5 ms·

Yeah calibre was a boon back in my Sony reader years. Plus Kovid (the project creator) is a really great and helpful guy. Dang it's been a while, good old times

Yeah calibre was a boon back in my Sony reader years. Plus Kovid (the project creator) is a really great and helpful guy. Dang it's been a while, good old times hanging around the MobileRead.com forums. The real shame is I've mostly become a dead tree book consumer, back from my enlightened epub ways. The status quo of ebooks is really bad, and as much as calibre helps, venturing out of the Kindle route was fairly high maintenance. I only hope we can take these freedoms back into the mainstream with all the 'own cloud' movements happening, that I may easily buy ebooks online straight into my cloud and serve them out to a smart ereader, to my phone, desktop browser, etc.

vidarh 13y ago
I don't know how hard it'd be to use Calibre for background/batch conversion, but Calibre + DRM plugins automatically pics up anything delivered to Kindle for PC now, which runs fine under Wine. So it should be reasonably simple to set up a script to run Kindle for PC under wine against a VNC server regularly, and run Calibre and trigger conversions now and again. I push my Kindle stuff straight to my Android devices without caring about DRM, but only because I semi-regularly dump any new books to my Kindle for PC install and make sure I get DRM free copies for backup purposes, but I currently do this manually. My "exposure" is never more than a handful of books. Otherwise I've bought a lot more than I otherwise would from O'Reilly because they're DRM free and happily sync my books directly to Dropbox etc. My "own cloud" I currently handle simply with rsync - storage capacity on my devices grow faster than the content I want to have on the go for the most part, other than video which I do need to manage a bit.
- VLM 13y ago
  "I've bought a lot more than I otherwise would from O'Reilly because they're DRM free and happily sync my books directly to Dropbox etc." Pragmatic does the same thing; there's a directory called "Pragmatic Bookshelf" on my dropbox and inside that they automatically make a directory for each title. Multiple editions, when published, magically appear in the same title directory and they send an email to let me know. Source for this information is looking at my phone's dropbox while I type this. Delivery of electronic goods via Dropbox seems to be turning into a standard.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    Good to know. I've actually spent more money on books with O'Reilly than Amazon over the last year thanks to the DRM bit, and I might as well spread some of that love to Pragmatic as well. This is despite for many years spending maybe 90% of my "book budget" at Amazon with paper books, but partly I don't want to reward them for DRM and secondly that extra little tiny hassle to get my de-DRM'd archival copy adds just that little extra disincentive... And despite having a ton of Android devices, Google Play has gotten exactly $0 for books, videos or music, since it's a massive confusion of rental and DRM and I just don't can't be bothered verifying what is DRM free, and to keep (e.g. for books, I don't know if there is a way to verify if they're DRM free before purchasing - I can't find anything after a quick look).

vidarh 13y ago

I don't know how hard it'd be to use Calibre for background/batch conversion, but Calibre + DRM plugins automatically pics up anything delivered to Kindle for PC now, which runs fine under Wine. So it should be reasonably simple to set up a script to run Kindle for PC under wine against a VNC server regularly, and run Calibre and trigger conversions now and again. I push my Kindle stuff straight to my Android devices without caring about DRM, but only because I semi-regularly dump any new books to my Kindle for PC install and make sure I get DRM free copies for backup purposes, but I currently do this manually. My "exposure" is never more than a handful of books. Otherwise I've bought a lot more than I otherwise would from O'Reilly because they're DRM free and happily sync my books directly to Dropbox etc. My "own cloud" I currently handle simply with rsync - storage capacity on my devices grow faster than the content I want to have on the go for the most part, other than video which I do need to manage a bit.

VLM 13y ago
"I've bought a lot more than I otherwise would from O'Reilly because they're DRM free and happily sync my books directly to Dropbox etc." Pragmatic does the same thing; there's a directory called "Pragmatic Bookshelf" on my dropbox and inside that they automatically make a directory for each title. Multiple editions, when published, magically appear in the same title directory and they send an email to let me know. Source for this information is looking at my phone's dropbox while I type this. Delivery of electronic goods via Dropbox seems to be turning into a standard.
- vidarh 13y ago
  Good to know. I've actually spent more money on books with O'Reilly than Amazon over the last year thanks to the DRM bit, and I might as well spread some of that love to Pragmatic as well. This is despite for many years spending maybe 90% of my "book budget" at Amazon with paper books, but partly I don't want to reward them for DRM and secondly that extra little tiny hassle to get my de-DRM'd archival copy adds just that little extra disincentive... And despite having a ton of Android devices, Google Play has gotten exactly $0 for books, videos or music, since it's a massive confusion of rental and DRM and I just don't can't be bothered verifying what is DRM free, and to keep (e.g. for books, I don't know if there is a way to verify if they're DRM free before purchasing - I can't find anything after a quick look).