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.
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.
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.
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 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.
The frequent use of bold emphasis, lists, and subject-only rhetorical questions ("Those tiny m3,1 m1,6 m-4,-7 commands? They're micro-MoveTo operations.") are classic LLM-speak, but they're used in such a way that makes me doubt that OP actually used an LLM to write this. I think that OP's natural prose just happens to be stylistically pretty similar to that of an LLM.
It's kind of sad that what were once signs of high effort and dedication (e.g. em-dashes) are now signs of low effort and dishonesty, despite the fact that people still use them in human writing.
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.
A second peeve is that in dark mode you can only have gray on black, not white on black.
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.
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.
But there were plenty of other bugs like bookshelf management getting corrupted.
"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."
They broke that a while ago by making their DRM even worse, so now I just pirate those books.
At least Steve Jobs understood how DRM should work.
Sure seems like whoever at Amazon wrote this didn’t realize that it backdoors their DRM.
Or maybe they did, and now they will have to fix it.
second books seems erroneous
AdmiralAsshat•1h ago
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.
BolexNOLA•1h ago
AdmiralAsshat•1h ago
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.
boldlybold•57m ago
Or to the author: what happens to images in the ebook?
gruez•52m ago
rs186•43m ago
pixelmelt•56m ago