Comment by leshenka
3 months ago
that's so weird. First I decide to buy my wife an ebook reader for the new years and then Louis Rossman makes a video on Kindle DRM bait and switch. Now this and people praising Kobo. Guess I'm buying a kobo
3 months ago
that's so weird. First I decide to buy my wife an ebook reader for the new years and then Louis Rossman makes a video on Kindle DRM bait and switch. Now this and people praising Kobo. Guess I'm buying a kobo
Most Kobo books have DRM. There are a few publishers (TOR) and authors that are DRM free, but most of books I've wanted have it.
This is why I have a Boox Android eInk tablet, although I only use it with burner accounts. They run Ancient versions of Android.
True, but that DRM is relatively easy to handle, and is sort-of a standard (OK, I know Adobe handles it, but it's not a complete walled garden like Kindle). I can borrow an ebook from my library using my browser, download the DRM'ed file, fulfil it (using Adobe Digital Editions), copy to my ereader. I can buy books from Google and do the same. It's relatively straight forward to strip the DRM if you want to. Because it is reliant on a third-party service (Adobe) that has other clients/interests, it's not as likely to change as quickly or as onerously as Kindle's DRM.
Yes, most books you buy from Kobo do have DRM, but a Kobo handles DRM-free files you may acquire elsewhere (e.g. an author or publisher's site) better than Kindles do. Kobos support epub natively, while Kindle requires some sort of conversion that doesn't always work great.
This, my first eink reader was a Meebook M6, Boox didn't release their 6" model yet. My main selection criteria was "it runs android". It was a really good reader, Kobo, Kindle and co can just be ewaste as they're designed to be.
Kobo fully supports pointing your library at a Calibre server instance to pull books from. You can also access a bash shell by changing a setting. They're very open devices and IMO quite nice.
Kobo's pretty good. Anything to avoid Kindle books.
I bought one, but it didn't have any of the books I wanted. It seems to be nowhere near as comprehensive as the Kindle library.
I bought one to replace my aging Amazon Kindle Oasis, after the DRM move.
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.
Just put epubs on it.
It's a little less user friendly but I really like my Boox tablet because it's a full android device.
I run Storyteller app on it and have my ebooks & audiobooks synced up perfectly like whispersync but better.
+1 for Storyteller. It is beyond fantastic to have my progress seamlessly synced between my ebooks and audiobooks.
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.
Storyteller can sync your progress between devices, although there’s occasionally a bit of a bug with it (will be fixed soon). I sync between my iPhone and boox.
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.
Calibre handles kindle too (if you already have that). You "obtain" the books one way or another, and calibre converts them to a proper format and copies them directly to your kindle (via the usb cable).
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.
Bookshop.org is supposed to implement Kobo support sometime this year, getting a Kobo if that happens.
What does 'Kobo support' mean? Anyone can publish an epub, which a Kobo can read. Are you talking integration into the Kobo store?
The DRM free books they sell work just fine. Ones with DRM must currently be read using their mobile or web apps. Their FAQ mentions their plans to support Kobo in the future.
https://bookshop.org/info/ebooks#EBOOKFAQ
I liked the idea of Bookshop.org but I was surprised when I ordered something from it, it shipped from somewhere 2,000 miles away from me. I had the misunderstanding it was going to ship from a local bookshop that was actually local to me.
Its possible that the local bookshop didn't have the book, so they had their supplier drop ship it to you, but they still got the margin from the sale? I don't really know anything about how Bookshop.org really works.
At the end of the day it's an affiliate marketing setup, I think all fulfillment is through Ingram, not local bookstores. But it's a B Corp mandated to give 80% or more of profits to independent booksellers.