notes.jays.net

eBooks

Buying books in 2025

If an author sells DRM-free books, great! Sold!!

If they don't... ugh. Example: I wanted to start reading The Expanse books where the Amazon TV show left off. I want to read them on my Kobo Libra Colour e-reader. So the first book after the show ends is Persepolis Rising. I want to support the authors directly as much as possible, so we'll start at the author homepage:

Hey, it worked! Nice! No idea if this is better for authors than if I had just bought it in the Kobo store. But now I know I have a DRM-free backup whenever my Kobo bricks and/or the Kobo ecosystem becomes hostile to authors / readers.

Unsurprisingly, the Kobo store (kobo.com) thinks I don't own this book, continues to offer to sell it to me for another $12.

My various Kindles and my new Kobo Libra Colour

DRM-free bookstores

Backstory angst

Apparently, from 2011-2025 I purchased 291 books+ from the Kindle store.

I love/d the convenience of my Kindles. Traveling all over the world, or not, it was miraculous that I could buy books from anywhere and read them immediately, in such a tiny portable device.

The authors get the vast majority of the money(?), Amazon keeps a reasonable cut for the tech, I can grow my library forever and move it in the palm of my hand. Amazing.

Then I started reading that some authors were pissed off about Amazon keeping most, or nearly all, of the money. So they stopped selling there.

While some authors are, apparently, Audible/Amazon exclusive.

(Meanwhile, Amazon destroyed most physical book stores nationwide, apparently. Zine: How To Resist Amazon and Why. I'm not into physical books, so I still don't pay much attention to that, other than generally supporting anti-trust enforcement. We used to do that. 🇺🇸)

Humble Bundle fiasco: 2024

Jan 25 2024. Recapping a few hours of frustrating labor you should avoid:

I paid+donated $100 total to Humble Bundle + Harper Collins + a charity for a collection of Terry Pratchett eBooks.

I'm on macOS. To read them I had to:

Now you can actually read the .epub books you bought in whatever eBook reader you want.

BUT DON'T DO THAT. What a waste of time. Instead:

The archive.org versions have better cover art on them. And you can just download them and you're done. So pay+donate for the books, and ignore what you bought completely. Download them for free off of archive.org instead.

Author God Michael Warren Lucas blogged about this too.

Kindle-pocolypse: Feb 26 2025

Feb 14 2025. I saw toots about Amazon removing "Download & Transfer via USB" on Feb 26. For 14 years I bought books from them, and now they're removing the last emergency escape hatch for "my books" that "I own?" I had paid full retail price for every one of them, even when Kindle prices were higher than paperback, which always shocked me. But I loved the convenience of Kindle, so I paid.

I had never used "Download & Transfer via USB" before. I had never tried to read any of my Kindle books anywhere but the latest Amazon software, or on a series of devices I purchased from Amazon at full retail price. I had heard rumors of De-DRMing Kindle books, but had never looked into it.

This announcement felt like a violation of the peace agreement I had with Amazon. I can't trust them. I must escape with my library before it's too late.

Thanks to Calibre and the DeDRM plugin I got out. All my books are now .epub files. Or whatever other format I tell Calibre to convert them to, whenever, for whatever reason.

Over on YouTube, Rachel does a great job showing you how. I don't have a Kobo (yet?), but regardless, you need to de-DRM (or at least download) your Kindle purchases before Feb 26. Once your books are DRM-free in Calibre you have all the options and time in the world to decide whatever you want to do later: HOW TO: de-DRM your Kindle books into Calibre.

My new relationship with eBook DRM

So instead of forever pumping money at Amazon, I think this is my new set of goals for the books I read:

So in practice that means:

Misc

My local library, eReaders

I want my eReader lit for night reading, with physical page turn buttons. I don't care about color or stylus, I use my iPad + Apple Pencil for comics / taking notes / drawing.

eReaders I own:

What I'm currently reading, recommendations

Attempts to buy EPUBs:

No-money eBooks

If an author/partner is still alive, and not sitting on $10M+, I want to pay them for their work unless they insist on not taking money. Once an author+partner is dead, I'm ambivalent about paying their descendants. Most no-money books, in my experience so far, are long dead authors whose works aren't fun reads. I do enjoy occasional Shakespeare, Plato, Poe, Whitman etc.

SpeakEasy wrote:

Audiobooks

On Discord squirrelcanoe wrote: I really like Libro.fm. You can select a local bookstore to support with your purchases and they are DRM-free. I do have a referral link if you end up wanting to join :)