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Moving away from Kindle (self.foss)

submitted 11 months ago by heygooberman to c/foss@beehaw.org

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I've been using the Kindle ebook reader for over a decade now, and I've accumulated quite a big digital library from Amazon. However, now I'd like to move away to another ebook reader, preferably Kobo, but I don't want to leave my Kindle ebooks behind. I'd like to bring them with me.

Does anyone have any advices or tools that they can recommend that will allow me to move my Kindle ebooks over to Kobo or some other ebook reader (e.g. Nook)?

P.S. Sorry if this post has nothing to do with this community. Out of all the communities I follow, this one seemed to be the most appropriate for such a question.

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[–] senseamidmadness@beehaw.org 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Personally I just abandoned my Kindle library when I bought a Nook. That's not particularly helpful, of course, but it's what I did as part of kicking Amazon out of my life entirely. I started buying my books from non-DRM sources.

I will say this: you may have paid for "licenses" for those books, but you don't actually own them. Amazon can rip away your access to them at any time. Were it me, I'd simply pirate DRM-free copies of the same books. Though if you can successfully strip off the DRM and convert them to open-source formats, that's just as good and carries less risk. Every time I've converted ebook formats with Calibre it's done weird stuff to the text: letters incorrectly interpreted, missing punctuation, page breaks in odd places, and enough of them to be annoying. Something to consider. Maybe that kind of thing can be corrected but I haven't yet figured out how.

[–] heygooberman 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yes, I do realize that what I purchased may have been "licenses" to access the book. That's why I'm looking for a solution that will allow me to keep what I purchased. I'm not in a position where I can just re-purchase every eBook that I got on Kindle.

I am aware of Calibre, but like you, I have also been told that it doesn't always work as expected.

What is your experience with the Nook? I haven't seen that many positive reviews of the Nook when compared to Kindle and Kobo.

[–] senseamidmadness@beehaw.org 1 points 11 months ago

I have an older touchscreen, non-backlit e-ink Nook, and I don't use any of the Web interfacing or store to buy books. I do all my library management and acquisition on desktop and then USB transfer it. Mine freezes and stutters occasionally, mostly when browsing menus or waking up from standby mode, so it's not perfect. But it's acceptable and I've done plenty of reading on it. Mostly it was cheap. I think I paid less than $40 for mine used. My last Kindle was a Kindle 3G and it behaved pretty much the same after I jailbroke it to read epub format.