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Discussion (196 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Calibre is the escape hatch. Converts everything to EPUB. Even if you don't use it day-to-day, it's the best tool for getting your library out of Amazon's format.
Public domain catalogs are huge now. Standard Ebooks, Internet Archive, Gutenberg - tens of thousands of well-formatted free EPUBs. Most people don't realize how much is out there.
For actually reading on macOS/iOS, I ended up on BookShelves (https://getbookshelves.app) after trying a few options. Native app, reads EPUB and comics, has Calibre wireless sync, and browses those public domain catalogs directly. Books are just files on your device - no account, no cloud lock-in.
Honestly the hardest part was realizing how much of my library I'd been renting rather than owning.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/1q1uza4/successful...
I don't think the process you described makes sense for anyone anyway.
Unless the comment has been edited, it does make sense (other than the fact it's intention might just be an ad for BookShelves reader):
- Use Calibre to cross-convert books.
- Leverage public domain ebook catalogs: Standard Ebooks, Internet Archive, Gutenberg.
- For on-device reading BookShelves app might be an option, with no cloud lock-in.
This is inherent to DRM, and the reason why I would never have considered buying one in the first place. The eReader I have is a PocketBook Versa. Same price as a Kindle, extensible using microSD and I can add my non-DRM books however I want. Fortunately, Apple Books ePub FairPlay DRM is fairly easy to remove, so that's where I buy them.
Dvd players didn't need to know the date. The new world of constantly evolving drm schemes falls into this world, making it east to eol devices if not updated
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c98k91yy4z4o
"The move will mean owners of older Kindles, including its earliest models such as the Kindle Touch and some Kindle Fire tablets, will be unable to download new e-books."
For a more tech-oriented site, according to Ars Technica Amazon removed the ability to upload over USB:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/04/starting-in-may-pre-...
"Previously, owners of old Kindles could have worked around this loss of functionality by downloading books locally and transferring them via USB. But Amazon removed the ability to download books to a PC or Mac in February of 2025."
I don't like to brag "I told you so" but I saw this coming 16 years ago:
https://blog.majid.info/why-i-will-never-buy-a-kindle/
I'm assuming send to kindle will no longer be supported on these older devices.
I don't love having to replace them, but paying €120 every five years is probably worth it. I mean that's €2/month, and I have a huge library of books which I load via calibre.
I read daily, on the bus to work, at home in bed, and while there are "more free" ereaders I've become accustomed to the kindle and have no complaints. If I were not so clumsy they'd last longer, so that's on me.
My physical library is pretty big, but being able to carry 50+ books at all times? And have a battery life of a few weeks? (I stay in airplane mode, as I transfer books via the USB cable). It's hard to complain.
I don't have that faith either, but it still irks me when good hardware has to get chucked for software reasons. And this goes double for when those software reasons are about stupid-ass DRM.
But in this particular instance I don't consider it to be that bad for me personally, since I don't rely on being able to access Amazon DRM books. But a lot of perfectly working devices are going to get landfilled for this.
In fact all Kobo e-ink devices, except the Kobo Mini, wifi, and the original one, are still getting firmware updates.
Their android-based tablets with IPS screens are all discontinued though (as far as I am aware).
This is more than Amazon ever did. They haven't updated the firmware on some of their devices that are officially "supported" in years.
Of course, you'll get a bit more out of them if you convert your EPUBs to KEPUBs with Kepubify[0], but the point remains that Kobos are supplemented by their cloud/connected features, not inherently dependent on them.
0: https://pgaskin.net/kepubify/
Amazon is offering a 20% discount to owners of those devices to switch to any other modern kindle.
AFAIK it's still possible to authorize ancient supported ePub readers with Adobe Digital Editions and load up DRMed books from providers like Google Play even with devices like the Sony PRS-505 (e.g,https://www.sony.com/electronics/support/reader-digital-book...), despite them exiting the market over a decade ago. Kobo also has continued providing firmware updates to devices from 2011, and even their unsupported devices can still load books via ADE or the Kobo Desktop App.
I would point out that in 45 years ago, in 1981, the typewriter as a product was over 100 years old (first sold 1874). There was a lot of time to standardize by 1981. And there probably haven't been a lot of serviceable pre-1900s typewriters for quite a while.
The first Kindle came out in 2007. Who knows what an e-reader will be like in 2107?
On top of that, their aftermarket and open source situation is pretty good.
They're not ideal e-readers though, but if you're in the market for a good e-ink device with long-term support and that works well with calibre? Might be worth a look.
That said, remarkable are great devices as well.
If you want greater security, substitute Graphene for Lineage.
These will not be e-ink displays, but the longevity is perhaps the longest available from independent vendors.
KFX is the modern kindle format, AZW meanwhile is heavily PDF-based. KFX was designed ground-up by Amazon, supports every modern feature they could think of, and presumably couldn't be backported to 2013 and earlier Kindles; AZW meanwhile was basically a wrapper around a subset of PDF. KFX is a complete redo, notable enough it's what "Enhanced Typesetting" on every Kindle product page means, not a small DRM upgrade.
By doing this, all authors will soon receive guarantees that they will have the full KFX feature set when designing eBooks, and won't break AZW by accident. Trying to point this out though to the "it's about DRM" or "it's about obsolescence" crowd will get you downvoted to oblivion before the truth is even considered (speaking from experience, -4 when I dared suggest legitimate reasons exist) and is a prime example of echo chambers and deeply ingrained bias on this forum.
MOBI stopped keeping up with ePub standards and standard features, in part because Amazon acquired MobiPocket. The KFX is just ePub with a new proprietary DRM container around the ZIP file that is ePub's container.
The 2013 boundary is also the "supports ePUB files directly without a conversion process" boundary in Amazon's kindle OS. It's not just useful to know for book file authors, but as a consumer it becomes useful for a quick "Can I buy a standards compliant DRM-free EPUBs such as from sites like DriveThruFiction and just send them to my Kindle with no other steps?"
PDF were just not meant to be viewed on the old one, but the 11th gen handles them surprisingly well.
The screen's got some little black dots where it fell out of my laptop bag in the back of the Landrover and got squashed under the spare tyre and a toolbox. Even that didn't kill it though, it just gave it a couple of little black dots about the size of a lower-case "o" in the smallest font. I can live with that.
However, I woke up from my stupor when Micro$oft's eBook store closed and purged their library from under everybodies butts. Giving Amazon complete control over my library is a horrible thought, so I'm out.
I am now a happy Boox Go 10.3 + BookFusion user. Crisp screen, great battery life, full android with play store underneath. It syncs to my phone, has most of the bells and whistles I need in terms of reading, and it supports writing handwritten notes (albeit not onto the ebook itself; that's apparently too sci-fi even for 2026), and Bookfusion can sync notes into Obisidian vaults via an Obsidian plugin. I feel in control. I buy books from alternative sites with either no DRM to begin with, or where I'm confident I can remove it. Bookfusion costs me 20EUR a year.
I'm fairly happy with my setup.
EDIT: yes, I'm aware Boox are not the good guys in this story. I have not signed up to any of their services - the device is perfectly usable without that. I turned their book shop off immediately, and I do monitor+block the Chinese IPs it's trying to reach on my router.
There are two tabs on main Kindle screen - Home and Library (and also pretty good search). In Library you can see all your books AND collections as folders.
BOOX devices have their own issues https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33353640
I think Kobo has same issues with DRM as Amazon does.
Also, Kindle devices are cheaper, last time I checked, low end models of competitors, didn't have flush-front screens, like Paperwhite.
I never had problems described in this article (but YMMV of course).
Of course, the general state of e-book devices is pretty abysmal. There are no good options I'm aware of.
True. That's why I prefer to buy books on other platforms, sometimes directly on authors website. And nothing stops me from reading them on Kindle. Maybe that's the reason why I don't understand the problem here.
Two tabs, which one do they default you to? Which one do they default you to?
Such claims make me think that this post is biased.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Kindle#Sales
[0] https://allthingsd.com/20130812/amazon-to-sell-4-5-billion-w...
[1] https://tech.yahoo.com/phones/articles/amazon-unveils-kindle...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/01/06/three-in-...
Edit: also MSRP on ebooks is lower than for print versions (very roughly 50%, based on a couple randomly checked books)
An ebook has zero cost of distribution and no middlemen.
A physical book has to be typeset, printed, shipped to stores, shipped to customers, marketed in store, etc etc etc.
If a physical book is sold for $10 at least half that is printing, distribution and retail.
Like the GP, the price fixing of ebooks at the Dane price as physical books mothers me as well, particularly because physical books can be sold, lent or given away.
The exact same thing happened when CDs launched. They were cheaper to produce than vinyl or cassette very quickly but they sold at a premium for no reason at all.
But as anyone who has taken Econ 101 knows, the price is based on what people are willing to pay for it. The cost of production merely dictates whether it is viable to sell in the market.
If most people are willing to pay $10 for an ebook, when the hardcopy is also $10, then $10 is what they'll sell it for.
100% incorrect.
ebooks still:
- Have to be edited, proof read and formatted properly.
- Have to have a cover design.
- Unless you're distributing on your own website (which is uber rare), you still need to pay for platform fees and retailer costs for distribution.
- Marketing and tech support which is the same for any book, regardless of what platform its sold on.
The costs of printing and retail are definitely less than half the sales price: https://www.davidderrico.com/cost-breakdowns-e-books-vs-prin... Publishers say it's 10%; Derrico thinks they are underestimating certain logistical costs but no way it's 50%.
Ebooks have always been priced this way. How can it contribute to its dying when it was this way during the "glory" days?
Paper is cheap. Shipping is cheap. The incremental cost of making a physical book is so small as to be noise in the overall book price.
What on earth are all the middlemen between book being authored and it being sold to a customer that add so much overhead that the cost of printing and logistics disappears in the noise???
It just means that publishers are really good at manufacturing physical goods. They've been doing it for several hundred years so no big surprise there.
Books don't sell in large quantities. The economics of scale for the publishes for labor aren't there.
No one is getting rich off of fiction publishing except for the rare break out author. Publishers go out of business (or get acquired) all the time because they are constantly one step away from being insolvent.
This is also why the industry has massively consolidated.
I highly suggest reading breakdowns of the finances of publishing books, it is an interesting field that is incredibly different than how we are used to seeing numbers work in software.
Nevertheless automatic typesetting and formatting have existed for decades! TeX and LaTeX are ancient and produce better looking results than any book I've ever read on any of my ereaders, and those aren't the only tools in this space.
Whatever people are paying for such "production" seems wasted.
Then I switched to the Kobo Libra Colour. The weight and portability make a huge difference. Having my entire library with me means I am no longer stuck with whatever I decided to bring before leaving home.
The color display is not amazing, but it is good enough for comics. I have been reading things like Attack on Titan and Spider-Man on it. Reading tech books has been great too, especially those with graphs and images.
If I had to sum it up in one word, versatile.
If the book is not written in your native language or you like to read books with unusual vocabulary (e.g. historical books), it's an absolute delight. So far, a concise dictionary like Oxford has worked the best for me, while Wiktionary or similar always came short.
The other is heft and handiness. If you read anything that is larger than a small notebook, an e-book is much more practical. You also don't have to hold it open all the time.
I have a 40 minute drive to work each way, and I find audiobooks the best way to pass the time. At night if I want to read the same book from my drive, Kindle picks up exactly where I stopped listening. And does the reverse the next morning when I get in the car.
If any else is doing this, I am unaware. But it's AWESOME.
My main complaint is Amazon has discontinued Kindle devices with physical page turn buttons. Whoever made that decision should be fired.
- If you like long books, an e-reader is much lighter than a tome. Not only more portable, but also easier to hold when reading.
- When lying down you don't have to fight the cover 50% of the time. Easy to read one-handed too.
- The new ones are water-resistant.
- You can have multiple books available, in case you switch it up or just finish them quickly.
- Search feature.
- Built-in bookmark.
- Time estimates until end-of-chapter and end-of-book.
- The e-ink screen doesn't feel like a screen. Not really a plus on top of paper books, but just because you mentioned.
I still read physical books when they're gifted or the medium requires it (House of Leaves being the latest example), but otherwise I'm 100% on e-readers. Previously Kindle Paperwhite 6th Gen, and since a few weeks, Kobo Clara BW.
That said, I have a jailbroken Kindle, but I am not giving a cent to Amazon. Should it break I'd just get a Kobo.
Wow. I got a kindle keyboard in 2012? It gave out about 4 years ago when I got a PocketBook Touch HD3, which has been great these last 4 years. I think it’s just insane that some people buy all the generations. What a waste.
1. if you factory reset a device after May 20, you will not be able to sign in or use the device at all.
2. if you have one already you can use it with your downloaded books but you cannot use the official store at all.
You might not have a problem with #2, but #1 is a dealbreaker imo
-The old kindles are great products that last a long time -I don't expect Amazon to support them forever, but kindasorta bricking them on their way out is a dick move -Jailbreaking is straightforward but this probably hits older people who are not very tech-savvy the most. Like quite a few others here, I too have an elderly family member who I had to help resolve this
I feel there's gotta be some compromise between letting old electronics age gracefully so they don't occupy landfill and a company's need to support aging products over a long time... though I'm not sure what's a good model.
Kobo only integrates with OverDrive, the predecessor to Libby. You can only use one library card at a time with OverDrive, and don't have access to the audioboks or periodicals on Libby. Meanwhile Kobo will aggressively push you to sign up for their monthly subscription to get access to that kind of content.
If you want Libby on e-paper, sans Kindle, your best bet is to look at the E Paper android tablets (I use Boox) and just install the Libby app. The experience isn't perfect but its the least worst option.
I bought the Verse Pro Color. It doesn't require an account, it doesn't require wifi. I transfer epubs via USB and the pocketbook works on device without ever logging into a Pocketbook account.
There are other reasons not to like the device, but it's refreshing not to need to login to even use the device.
I personally was fine with the limitations, after all I'm only one person and I would only ever read books on my ereader.
For me, I've mostly switched to reading on my phone. Dark mode, plus OLED, works very well for my needs.
I use Koreader: after experimenting with various configuration parameters for a few days, the UI is now stable and tailored to my taste. Once in a while, I switch to another app: Plato is better at handling huge PDF files.
Another bonus point is that I can mount my ereader as a USB mass-storage and rsync the git repository of my ebooks onto it.
FWIW, I've had the same issue with my Kindle, and cleaning the screen seemed to fix it reliably.
But the Overdrive issues are infuriating, especially when you miss out on a hold from the library and have to get in the queue again. On popular books it can take months. :(
also, i use my kindle to read library books. will that still work?
Battery life standby time isn't nearly as good, but being able to also read Notion pages, review full PDFs, and other benefits from having an actual tablet, make the battery life sacrifice worth it.
Jailbreak on very old Kindles is reasonably straightforward and the fact that Amazon hasn't even put out point releases to stop it (as the do with newer models) is a strong hint that they've just given up on maintaining them. I still have a K3 (Kindle Keyboard) that not only is jailbroken: it runs Tailscale.
Unprotected books, no problem. Anna's Archive + Calibre will keep working just fine.
I’ll happily keep reading on my kindle, it’s the most ergonomic way of reading for me especially when traveling. I get that there are other options like Kobo, but I don’t see it as significantly better than the Kindles. And I like the fact that I can also use the iPad and iPhone apps for kindle to read on the go if I don’t have the physical kindle with me.
Some of this post just seems that an "Android Authority" only just now realized there are less-forked Android-based e-readers versus Kindle and they feel happier with the Android ecosystem (and its DRM) than Amazon's. To me it feels a bit like a choice between Purple Drazi and Green Drazi. Many of the same problems but a different ascot color.
I haven't had a job that requires travel in a long time, so looking at it from that perspective, having my library also require some kind of additional device maintenance cycle or whatever really adds a layer of complexity I don't want to deal with, so depending on what options I have and what I'm buying, I'm finding myself these days purchasing physical books more frequently just to avoid the hassle for future me.
Since then, I bought a Kindle Paperwhite, and I've made a game of either getting free e-books when offered on the store, or purchasing books when on sale and I've had sufficient Amazon gift cards from Microsoft Rewards, so that I've not spent "real" money on any virtual books, except for when I've purchased an ebook to go along with a newly published hardcover by an author whose work I feel strongly enough that it merits such doubled purchasing.
(This is absolutely bonkers though – the experience of using an e-reader has basically not gotten better since 2008 when I got my first Kindle. There are still glaringly obvious usability issues which nobody has spent any time innovating on.)
I never liked Calibre, it's weirdly shoddy software, slow as a dog, and the worst UX i've ever seen in a popular app - so I needed something I could just drop my files into.
The weird thing is how huge Calibre is considering, I'd wager, 90% of people (myself included) just use it to convert books and never touch 1/100th of the tools and functionality in it, not touching on the fact that it's not a shining example of intuitive software. But once you have it setup, using it as a middleman is pretty straightforward and easy.
Is there a simpler conversion tool that does as good of a job? I've literally not looked in a decade plus.
Apple figured the correct model out years ago with iTunes Music.
I have an old iPod, which still works fine. But nearly all of its apps no longer work because the servers they connect to don't support it anymore, making it essentially useless.
Same thing happened to my older Samsung tablet.
Same thing to my various internet radios.
The X4 is so small that I can throw it in my pocket and read a page or two when I'm waiting for something instead of doomscolling on my phone. I love that little thing. I've read two books since 3/27 and I'm halfway through my 3rd book.
It's possible I needed to log into Amazon in 2016 and 2020 when I bought my two Paperwhites, but I haven't needed to do so again since, so I'm not sure this will affect me at all. If it does, I'll have to check my notes for what was closest last year when I last checked.
Incidentally, I hope there are alternative readers that are also just readers. No Android no "applications". I like being able to go on holiday without worrying about charging the ebook reader.
Unpopular here but: This won't bother non-techies who aren't religiously against DRM. They love their kindles, old ones should be thrown away and they will buy a new one (with cool new features like blue light blocking mode).
I don't know if the alternative e-readers have an equivalent store? Tracking down epub files on my PC then transferring to the device multiple times a week sounds a bit frustrating as an alternative.
Also they support kindles for a long time, my kindle oasis from 2016 that I bought used still is supported, and the things battery also somehow is still in good shape.
The renderer is atrocious and is holding back the entire industry, much like IE6's crappy renderer and monopoly on users held the entire web back a decade. Browsers (and thus ebooks, which are just HTML/CSS) can now do pretty decent typography, but Amazon inexplicably refuses to get on board with epub.
Their file formats are equally garbage. Mobi, a format that has hardly changed since circa the year 2005, was still in active use until just recently. Their other proprietary formats are confusing in feature set and are opaque to create. The official tool to create Amazon ebooks only runs on Windows![1]
Kindles still can't natively read epubs, but since they accept epubs via email, their customers get confused and email me about it. (Epubs sent via email are quietly convert to Amazon's propriety format, meaning all bets are off on the result. Good luck, publisher!)
I always tell people, buy literally any other ereader.
[1] Calibre can also create them but it's reverse-engineering and not the official implementation.
We should be normalizing a separation of device and ecosystem. These are for consuming books, it's not an awful inconvenience to sideload every 19 hours of consumption to queue up the next read.
[1]: https://daylightcomputer.com/
Have things improved since the last time I checked in? I really hate so much about the kindle and its ecosystem but it seems to be the best out there.
today i use a boox page, after a friend complimented his
https://shop.boox.com/products/page
https://lockywolf.net/2024-08-07_Using-an-ebook-instead-of-a...
Never buy another Kindle? I keep mine in airplane mode all the time and sideload all the books/papers I want to read. It works practically just as well as when I bought it. Why wouldn't I buy another? If Amazon makes a Kindle with color at 300 PPI, I will.
Sure, proper EPUB support would be nice, but if I need that I can jailbreak and install Koreader.
If there's another device with comparable hardware/software/battery, I'd consider it. AFAIK, Kindle still has the best standby battery life.
Kindle to end store downloads and registering for 1st-5th gen kindles in May
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47678320
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47690049
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47747330
Amazon is discontinuing Kindle for PC on June 30th
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47816878
I have a kindle, but have never used any of the amazon specific functionality and don't plan on it. Stays permanently in airplane mode. I have no complaints and find the software more "refined" but not exceptional. I just convert everything to a mobi file.
My partner has a kobo and it seems just as serviceable. Out of the box it supports more file types, but it can be iffy on formatting sometimes, so I've had to fiddle with some stuff in Calibre to make stuff display nicely. I'm sure sticking to epubs would resolve that issue though.
TBH, I find all of the mass market e-readers to all have pretty comparable displays. I used to use a 20 year old kindle and don't find newer ones wildly better. The tech seems pretty stagnant. You're usually picking between things like backlights or light-temp now.
Depending on your model or version, it's not hard.
I'm rocking a newer Paperwhite Special Edition, with KOreader installed.
Kindles have the best text rendering (imo), and calibre can be used to sideload books. My PW1 had stellar text rendering. My next kindle, Kindle 10 had a lower PPI but decent text rendering. I now use a PW5 and the text is flawless.
Kindle's UI does suck, though. Very slow and the keyboard is glacial. Still, page turns are zippy and it collects highlights in a central file, which is very handy.
https://stallman.org/amazon.html
I got a Kindle Oasis in 2018 and it was a perfect device for me. Cellular connectivity, Bluetooth support for audiobooks, and synchronization.
I could start reading on my phone, then transition to listening in my car, and then pick up reading on Kindle. And it worked well in a literal airplane. I didn't have to faff about with WiFi passwords to sync to the latest page, thanks to the cellular connectivity.
And now Kindle devices lost cellular (why?!?), lost physical keys (facepalm), and are getting worse and worse UI/UX-wise.