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Posted3 months ago
Key Takeaways
I stopped buying ebooks from Amazon some time ago and switched completely to Kobo (and their much-more-easily-defeated DRM), but Amazon's acquisition of Comixology means they've still got by far the best collection of digital comics on the market.
I have about half of them already ripped, from an earlier time when the Kindle4PC application was easier to crack. But I still grab new comics from time to time.
Most local ebook stores will put undue barriers on who can purchase what because of generic region policies and/or their publishing contracts being country limited. Amazon will accept any valid credit card from anywhere as long as you create an account on the dedicated store. It's digital goods so you can also fill in any random address if needed.
No, piracy is.
Or to the author: what happens to images in the ebook?
I've had some slightly blurry on 2.8x1.9k screens, especially the older ones.
Pirating books is not hard. They're probably the smallest possible thing that people are interested in copying with the broadest variation in acceptable formats.
I know I'm screaming into the void, but if I'm paying real money why is the experience from piracy sites better?
I've never experienced issues with them that break the reading experience. The one issue I occasionally run into is that the book progress doesn't sync when I open the app and I have to click "sync now" which sometimes is blazingly fast and sometimes takes like a minute.
I can't imagine migrating away from Kindle now, it's probably one of my favourite devices and the Kindle is my favourite way to read.
But the main problem is that they don't sync the "last read" bookmarks until you open a book. But since that book didn't have a bookmark, it's reset to the beginning and then synced, so my "last read" bookmark is now at the beginning.
I'm either old and stubborn or principled, but I want to use my current phone and "system" I've been using to read ebooks for the last 15 years.
(It's possible that kindle unlimited is a cheap enough system to make dealing with amazon software, but amazon is annoying enough that so far nothing has convinced me to buy into it)
All seamlessly, because Kindle used the cellular network for reading progress. Really a magical experience.
Then they removed cellular and _buttons_ from the devices. And now their app is actively crashing on my Kindle when I try to use it to buy a book.
That's all changed now. I'd love to know why it's changed. My first thought was publisher pressure. But Kobo hasn't implemented harsh measures. Just Amazon has.
At any rate, I'm now using Kobo for my reading. Easy to break DRM. And they don't assume the same level of control over Kobo ereaders the way Amazon does with Kindle. I have over a thousand ebooks. I'm able to tag books in Calibre, and those tags automatically show up as Collections on the Kobo. It's a simple thing, but Amazon never gave me such flexibility. Makes a huge difference for me.
It's also possible to alter Kobo's UI/UX with various plugins without the need to jailbreak. Kobo (the company) is perfectly happy to let you do whatever you want with your own device. That's such a breath of fresh air compared to how Kindle is locked down.
It’s why archive.is is so much better to read on than a news site.
Might as well ask “when I engage with GPL projects it’s so much worse of an experience than if I just bundle the code and distribute it without a license, why?” It’s often cheaper to not comply than to comply.
But my kindle has definitely been “good enough” for me with Libby.
I use it too, but people work hard writing articles. How will they earn money if no one pays them?
Amazon theoretically makes money with which they pay people to make the user experience good.
Pirates have... a few nerds with some spare time?
But fortunately, with AI content starting to become better we will be able to transform regular people into IP maximalists arguing that copyright protection schemes should be embedded even more than they are today.
When I tried, the only options from Amazon were 'transfer to my device' and that only works if you have a Kindle. There was 0 way to just download the stupid file and let me copy it myself.
There is a library built into the kobo you can purchase from, which I do for newer books. However, I've been on a classics kick and I pirate them tbh. Dumas doesn't mind.
That's good to know, thanks!
I wish more people would understand that we empower those companies by using their products and services. Avoid when you can and they lose their power.
That would provide a closer-to-original version of the ebook, rather than just a visually similar one.
That any of this is necessary at all is absurd. Hats off to anyone with the patience to bypass Amazon's DRM rather than giving up on the Amazon ebook ecosystem entirely.
The only viable option would be to buy the book and then pirate a de-DRM'd copy.
Dont pay for your own hope that you can pick the lock of your own paid for jail cell.
In the old days, we used to cart boxes of books down to the used book store in exchange for credit, and then load back up with more reading to bring home.
I don't have anywhere close to enough bookshelf space for the number of books I've read over the years.
I moved my book boxes many times before I gave up on most of them. Now I don't even have space to put them all out. 88 square meters for a family of four with toys etc. doesn't go very far.
You don't keep proof, though, and probably isn't allowed to keep a backup after you give the book away. But most countries laws don't care about any of this (and it's not a backup).
Whereas of everyone buys new, keeps the book, and pirates, the author isn't going to see much negative impact.
Hanging on to the "proof" is important. Otherwise all you really prove is that you paid money to touch a physical copy.
https://apps.apple.com/app/id1668658774 can be used to verify if they require a physical copy.
(usps bound printed matter is usually least expensive when shipping books)
Or, you might find the author online and see if they have some sort of donation mechanism set up. It's very common these days for a lot of professionals, but some authors are old school.
https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/
When I upload the PDF on Amazon, a minimal price is automatically calculated. In the case of the DOOM, Amazon sets the minimal price at $51.35.
There is a slider which authors can use in order to add their "share" on top of Amazon price. I have added $3.88 which Amazon also takes a cut on. The result is $1.59 royalty and $0.77 profit per book sold.
Amazon: 40% of the price
Author: 3% of the price (half of which goes to taxes)
Color printed books are expensive, but I think he chose the premium color print option rather than the standard color print option. You can try it out: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/royalty-calculator { pages: 432, dimensions: 7.5"x9.25" } Roughly $18 for basic color and $36 for premium color (which probably also means heavier, higher quality paper).
Amazon takes 40%. Barnes and Noble Press takes 45% for self-published books, and their printing costs are within a couple dollars. Compare to typical retailer+distributor costs of >50% while authors get <15%.
The economics of retail print publishing and logistics don't seem to work out at higher author royalty rates. Authors who don't want to give up 40% of list price always have the option to handle printing, shipping, and accounting themselves, selling on ebay or from their own website.
Feels jank to pay for the book AND pay to free it, but that's the world we live in.
It should show up in the epubor app on the Kindle tab after you install the kindle app and used it to download your books. No need to drag and drop from the file system it's all right there in the app. It finds Kindle, Kobo, etc and lists them.
EDIT - Make sure you leave the Kindle app running. I think it needs to be able to read the keys from memory or something.
A second peeve is that in dark mode you can only have gray on black, not white on black.
I’ve never seen a Kindle book rendering anything as vector graphics. That’s just not a thing in the Kindle world, as far as I can tell. It’s either basic text or pixel images.
One example I just checked is a book from MIT Press from 2021, where even √2 is rendered as an image, and also isn’t scaled correctly with respect to the text size. It really puts you off reading such books in Kindle.
Anyway, I guess my point is that TFA won’t help with what I find the most annoying about the Kindle experience.
I jailbroke both kindles. And use koreader on them which now supports progress sync with Kavita which is amazing! So I don't really lose functionality.
Many websites sell epubs, with or without protection. The DRM is never usually that hard to break with Calibre. If you're into that sort of thing.
I suppose if you want to implement your own cloud-based (Dropbox? Google Drive?) storage service and circumvent the author's monetisation model, you could.
"Was it worth it? To read one book? No. To prove a point? Absolutely. To learn about SVG rendering, perceptual hashing, and font metrics? Probably yes."
"Wait, you work in tech, why would you ever work on your own car when you can clearly pay someone else to do it???"
Because I like to learn things.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, if you haven't read it
They broke that a while ago by making their DRM even worse, so now I just pirate those books.
I've loaded it up with the epubs I have in my Calibre library (which ironically contains mostly books I've bought from Amazon before they made stripping DRM unreasonably hard).
Now I won't buy anything from Amazon because I can't strip the DRM, and hence can't read the books on my e-reader of choice.
Their loss, not mine.
This is why I have a Boox Android eInk tablet, although I only use it with burner accounts. They run Ancient versions of Android.
I run Storyteller app on it and have my ebooks & audiobooks synced up perfectly like whispersync but better.
I’m paying for BookFusion, to have synced cross-platform reading. It’s expensive, but seems to be one of the few cross-platform synced readers that supports the EPUB Media Overlays from Storyteller.
Have you experienced ghosting with your Boox tablet? I’d like to get one, but I know that ghosting would bother me.
Once you get all the e-ink settings dialed in to make black text more readable on the color e-ink screen, it’s pretty damned good. I never notice ghosting. It’s not very easy to get the settings dialed in though. If you are purely reading on it get a black and white screen if it’s in stock so you aren’t fiddling with it to get text to really be boldly black instead of grey.
Pirated books have no DRM, usually come in an open .epub format, which can be converted to whatever your reader requires, and you end up actually owning them, even if amazon decides to abandon the kindle ecosystem.
I personally know people who pirate books, but pay hundreds of dollars a year for streaming services or battle pass type video games. It blows my mind. Books are so cheap people!
I recently bought the complete Storm Archives series by Brandon Sanderson on ebook for $10. That's over 100 hours of entertainment. It's literally a ratio of 10 CENTS per hour of entertainment.
Even a 60 euros for a 6 hour experience comes at 10 euro per hour, cheaper than music and on par with movies.
Add replayability, multiplayer, longer games, cheaper games, ... and many many games are under 1 euro per hour, sometimes far under. Even someone playing fifa or call of duty has a price to hour ratio thats absurdly good.
And the range available is insane, used to be if you liked some genre you had maybe a game once every two years, now there are so many that not only you can't play all your games, even a seasonned gigantic fan of gaming cannot know all good games released anymore.
At least you can transfer movies around different services. It’s a shame you can’t with books.
It was mostly a passing mention in the lawsuit against them where the damages are just for pirating books they didn't also buy. The fact that they bought used books and scanned them since its cheaper than ebooks was allowed by the court.
In the present case, Amazon clearly states that the customer is buying a book, so it should work the same way as buying a physical book.
One solution would be to buy a DRM free digital version.
At least Steve Jobs understood how DRM should work.
Over the course of a couple years they updated their scrambling; First to randomize the size of the regions, then to make them triangular instead of rectangular. It was an interesting if tedious challenge to reverse engineer.
But there were plenty of other bugs like bookshelf management getting corrupted.
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