Good news is that there are alternative ways to download these books from Amazon for backup purposes. It’s not as straightforward but it’s doable.
That said I will be refusing to buy from any storefront that doesn’t offer a way to download my books. Even adobe digital editions is a viable alternative.
Just pirate them at this point instead of giving your money to predatory companies lol
Previously, you could just download the books on the Kindle for PC, use a random decoder software or install a plugin for Calibre, and boop, decoded books, readable in Calibre, can be converted to EPUB.
For ssssssome reasonnns I’ve been looking at how to do the same thing again, but apparently you need an old version of KfPC because the new one uses new encryption/file format that hasn’t been sussed out yet. Weirdly enough, even with the newer app, I’ve still been able to download a bunch of books that didn’t have DRM to begin with, but of course Amazon doesn’t exactly advertise if a book is DRM-free anywhere on the store page.
Also weirdly enough this quest of mine actually started last year when one Finnish ebook store was closed down, but that was less of a problem. I just downloaded all of my purchases as unencrypted EPUBs. Guess the local publishers are less dickish, worst thing they asked for was watermarking.
I’m actually suprised Google never went and made an reader they already have the store and software. Kobo does the job for me anyway though.
https://github.com/Jedi425/BulkKindleUSBDownloader
Quick script to download all your Kindle ebooks.
If you know any other tools, please reply.
Reposting as a top level comment for visibility. Thanks gitamar.
I am getting prompts from the script for “Your Amazon Oath”
Any idea where I can actually find/download this ?
Get an old Kindle. The new ones make it hard for you to connect to your computer. They require you to download a “convenient” piece of software meant to allow you to transfer files. But conveniently it also makes it so you can’t transfer files easily without it.
Even just a couple of years back you could plug in your Kindle to your computer through a USB and just drag and drop files. It only reads the proprietary .mobi format but Calibre, an excellent piece of software, will automatically convert .epub files to .mobi for you and it has a great algorithm.
Then all you gotta do is look up whatever you want on libgen and for the price of one kindle you can have a virtually infinite library of books.
I’ve actually had my first generation Kindle for about ~14 years now and my newer one for about ~3 years. I won’t ever buy a new one, but the ones from ~3 years ago are excellent pieces of hardware.
You just have to disconnect it from the internet and never turn on the wifi. If you do, Amazon will fuck with your settings and make your life difficult.
Basically, if you’re on a budget a used Kindle from ~3 years ago is a great choice in my opinion. If you want something new, stay far away from Amazon.
I found this super helpful… https://github.com/WeLackDiscipline/BulkKindleUSBDownloader/blob/manual-login/end-all-guide.md
The optimist in me says they’re doing this to avoid piracy.
The pessimist in me says they’re doing this so they can purge books because of the Trump administration.
Either way, I can’t say I’m a fan.
The optimist in me says they’re doing this to avoid piracy.
Won’t pirates just buy their source copies on a different platform, so now Amazon loses the original sale as well?
The “original sale” in that case is not even pennies. So… not sure why amazon would care?
Also: Many smaller authors basically depend on kindle because of the ease of use of the web portal and incentives to do larger discounts for their audiences. One of my favorite guilty pleasures has talked about exactly this (although he IS investigating alternatives).
And, much like with video games: The Sandersons of the world will be pirated. MAYBE a Dalglish will be too. But nobody cares enough to go after a Samphire or Shel.
both seem just as terrible to me
Reminder that piracy is a service issue.
100%. I have always pirated, but the amount of things I pirated went way, way down when Netflix had a decent library of things to watch and was affordably priced.
I stopped pirating altogether thanks to Spotify, Netflix and Steam.
But now I’ve cancelled Netflix and I have a 24 TB NAS filled with movies
I moved from MA to NC and I miss my library every day. (I also miss other things.)
That’s why I avoided Kindle and picked a Kobo. Sure you can remove DRMs from the books you’ve bought. But at some point they could block you from doing that. They can change anything at anytime and there’s nothing you can do about it.
That is no different than Kobo. Thus far, Rakuten have been pretty good about not caring more than the bare minimum. But there is nothing stopping them from doing the same bullshit with firmware updates to the kobos and drm updates to the store and apps.
I am finally migrating from kindle to kobo (tried kindle to boox last year and it was bad…) but I am under no illusions that I am just hoping one company is better than another. I mean, the other is Amazon so it is a pretty safe bet. But still.
Well there’s a key difference, Kobo allows epub. I don’t think they could legally remove it from devices already on the market?
And Kindle supports mobi files? It is just that those tend to get preprocessed into azw or the other one files. Much like Kobo tends to work best if you preprocess those epubs into kepubs.
The issue is that Amazon has repeatedly changed their mobi variants to fight against de-drm tools as well as increasingly locking down their apps and even devices to make it harder to get data off (and now on) to them.
There is absolutely nothing stopping Rakuten from doing the exact same with Kobo. And people should be aware of that rather than just stanning their favorite company.
there is nothing stopping them from doing the same bullshit with firmware updates to the kobos and drm updates to the store and apps.
I never connect the Libra to any network, how can they do anything? I did actually install some updates since there were a few annoying bugs, but I just downloaded the firmware on the pc from https://pgaskin.net/KoboStuff/kobofirmware.html and updated it offline. Now all those bugs seem fixed and poor Kobo still hasn’t seen the interwebs
Ah, my deepest apologies. I was not aware there was absolutely no issue or threat to anyone because you didn’t connect a kindle to the network either.
there is nothing stopping them
how can they do anything?
Just dont update and keep it off the internet I guess
This is why you never connect your kindle to the internet. Calibre forever
I just tried Calibre hoping it would help me get the metadata in my library in order… But maybe I am stupid, but I don’t understand the purpose of this software. It apparently can’t choose the MTP device as your library, only a folder on your computer? And only push the books onto the reader? I don’t get how that’s massively different from just copypasting the files into the reader. Is the main point convenient metadata editing?..
It’s a library manager, like iTunes for music, or Plex for movies, Google Photos/Picasa for photos/images . You pick a spot for you library locally, and then your local lib is a jump off point to load in on to any reader device you want. It will understand what device you are pushing it to, and automagically convert it (like Amazon’s proprietary format to mobi or epub 😜 !) to supported file-types. If you are into that kind of stuff, you could run it as a service on your network, and have all that fancy BYO cloud ebook solution.
The big difference with just copy-pasting is that you have a full library somewhere locally, and you can pick and choose what you load up on your reader. For me and maybe you, those lists are pretty close to identical, but what if you have a very large collection? And what if i just had to RMA my Libra? One click and a couple minutes after i receive my replacement, all of my books and reading progress will be synced back. If you had put your lib on the device itself, you would have had to rebuild it from scratch.
TLDR: Collection Management/Self Host and auto-convert are the big plusses.
It’s like iTunes, but for books.
That barely tells me anything because I could never afford Apple tech :/ But from what I read, Apple devices genuinely need an external piece of software to even upload anything there rather than you just copypasting the files, so idk how fair of a comparison it is.
Meta data manager, file organiser by metadata, upload a subset to your device, sync device metadata back to your library, built-in reader, file format conversion, file editing.
It’s a whole suite really.
This doesn’t track.
To pull my books into calibre, I need to first download them onto the Kindle, which requires wifi.
My kindle has been on airplane mode for years and I read new books all the time with it, but hey, whatever works for you
Ugh, thanks for the warning. Time for me to download and de-drm all my old kindle books and never again buy anymore.
Do yourself a favour, switch to Kobo or a third party ereader… Especially if you’re not in the US.
Why “especially if you’re not i the US”?
I’m not in the US, and switched to kobo a couple of years ago, but i’ve had to keep buying books from amazon, sine the kobo store is just realy bad (missing a lot of books, even popular once), and there are few others who offer ebooks here.
The quality of the devices seem not the greatest either.
Bought a kobo libra first and it lasted just long enough for the warranty to expire before it just fully died. Replaced it with a kobo libra colour, and had to replace it three times before I got one that didn’t have pin holes on the screen where light shone through.
Meanwhile my 9 year old kindle oasis works just fine, it has just gotten slow and the battery is worse, which is why I replaced it with kobo.
Because supporting the US economy from outside of it right now is ludicrous and Amazon is a union busting mega corporation that destroy local economies…
Now, I’m not a Kobo corporate shill, I don’t care which device you get, I did say there are other ereaders you can get, pick whatever you want. You don’t care about thr trade wars, you can get a Nook or Remarkable. You care but don’t like Kobo? You can buy an Onyx or another Chinese brand. You can use your phone, an old tablet whatever you want.
Personally, I’ve never not found a book on kobo but if it happened and it wasn’t at my library, I’d find alternative to buying on amazon, I’d get it physical or find other ways to get it.
You want to continue using amazon products and contribute to the success of Bezos and his billionaire friends, that’s your prerogative but a lot of us are not ready to do that for the sole sake of minor convenience.
A whole new generation of the Kobo readers just came out too!
I’ve got one of the previous Gen and I was so happy to find they have models with the clicky buttons to turn the page.
Yeah I got the libra colour and it’s really great for the buttons. Didn’t really care about the colour part but the regular one was out of stock when I got it so I just went with it and I’m finding I enjoy it a lot. Especially when I read picture books for mt kid’s bedtime
Yup, I’ve had my Kobo for quite a while now and I still love it. The push buttons are great, as pointed out by another poster, but also… I’ve just never had any issues with it. None whatsoever. I’m hoping this one will just never brick.
About a month after I got mine, I bought the exact same one for my husband and he says his is still working like a charm as well! Now to be fair, I had never owned any other e-readers so I can’t really compare it to anything, but quality-wise I’d say they’re really good.
I sure am glad I got a Kobo for myself for Xmas and ripped all my books to it. Guess I’ll be recycling my Kindle for good.
I just got a Kobo color (don’t recommend the color feature; no book is ever going to use it except the red-letter Bible and House of Leaves) and gifted the old Kindle to a friend. I e-reader is an awesome gift actually because for a lot of people it’s something they would never evenly in years take a chance on, but that they would love it if they tried.
It’s semi-decent for comics if you massage them a bit
That’s interesting. What kind of massage are you talking about here?
Answered in the sibling, but this basically: https://github.com/ciromattia/kcc
Thank you!
Interesting that you don’t recommend Kobo Color. I was thinking of gifting my mother a kobo but I might just go for a BW version.
To be quite honest I never allowed my Kindle or my Kobo to go online and the experience is not that different. The build quality on the Kindle is a bit better superior and I might well go back. Calibre is the real hero of the story IMO.
Look to whom you are giving the money. That is a very important part of the whole story.
The color might make more sense if you’re into manga or graphical novels as opposed to just ebooks
If your model accepts a custom OS, some of them make decent e-ink displays for weather, family photos, etc. Things look good in the black and white ones especially.
Yeah I’ve actually thought about doing that and making it an office desk calendar or something. Thanks for reminding me!
Its possible to buy DRM free ebooks from itch.io and it is where I get everything that I can.
Adding on to this that Barnes and Noble sells DRMed ePUB files that are relatively easy to strip DRM from using Calibre.
So if you can’t find a book anywhere else, at least they don’t use a proprietary format and still allow you to download your books using their PC software.
I was a semi-early adopter in the ebook space and I have refused to get onboard with the kindle ecosystem from the start. There’s no reason for their proprietary format other than complete control over things they pretend to sell you. Amazon is also the Walmart of books and uses their position to browbeat publishers and authors into taking smaller cuts of sales.
One of my friends got a book published and I waited and waited for it to be available anywhere else. Eventually just bought what was probably a print on demand copy from Amazon because that’s the only place his publisher sold books. I never buy physical books anymore but I’d rather do that than buy a kindle book.
I hate Amazon’s proprietary format too because one time it was the only download available and my reader just can’t display it!!
Do the non-kindle e-readers link to Libby? I may eventually try to get my wife and I off our kindles and she uses that when she can.
100% yes on Nook, and as far as I know Kobo hasn’t dropped compatibility.
resist.
Stop buying whatever it is that Amazon/Meta/Google/Etc sell. They will not stand for you. They will not respect you.
At some points, it may seem like they changed and that they are now good. They are not. They will never be. Resist them.
I bought a Kindle so I can pirate all my books. Am I resisting?
You could have made a better choice, I suppose. And some authors/editors do deserve the money.
Pirating is not necessarily resisting. Are you taking money from authors who really really need it? Or are you taking money from rich CEOs who are worsening the environment, ruining future generations, slaving, etc?
Ya good point.
Seems like I’m doing it backwards lol
Giving money to Amazon for the hardware and then stealing from the authors.
I should do some more research before buying my next ebook reader.
At least install KoReader before they find a way to firmware-lock the device.
Using calibre to just upload books directly.
I’ll check out KoReader. Never heard of it.
Yeah, Calibre is the way to go. KoReader is basically custom built for Calibre, and includes things (missing from the base kindle firmware) like native metadata retrieval.
You know I am starting to think going to the library is a better idea than buying their products. You can literally just walk in.
You can also get ebooks from the library
Some libraries offer large sections of the O’reilly Safari Bookshelf, a collection of educational tech books.
My library only offers ebooks via CloudLibrary, which doesn’t support e-readers. You have to read everything in their mobile app which scrolls instead of turning pages. It’s like someone custom built an app to be horrible for reading books in bed.
I literally pay $50 per year for a library card in a neighboring city, just so I don’t have to deal with it.
