From publishers to right wingers, they would be painted as communist plots to destroy creativity.
- toomuchtodo 3mo agoThe Internet Archive tried, at great cost and peril, to defend its ability to lend books as an online library due to format shift (physical books get first sale doctrine, ebooks are licensed, you cannot own them), and were told no by the system, so “pirating” it is until copyright changes and becomes more reasonable. Disk is cheap, and the Internet global. Global distributed storage system durability and availability is the path to success until laws change imho. (Archiving culture alone is not the same as also enabling universal access to the culture and knowledge one is acting as custodian for and serving to global citizens) The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41447758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41447758 - September 2024 (793 comments) https://archive.org/details/brewsterkahlelongnowfoundation https://archive.org/details/brewsterkahlelongnowfoundation Totally unrelated: Dweb camp 2026 is coming up for those interested: https://dwebcamp.org/ https://dwebcamp.org/ (no affiliation with any person or entity mentioned in this comment)
- whycome 3mo agoSo you’re saying your entire current life is because of the proceeds of crime?! I’m kidding. Knowledge should be free. It was never created in a vacuum. It belongs to us all
- zerobees 3mo ago> Knowledge should be free. It was never created in a vacuum. This is a common perspective on HN, but it's so jarring. Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks. Someone pirates books and it's fine - really, the authors should be thanking us. Good books are incredibly challenging to write, more so than good software. It's not like you grab Harry Potter and say "I'm just gonna change character names and rephrase some of the text". Most authors recognize that not everyone can afford books and then contend that some amount of sharing is healthy, no different from borrowing books from a local library. If you ask nicely, they will probably send you a PDF for free. But the scale of online book piracy is absolutely staggering and demoralizing, and most of it has nothing to do with taking any serious moral stance. It's just "lol, why pay when you can download for free".
- nzeid 3mo agoTaken out of context, you're right. But the parent comment couldn't buy these books even if they wanted to. I'd say there's a consensus that the primary motivation for piracy is hurdles to access having nothing to do with payment.
- bigiain 3mo agoI think iTunes Store and Netflix both showed 15 or so years back that if you give people and easy and convenient way to pay a reasonable price for music/movies - a huge number of people will willingly choose to pay and support the artists/creators, instead of hanging out on Bittorrent trackers and paying for seedboxes and sharing with friends. And the siloing of movies by Netflix nd all the other streaming services, and the introduction of advertising into the "reasonable price" tiers, shows that people can and do remember piracy in still an option, for when corporations and copyright holding groups enshittify things. Lately amongst a lot of my friends I've seen more usb stick with movies being shared that even in the heyday of Bittorrent.
- Dusseldorf 3mo agoI'm glad your username specifies your location. My biggest pet peeve online these days is someone telling a story about "my country" but never specifying which country that is.
- tren 3mo agoWe sell ebooks in every country, including Tunisia - https://www.ebooks.com/en-tn/ https://www.ebooks.com/en-tn/. I understand that the price of books is sometimes prohibitive, but it's largely outside our control.
- brightbeige 3mo ago[dead]
- ahmedfromtunis 3mo agoThe issue is not the amount; it's the currency. Ours is not convertible. To put it into perspective: even *free* services can be completely inaccessible here if they require payment info for verification purposes. Acquiring hard currency to spend online is truly a bureaucratic nightmare, and even if you manage it, the annual limit is strictly capped (at around $300).
- wwind123 3mo agoI can feel for both camps. Some of my published work is pirated heavily. That's not my main income source, so I just shrug and let it go. If anything, I'm probably happy that people are reading my work. Especially if it's people that can't afford it, I'm glad they enjoy my work -- those books got pretty high reader ratings, and it seems to me many readers are actually reading the pirated version. But I do have friends that depend on this income source, and fighting piracy has become a part of their day job. It's not a fun thing to do, they'd rather spend time working on their next story, but they still have to do this everyday. I feel for them.
- spwa4 3mo agoThat's almost every country these days. At least in the EU. Amazon doesn't carry nearly the selection you'd want, and certainly not in the non-fiction department.