Say it with me kids, “This is why we pirate digital media from billion dollar corporations”
this is also why i started buying physical books and using my local public library again.
Hell Yeah.
My local library allows borrowing ebooks. It’s incredibly useful. I own two kindles and haven’t spent a dime at Amazon for ebooks. I do buy physical books now and then from there, but only if I really need it and can’t find elsewhere.
How do you return a borrowed ebook…?
It expires after two weeks. You can extend, just like borrowing a physical copy. Or return early, in which case it expires upon return.
I mean, yeah, sure, I guess that’s a decent solutions in terms of modern IP shit.
But like, we all know you’re not returning anything and if you wanted, you could also copy it for yourself.
I just dislike how it feels like when it was actually books, they had actual reasons to everything. There’s a queue because there’s limited copies. You need to return it and if you’re late there’s a fee, because it’s from other people’s time, etc. Nowadays that all feels like larping just to protect large companies IP’s essentially. Because digital copies don’t actually get returned.
Like when I was a kid I would’ve never thought a librarian would say “you’re not allowed to read that anymore”. Or that I couldn’t copy a thing down at home from one of their books. But now as your tokens to ebooks expire, it kinda does feel like that.
My best friend is a librarian, and they’ve stopped buying ebook licenses because the terms were awful.
The publishers only allowed an ebook to be checked out a few times before the library had to purchase a license extension. The argument was that pylhysical books face wear and tear and eventually have to be replaced, so ebooks should have to be replaced too.
It’s true that normal books do experience wear and tear, but looking at what my local library has I’d say that many or most can still least many years before needing to be retired or replaced.
As we’re seeing with Amazon, with ebooks it’s really the readers that expire over time
I find ebooks from the library to be very useful.
I’m not saying they’re not, or that the librarians are any more capitalist than they were in the 90’s. I’m just saying it feels like they are.
The magic word is Calibre
Funny, my old kindle seems to be downloading e-books just fine from my self-hosted server.
Tell me more! My partner has an older Kindle, but it’s been a while since I’ve added a book for her.
Nothing special. I just run a instance of jellyfin and have a my book collection shared that way.
I’m sure not the most efficient but it works.
I got 3 kindles off eBay for the price of 1 new. 2 successfully jail broken (and 1 ready to be jail broken. Just on the fence of making another account, or gamble my main one again)
Kobo gang where you at?
8 year old libre still kicks kindles ass
I have an older Aura that isn’t allowed library books. :/
Correction: Older kindles can no longer download e-books with the stock rom
… from Amazon. Sideloading is still fine.
Does anyone else just read on their phone? I use Librera ebook reader in dark mode. The app even reads to me with tts while I’m driving.
Haven’t picked up a paper book in over 10 years!
I have a kindle that I’ve had for ages. It has been jailbroken for a while and I’ve been loading my own epubs onto it. They make it easy with the 1 click send to kindle stuff but that locks you in to their ecosystem.
Good thing I put mine in airplane mode when I first got it and never updated firmware. I load books like its a flash drive.
I’ve been using raw text files for my books, sent locally over USB, and that’s the way it’s gonna stay until my reader craps out
can’t you just load epub with calibre or another sync to? I’m pretty sure that’s what I do because that’s what I’m doing
IMO for personal use “drag and drop into the correct directory” is an infinitely better organisational system than tag based libraries, especially for pirated books. I’m not going to sync my books across 10 different devices since I don’t need more than 1 reader, so it doesn’t make any sense for me to waste time using tags, let alone fix them for every book I download.
Yeah I strongly prefer epub for chapters and text formatting.
Or just drag and drop the epub.
I’ve tried that in the past, but it doesn’t seem to care how the epub is put on it, it always displays epubs horribly
are you doing something to convert to epub from another format? i don’t have the issue you’re describing when loading epub directly or when converting from mobi with calibre. the format is dynamic unlike PDF, so the font size and page width shouldn’t be fixed like that. it should look and behave pretty much like kindle mobi or your text files
Nope. Raw epub to reader and it doesn’t handle it.
There’s not really any advantage of using txt files over open standard drm-free epubs. You can still generate them yourself using txt editors or publishing software, you can still load them over USB. But epubs give you quality of life features on eReaders like title pages, table of contents, chapter headers, formatting markers like bold and italics.
My reader formats epubs really terribly, the text is almost always way too small, and requires some grotesque horizontal scrolling for most books.
On the other hand .txt just works, and handles resizing just fine
An eReader’s literally only job is to format, reflow, render and display ePubs. If you have one that can’t do that, then it is a fancy coaster at best.
Ok? I’m still going to read books as .txt files anyways, because it does so.
What reader are you using?
It’s a kindle D01100
you are almost certainly doing something wrong
I really don’t care. I’ve tried several different ways to get it to cooperate with epubs, and at a certain point it isn’t worth it when I already have a viable solution.
Jailbreaking and never turning airplane mode off has been the best decision I made with my kindle. Download from zlibrary, transfer to folder on kindle, done
All hail the high seas
Also… https://annas-archive.gl/
Support them with donations if possible. An outstanding resource.
second that, much more control of it
lol i already jailbroke my 2012 paperwhite and intstalled Koreader on it so I can sync it with my calibre epub library over wifi
It’s a pity Calibre to date refuses to be refactored into a self-hosted service.
The core logic should be portable, with the app just being an interface to it, but no, the entire project is so much spaghetti it would feed the entire boot for over a year… such a shame.
I switched. Kavita is the new hotness.
I found it for comics, but realized it handled books as well as Caliber does, in a modern interface with OPDS support.
I tried Kavita and immediately recoiled at the fact that basic features like progress sync or metadata matching are behind a paywall - literally features that don’t cost the developers anything, while having open, active bug reports going back a year on these “premium” features.
All while licensing the code under GPLv3…
Progress sync works fine for me in KOReader with OPDS. Progress Sync Scrobble (to third-parties) is the Kavita+ feature.
My understanding was the Kavita+ items are things to do with third-party services and meta data providers that are an API/cost-based service to the dev. That being said I don’t use any of those features.
OPDS doesn’t do progress sync, at all… you’re running something else there if that works for you.
https://anansi-project.github.io/docs/opds-pse/specs/v1.2
They use the PS extension. I believe Komga and Kavita maintain the spec now. Reader support for Kavita specifically is in the Wiki.
PSE is page streaming, not progress sync…
I’ve looked into Kavita before and it looks good, just need to figure out a way I can wirelessly connect to it using KOreader on my Kindle to transfer books and sync reading progress
The OPDS service works for me, just like on Calibre. I can browse my books from within KOReader.
I see, that’s good to hear, since KOreader has a direct integration with Calibre, when I connect it to my server it shows up as a external device in Calibre and I can select multiple books in Calibre and directly send to the Kindle in one click which I find more convenient than navigating a OPDS catalog from within my slow kindle and downloading books one by one, but maybe in the future when I get a better e-reader I will give Kavita a try.
My workflow is usually to add a book to my Want to Read list in Kavita, then on a reader I can go to that list through OPDS and browse just that list. Makes things much more managable assuming I don’t spam the list.
Agree, though calibre-web exists and runs in a single Docker container. I’ve been using it for a few years, and it’s great.
Sure its a whole Linux server under the hood just to run Calibre and the services required to give it a web interface and API for reading apps - making it way bigger than it needs to be - but it does the job.
Calibre-web isn’t Calibre. It uses the same database, but that’s about it, unless you use the optional conversion mod on the linuxserver container.
A docker container is preferred, but again, CW isn’t Calibre. Same database but completely different management system + also lacking a lot of the sync opportunities.
The issue is that there’s no open protocol for library syncing. It doesn’t exist because all big players (Amazon, Kobo/Rakuten, B&N, etc.) have their own proprietary system, and need no open alternatives.
OPDS is a thing but it’s meant to replicate a physical library (one you can walk into) in behaviour and approach, not a personal library (list all books I have and give me easy access to them). It’s essentially just an RSS-style feed that has no defined structure, thus isn’t software navigable - e.g. there’s no guarantee you can list all book series, or all authors, and most implementations usually give you very roughly defined “recently added”, or “hot now” book lists…
I’ve actually been working on a solution for this, something that provides an almost Kindle library experience (see all your books from a remote server, sync down the remote ebook file, sync back read progress, filter/search based on book properties, etc.), while being flexible enough for non-readers applications as well. But I haven’t even gotten to the point where I can define the API contract properly, let alone the backing database and mapping to Calibre. Honestly at this stage I feel like the best approach is starting from scratch, establishing modern requirements, and going from there.
A docker container is not a whole separate Linux server, it uses the kernel running on the host
Have you seen the apt sources list that CW generates on boot? It’s semantics. 😊
With default runtime, very true. There are other runtimes that can be used that provide better isolation like gVisor, kata, firecracker, etc.
Check out [email protected]
That’s exactly what I did, but I use Grimmory/BookLore.
optimal solution (lol)
Jokes on Amazon I already jail broke mine and can directly download books from my Calibre server to it, KOreader ftw
YSK, there’s a large number of older Kindles that can be jail broken.
I just ssh pirated .mobi files into mine
So the product lineup is now called “Kindle Paperweight” instead?
