But lets see the Positive side: Now the Nazis wont have to burn thousands of books, saving tons of co2 in their Plan to take over the world with propaganda. So, yay for the envoirment I guess
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If you’re into audiobooks, I strongly recommend libro.fm instead - it’s all DRM free downloads, so you never lose access.
Anything similar for ebooks?
Also downpour.com! I ditched Audible a long time back in favor of sites like these that don’t lock authors into crappy exclusives, provide DRM-free audiobooks for sale, and have actually decent deals with authors.
Thank you for this! I made an account and may get the membership!
At the very least back up your Audible library in a DRM free format with something like Libation.
I am still using Audible because their web player works in my restricted office, and the authors get a couple of pennies from dragon, but have my library safely exported to ensure continued access and prevent fuckery like this.
Do you have a friend code we could put in if we do sign up for libro.fm? I don’t mind getting people free stuff for recommending awesome products!
For sure, thanks! https://libro.fm/referral?rf_code=lfm723891
I decided to do the subscription today so you should see at least one referral coming your way. Thanks, again, for the suggestion!
Appreciate it! The last audiobook I picked up from Libro is Kara Swisher’s “Burn Book”. Not sure if it’s your thing, but was totally worth it for understanding more personal context around the big Tech CEOs from the last 25 years.
Always down for a good recommendation. I picked up Black Pill. To start.
It’s kinda odd that all these years later, you’re still better off pirating than paying for anything digital. All these services solved piracy but we’ve now gone full circle.
Piracy was, is and remains a service problem, as Gabe Newell of Valve (Steam) once stated. Most people are perfectly content to pay a reasonable price to get access to the things they want. But if you make that impossible, they’ll find other options.
Take anime for example: even if you subscribed to every streaming service out there, you still wouldn’t be able to see everything you wanted. Some things aren’t streamable or sold ANYWHERE, or only on a service that’s actively blocked in your region. Which means there is simply no legal way for you at all to get that content.
Music on the other hand solved that dilemma. You can use Spotify, YT Music, Apple Music or a host of other options. You pay a flat fee and you can listen to pretty much every song you want, as often as you want. Nobody’s pirating MP3’s these days, because nobody needs to. It’s now more convenient to just stream it.
I’d really like to see someone do the same for books. An unlimited digital library that lets you download anything you want for a flat subscription fee. I’d pay 10 bucks a month for that for sure. Because that would make it more convenient than pirating is right now, with a more consistent experience.
Music is definitely not a solved problem. About 30% of my favorite older tunes aren’t available on streaming at all, as I discovered when I tried to find a way to casually share with some friends.
Sure, no platform will have everything. But for me personally, on YouTube Music, I’ve always been able to find what I was looking for. But I’m admittedly not what you’d call a music aficionado.
Interestingly, I am now going through some album series that are not on Youtube, but are on Spotify. It is frustrating because I can’t use Spotify on my phone (browser is incompatible), but I can Youtube, so music discovery is desktop-only. Good thing all of them are on Soulseek, though.
Bruv real libraries will let you download books for free
Yes, a lot of them do. But their digital selection often is pretty limited and comes with restrictions.
For example: our Dutch national online library lets you ‘borrow’ 10 e-books at a time. You get 21 days to read a book, but you can extend that one time by another three weeks. After that, you have to ‘return’ and ‘check them out again’ if you want to continue reading. With my particular reading habits, that’s a hassle and wouldn’t work for me.
But the biggest issue is: they only offer a limited selection. Basically, NONE of the books I’m reading now are available through that system.
I want to be able to read every book I want, no time restriction. And that’s not possible with the current digital library system they offer.
WB/Discovery+ just screwed people in the UK for watching cycling. It was £7 a month to watch before, which I was happy to pay. They just put an end to that and now bundled the cycling with their premium sports service for £29. I’m not paying all that when I only want cycling and none of their other content.
I cancelled my subscription, asked them to delete my account, purchased a fire stick and now paying for some dodgy IPTV service to watch it there for a fraction of the price.
Most people are perfectly content to pay a reasonable price to get access to the things they want. But if you make that impossible, they’ll find other options.
That’s a sliding scale, though. Streaming comes at a fixed price.
ever heard of zlibrary?
I am aware of them, yes. It’s not the book download site that I use personally, but you can never have enough options.
which do you use?
I usually use Anna’s Archive or Lib Gen, depending on what’s actually up and working. Anna scrapes Zlib as well as other sources. Usually that’s where I can find the really obscure stuff.
Yes, about service problems and Steam - I understand why it happened, but sanctions on Russia causing my inability to not buy, but even find in store some games kinda affect it. One small nuance is that family members of those, well, making decisions in Russia are often in the western countries feeling themselves very well (including Steam games), and those who are not do not, I think, have problems dealing with this. And, btw, topping up your Steam wallet is possible, just via intermediaries with some additional expense.
OK, this is not about Steam, this is about sanctions efficiency.
EDIT: On the subject - I pirate MP3’s. I like having my music stored locally and not dependent on various services. I may start some day using some of those services, probably.
An unlimited digital library that lets you download anything you want for a flat subscription fee.
A library? We solved that centuries ago.
A hosting provider always has the ability to change what’s on their infrastructure. The Kindle store is no different.
As it happens, they’ve been doing this for years. For example, the price you set as an author is not fixed nor is how it turns up on the page or how and when it’s promoted.
The standard ebook format is essentially a zipped up series of text files.
Source: I sell my “Foundations of Amateur Radio” ebooks on the Kindle store
Its just a bitter taste, thinking about how a few companies can lay words into the mouth of people they did not even say, years after they died
I would rather just have them Ban the books, because then you can see how they are manipulating the information you see.
Hell, I’m surprised the publishers aren’t up in arms about it.
Amazon is changing copyrighted works.
Increasingly more often Amazon is the publisher.
Does Amazon have permission to change what’s in your book though?
Copyright prevents them from making derivative works and if they change your text without your permission, that’s a clear copyright violation.
I don’t know how licensing deals work with Amazon but I’m guessing if they are doing this en mass, there is probably some provision in their contract.
The bigger question is do they care. At worst they get a slap on the wrist by the US government. At best they get to control the narrative and have books like having history books on their platform talk about how the the Allies first striked Nazi Germany because they were lifting the country out of economic crisis and making the world a better place.
I doubt they’ll care or listen if EU says stop since they’ll just find a way around whatever they have planned to try and stop revisionist ideology from taking hold.
Source: I sell my “Foundations of Amateur Radio” ebooks on the Kindle store
And thank you for the reminder that I should go get a license before the entire system is so messed up that it wouldn’t be possible.
Well or it would be irrelevant because no one would care.
Either way!
I paid for (the license to view) the books already, so I’m getting epubs from z-library without the slightest bit of moral pain.
I could do the calibre decryption thing, but meh.
Same boat man. ‘OK I’ll throw a few schmeckles in because the author does need the compensation, but i’m getting the actual book elsewhere.’
If I ever embrace my fate as a lonely housewife book author, I’m going to have a rough time, because the kind of people who would forever love me for producing my books and sharing them as free (with the option to donate) and the kind of people who buy lonely housewife books are two completely different circles and I wouldn’t be able to spend all the time necessary to ‘market’ myself online to get the books in the hands of people who want them, if I’m trying to spend that time writing.
Maybe what we need is an apparatus. A website where authors can share full-size books, users can vote on them, and if you like them enough you can give money to those writers.
I just don’t know how we’d get that, be able to allow any author to share their book, and still have quality control.
So… z-library? https://z-lib.gs
I bought a kobo recently (for the color screen) and have had to keep going back to my kindle to read smutty romance. All their newest decisions made me cancel my KU sub, and this has saved me from what I thought would be a drought.
Happy to help :)
That’s why Richard Stallman calls kindle the swindle.
I haven’t looked at or held or otherwise directly perceived a kindle in many years now, but when I did it was insanely easy to just pop any old file into a converter and slip that onto the kindle and pirate and read as you like. Did they put a stop to that with some proprietary nonsense?
Mr Stallman needs to be considered from all sides before deciding whether you’ll follow his lead. He’s not without some toejam.
Not sure what that means. He’s not Jesus. There’s no need to worship him! We can take the good and criticize the bad.
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In Stallman’s particular case he even substantiated his view on pedophilia with very good arguments
No, he didn’t, because none exist. Don’t defend pedophiles.
I’ve seen your wrong opinion, but without arguments it’s useless.
It would be nice if that stuff worked more like git where yeah maybe the release version gets changed but you can always work back through the history to see earlier versions.
Not git specifically but just deltas from one version to the next instead of replacing the whole thing with a flattened text.
Yes, but you say it like the Author himself changed it.
In the specific Example, the book is from before 2000 and the author is long dead. That book is a piece of culture now, displaying the writing style from a place in time where it was normal to discriminate against people. By changing a book, regardless of if it was actually amazon or just some manager that bought up the rights for the book, it is manipulating the Past. Amazon should not allow to do such things
Oh I didn’t think I implied that at all. Certainly didn’t mean to. I was just commenting that making cultural artifacts that can be revised into delta-based distributions instead of flat is useful for many reasons. But it’s no benefit to the corps and most users don’t care so of course it won’t happen.
OK, tanks for clarifying that
Yes, it would be great.
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Like wiki articles.
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In some Star Wars book, of the period between PT and OT, there was a similar moment, but I don’t remember details. Context - it’s described as some slow transition, while the Republic of the Clone Wars had military censorship and many freedoms curbed, after the war supposedly ended and the Empire proclaimed, it legally and procedurally was mostly the same and the military limitations were in part lifted. So there were protests and attempts to use legal mechanisms, with such funny events.
There are other ways to buy books, I don’t understand why so many people have a boner for Amazon. It feels like Stockholm syndrome to me. I’ve never bought a single book from Amazon, not one.
The reality is that Amazon is the most convenient way to buy a lot of things, and as a result, people will put up with a lot of bullshit.
I genuinely try to buy things locally before I start looking online. It’s increasingly difficult even for common items. The big box stores are shifting to branded only retailers. Where I used to be able to go to any hardware store and find a similar spread of items available, Lowe’s, home Depot and Menards all offer their own lines of tools to varrying degrees. Menards is the worst about it, but they’re all doing it.
Less common items are being phased out in stores, going to online order only. Where in the past you’d have your choice of just about any brand of thing you could think of in any store in any major town, now you’re lucky to find certain things at all. And if I’m going to have to order it online anyway, Amazon has the best return policy.
Hobby or specialty items are easily marked up 300% locally. And you have to go to that specific store, which may require a fucking membership just to get an only marginally hyper inflated price. It’s fine if it’s one thing I need right now but I’m not going to pay for the privilege of shopping at a hobby shop. I’m at Costco every week and I’m salty about that membership. Jack Tanner’s Leather Emporium isn’t even getting my email address.
And frequently on Amazon it’s not just the same thing, it’s the exact same fucking product. Likely shipped to the hobby shop from Amazon. I get that these guys need to make a living, but bro, have a little respect for modern consumers. I’ll pay a premium, I’m not signing up for anything and I’m not paying triple the price.
And even if you are resolved to buy online, and you try to go to the branded website to buy the specialty thing, Amazon has it, they have free shipping, and they’ll get it to you tomorrow. But if you go to Rockler’s website they’re going to charge you 10-20 dollars to ship a single item, unless you spend more money, and it’ll take two to three weeks to get to you.
I’m sorry, Amazon fucking won. Even if I say I’m willing to eat the cost, pay the shipping, pay a premium, and I’m willing to wait for the stuff I order, I’ll even make an account at every shady ass website I want to order from and give all of them my payment information, regardless of how much I trust their security, because I know Amazon is a horrifically evil company, I’m a drop in the fucking bucket. So are you and anyone reading this.
It’s just too fucking convenient. Too many competitors are cutting off the tail to try to keep up. They’ve won
What you’ve written is true, but none of it applies to ebooks.
I do order from online stores quite a bit, but at least I minimize what data they have on me. For example, even before I started caring about privacy, I just happened to always receive the goods in the store’s physical office and pay in cash (the former - because delivery to your door cost extra, the latter - because I was and still am uncomfortable using a card, especially online). That actually excludes the biggest Amazon-like marketplaces (we don’t have Amazon itself, but have several similar ones), since they require prepaying for the order.
Recently I also started ordering without even interacting with the site - I just ask the cashier to order for me into this particular office, and decline when they ask for a phone number for the notification, saying I remember when to come and pick it up.
Except we are talking about ebooks and none of what you’ve said applies to them. Amazon did not win in the ebooks department, as there are many other better platforms out there that don’t fuck their people.
You’re thinking like a techy, put yourself in the layman’s shoes.
The Kindle was a pretty big deal as the first widespread e-reader. My tech-challenged mom got one and she loves how easy it is to get a book and have it there.
Given that this change won’t really affect her, she probably doesn’t care. There’s a lot more people like my mom than you or I.
And your mother isn’t complaining about it, which is not the audience I’m talking to. My whole issue is with those who choose amazon then complain about their practices. Especially in ebooks, there is actually no excuse for anyone to use amazon anymore. I understand some people have already bought many books from them and don’t want to lose their books, but at least protest them not buying more books from them.
I’m constantly on the lookout for European alternatives. Are there any EU alternatives to Amazon?
Last time I looked (granted this was 7 or so years ago), it was pretty hard to find much, especially in English. Though German was worse, there were a few on-line retailers but because of (I’m guessing) copyright, they wouldn’t sell outside of Germany.
I’d love to find a good alternative to Amazon…
Isn’t Kobo made by rakuten? And Rakuten mainly operates in Germany? Also, hell get an e-reader with android on it and you can run all kinds of books on it without limiting yourself to just one company. There is even a Linux e-reader called pine note that you can buy.
You can even buy books directly from publishers. Recently I wanted a hardback copy of a book and it was out of stock, backordered, or absurdly high priced on all the big popular online places. Ended up ordering it for MSRP from Penguin Random House direct.
Dude, literally. Lmao. I once had an author himself give me a link to his book to buy it. The freaking other himself. For our older parents and non-techy people, I understand using and sticking to amazon, they most likely won’t even notice any of Amazon’s bad practices, but young folks who are techy? Come on, you know better.
Kindle just works
I can read a book in a series, finish it, buy the next one and it’s ready to read before I’ve gotten a new cup of tea.
Lol. This is the exact same on…checks notes… every single other platform I know of. I have a kobo sage and it’s the same, except that kobo runs on Linux and they don’t lock their system. You can literally “jailbreak” it and still get updates from them. They also don’t lock their books with encryption like on kindle so they lock you in. IMHO, there is 0 reasons to buy a kindle now, period.
I’ve tried the Kobo store (sold my Kindle and got a Libra 2 Color), but the selection is a bit lacking.
Some books just don’t exist there, which means I can’t just click and buy the next one from the Kobo UI.
I have a kobo sage and it’s the same, except that kobo runs on Linux and they don’t lock their system.
It runs on Android which runs on a Linux kernel. And Android is a tad bit too heavy for the kind of hardware the vendors tend to give e-readers, if you do anything outside the book-management-and-reader app. It’s more open than Kindle, sure (i could even flash Lineagos on my Leaf, since the stock ROM had weird translation and apps), but if you just want an e-reader and maybe Nextcloud sync, i’d recommend PocketBook over everything else.
Edit: well, AOSP based custom ROM, not Android.
I’ve searched everywhere and nowhere does anyone mention that kobo runs android. It runs an actual Linux based OS, not android. I know android uses the Linux kernel but that is not the same as an actual Linux OS. It doesn’t matter anyway, their shit is wide open and you can do whatever the hell you want to you kobo
Ok, “Android” is a certificate and requires, among others, Google Play Services and Store. Kobo doesn’t have that, so my that’s the issue. But it’s a AOSP-based vendor ROM, same as Kindle’s, so my point with performance still stands and battery is bad too. At least compared to PocketBook’s, which run plain Linux and last a month.
That’s not unlike the experience on my Kobo Elipsa 2e.
How is that Elipsa e2? I wanted to get it, but I discovered that it had a low PPI 227 and held off. I have eagle eyes and I hate seeing pixels. lol… so I got the sage fantastic device, but I want the 10" screen so badly.
I have not been at all dissatisfied with its clarity. I bet on a LCD or OLED screen the DPI would be noticeable, but not on an e-ink display.
I just buy physicals of the reference books I really want and pirate the digitals of anything else that isn’t sold DRM-free. I WILL own what I bought, whether they like it or not.
I wish I could do the same. I prefer paper books, we have a massive library and mostly read in our language on paper (except uni textbooks, I wouldn’t want to buy them and the library doesn’t have enough). However, that stopped being feasible when most of my non-fiction reading switched to English. Since English books are mostly not sold locally, I would have gone bankrupt on delivery costs alone. So thanks Libgen for my education.
13+ years ago when I’d say why I hate social media, cloud services, all this convenient dependence, everybody would act as if this was stupid.
My logic was that if there’s a mechanism allowing such influence, no matter how small, its power will grow almost until the death of such an ecosystem. Because the returns of abusing it will always be more than the expenses.
I don’t like this Cassandra feeling really.
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Yeah, see, I even have a mental condition which should supposedly make that my problem more than that of most people.
1984 right here.
I’ve heard a jailbreak was recently released for all kindle models: https://kindlemodding.org/jailbreaking/WinterBreak/
I’ll be trying it out soon!
Is there a text version of this?
Yes, I prefer to read over watching a video and being forced to go at someone else’s pace.
I truly hate this age of video where everything is either in incredibly long form with unnecessary cruft that can be pared down to a page or so of real information, or the video is so pointlessly short it’s devoid of real value and context. Sadly people just don’t want to read anymore
The changing the Books part hasn’t been archived in the Catf wiki yet, but the non downloadable books is already fully written
I’ve got an old Kindle, but not too old, which I jailbroke just yesterday with Winter break. I recommend that method for those considering getting drm free usage out of their device (instead of it contributing to ewaste).
Why not too old? I bought 4 gen 4 & 5 kindles off ebay for like $20 on purpose. I hate backlights and they still work great.
Been using 10th gen kindle, 5.17.1 firmware, as my daily driver. It’s not jailbroken, use calibre server to download my alternately sourced ebooks, convert to .mobi as needed.
I looked at Winterbreak. Decided not to fool with it as I can still sail with stock.
Any advantage to a jailbreak other than future proofing against side loading being disabled?
They got caught doing this over a decade ago as well.
