this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
602 points (98.4% liked)

You Should Know

33133 readers
4 users here now

YSK - for all the things that can make your life easier!

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must begin with YSK.

All posts must begin with YSK. If you're a Mastodon user, then include YSK after @youshouldknow. This is a community to share tips and tricks that will help you improve your life.



Rule 2- Your post body text must include the reason "Why" YSK:

**In your post's text body, you must include the reason "Why" YSK: It’s helpful for readability, and informs readers about the importance of the content. **



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding non-YSK posts.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-YSK posts using the [META] tag on your post title.



Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.

If you harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

If you are a member, sympathizer or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.

For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- The majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.

Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.



Partnered Communities:

You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.

Community Moderation

For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.

Credits

Our icon(masterpiece) was made by @clen15!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

This is not an anti-Kindle rant. I have purchased (rented?) several Kindle titles myself.

However, YSK that you are only licensing access to the book from Amazon, you don't own it like a physical book.

There have been cases where Amazon deletes a title from all devices. (Ironically, one version of "1984" was one such title).

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html

There have also been cases where a customer violated Amazon's terms of service and lost access to all of their Kindle e-books. Amazon has all the power in this relationship. They can and do change the rules on us lowly peasants from time to time.

Here are the terms of use:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201014950

Note, there are indeed ways to download your books and import them into something like Calibre (and remove the DRM from the books). If you do some web searches (and/or search YouTube) you can probably figure it out.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net 101 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I haven't used Kindles personally ever, but I helped my neighbor export their kindle collection a few years ago.

It dumped it into mobi files to use with calibre. Then from there, you can convert them into epubs.

I recall it being straightforward. Probably something a kindle owner should do periodically to back up their collection.

[–] GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org 47 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Another problem with DRM'd platforms is that you don't really know how long this will be easy or even viable. I recall these tools breaking in the past as Amazon changed their encryption, and it took time for them to be updated.

For anyone with a large library on Kindle, Audible, or any other DRM-infested platform, I recommend stripping that DRM sooner rather than later. You might think "I can always do it later" but there's no guarantee that will be true.

Also, shoutout to ebooks.com for having a dedicated DRM-free section and a simple checkbox to filter search results to only show DRM-free items. Not sure where to go for DRM-free audiobooks though. Anyone got suggestions? Personally I will simply not buy books with DRM, regardless of how easy it might be to crack it. If I'm going to have to break the law anyway (thanks, DMCA!), I might as well pirate it and find some other way to toss the author a few bucks.

[–] localme@lemm.ee 9 points 1 month ago

I use downpour.com for drm-free audiobooks. They let you straight up download the mb4 files haha it’s awesome.

It’s such a win-win b/c I get to buy audiobooks drm-free and I get to avoid supporting audible which has terrible business practices such as locking authors in exclusive deals.

Also thanks for the ebooks.com recommendation! I was reading this thread specifically to see if anyone knew of a good place online to buy drm-free ebooks :)

[–] boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net 8 points 1 month ago

You can get Audiobooks from Spotify using the app Soundbound. You need to insert a list of plugins, then it works.

Apart from that, youtube? Or sailing the high seas?

[–] Cenotaph@mander.xyz 12 points 1 month ago (2 children)

My understanding is they arent mobi files anymore but a proprietary DRM format. That being said, there are many wonderful calibre plugins that break the drm.

[–] TrenchcoatFullofBats@belfry.rip 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

FWIW, Amazon deprecated mobi files recently and epub is the new "sideload" standard. You still have to email the file to the kindle address to be able to read them, or convert to azw3.

If you're already using Calibre, check out Calibre-Web, which essentially uses a Calibre database as the back end. The interface is so much nicer than Calibre.

[–] tibi@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

You can use an USB cable to upload files to the Kindle, the @kindle email address is just a convenience thing. Calibre is great for converting to a compatible format.

[–] Cenotaph@mander.xyz 1 points 1 month ago

Yeah, AZW3 was the format I was thinking of. For things purchased from the amazon store for the kindle they will be in that format. If you want to move your amazon books library elsewhere you have to use some funky plugins for calibre to convert them to a standard format like mobi or epub

[–] tomkatt@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

MOBI has been deprecated for a long time. Standard formats now are AZW3 (KF8) and KFX. They're a bit more advanced than MOBI, and thank goodness, since it was a terrible format. AZW3 is essentially a MOBI/EPUB container, and I believe KFX is equivalent to EPUB2, possibly with some EPUB3 features.

[–] Anivia@feddit.org -2 points 1 month ago

It's better to keep them as mobi files than converting to epub. Mobi works on almost every device, and converting to epub can always result in messed up formatting or chapters.

If you absolutely have to convert the files to epub for some reason, at least keep the original mobi files as well