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bull3964 posted:It's precisely because it's so easy to crack that makes it an issue. It is completely and totally ineffectual to piracy. It's not actually about preventing piracy though? And non-DRM books have also prevented at least one person from enjoying their purchased books in a lawful way too, because the non-DRM format they got was completely incompatible with what they had to read with. And the very fact that piracy is so widespread and easy is why there's no incentive to remove the paltry DRM that does exist. There are very few people who are actually going to bother buying books if it was removed. There are very few people who actually get affected by it who are buying legit too - unlike say video drm for instance. bull3964 posted:Another reason why openly endorsing the portability of files matters is the content providers themselves are putting up even more roadblocks to actually GET the files. If you use Kindle for PC, you can get at the AZW files. If you use Kindle App for Windows 8, good luck. The files are split up into .fragment files that no one has quite figured out how to use yet. If that's not a clear sign of things to come, I don't know what else is. It's likely only a matter of time until they eliminate the full PC client and make you choose between the cloud reader or the Win8 app, making it harder to actually get at the files to convert. I really don't understand what you're upset about here. If for some reason you really want the files but don't want to use the reader, you can get the files from the various phone and tablet apps, as well as the fact that you can get them off the Kindle itself or the web. Why does it matter that they're doing a split up thing? Sign into your Amazon account and go to Manage Your Kindle and every book there has a download link: 
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Jul 5, 2013 20:26
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Amazon must only give you that option if you own a physical kindle. I do not.
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Jul 5, 2013 20:57
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Vegetable posted:Thank you guys, this was helpful. I'll keep an eye out for the new iPad mini. I've gotten proper used to using my N4 and N7 for reading ebooks. I love that most (not all, looking at you Comixology) apps have allowed the use of Volume Up/Down to turn pages.
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Jul 5, 2013 21:06
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bull3964 posted:Amazon must only give you that option if you own a physical kindle. I do not. If you don't have an actual Kindle device then the only option is the install the Kindle app on a desktop computer, download the books that you want, then retrieve the .azw files from wherever the app hides them on your hard drive. edit: The Kindle cloud reader has an offline reading option so there may be a way to retrieve a file from your browser's cache after downloading it that way. I don't see anywhere obvious to find the downloaded files with a quick look through my Chrome user directory though. withak fucked around with this message at 21:51 on Jul 5, 2013 |
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Jul 5, 2013 21:38
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withak posted:then retrieve the .azw files from wherever the app hides them on your hard drive. The desktop or wherever you saved them? I mean, I hate DRM as much as the next guy but this is going overboard.
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Jul 5, 2013 21:51
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tarepanda posted:The desktop or wherever you saved them? Wherever the app keeps them. On a Mac it is somewhere in ~/Library/. On a PC it is probably somewhere in %userprofile%\Local Settings\ or in %appdata%. The filenames are obfuscated but they will have .azw extensions and the metadata will be there. Probably there is a way to make Calibre auto-import anything new in that directory. withak fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Jul 5, 2013 |
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Jul 5, 2013 21:56
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withak posted:Wherever the app keeps them. On a Mac it is somewhere in ~/Library/. On a PC it is probably somewhere in %userprofile%\Local Settings\ or in %appdata%. The filenames are obfuscated but they will have .azw extensions and the metadata will be there. Weird, the last time I used Amazon's "download to my computer" thing it prompted me to choose where I wanted to save it.
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Jul 5, 2013 22:06
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They aren't hard to find for the PC App right now so it's not a huge issue yet. However, the Windows 8 App is a whole different story. That's a book and no one has figured out quite what to do with it yet. My concern is that Amazon decides to do away with their standalone app down the road and just maintain the Modern UI app and cloud reader. Fortunatly, I'll know before I buy any more books if that's the case. But it's still a bullshit thing that we shouldn't have to deal with. I can buy thousands of songs from Apple, Amazon, Google, or Microsoft and use them anywhere I want. The same should be true for books.
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Jul 5, 2013 22:53
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bull3964 posted:That's a book and no one has figured out quite what to do with it yet. My concern is that Amazon decides to do away with their standalone app down the road and just maintain the Modern UI app and cloud reader. Fortunatly, I'll know before I buy any more books if that's the case. But it's still a bullshit thing that we shouldn't have to deal with. I can buy thousands of songs from Apple, Amazon, Google, or Microsoft and use them anywhere I want. The same should be true for books. I would actually be super super happy if I had a cloud reader guaranteed to give me my books anywhere on any device I wanted in a web browser in a way that didn't suck.
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Jul 5, 2013 23:07
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bull3964 posted:They aren't hard to find for the PC App right now so it's not a huge issue yet. However, the Windows 8 App is a whole different story. The Windows 8 App version of Kindle reader is a Javascript application that handles stuff the same way as the web reader does when operating in solely online mode. The fragment files are basically broken up chunks for "streaming" the book. There is a fundamental habit of Windows 8 store apps to be just website javascript copied to your computer, that's how it works. You can read Kindle books on the major computer OS, as well as the minor one. And you can use it the major mobile OSes as well as a few of the minor ones. And on top of that there's also the web reader. There are currently over two billion devices out there that can read Kindle books when you add up all the supported devices. And most of the ones that aren't supported couldn't read them even if the books had no DRM, because they do not support the formats that Amazon uses at all, DRM or not.
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Jul 5, 2013 23:28
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Gorbash posted:I'm pretty sure that's a publisher imposed restriction - Amazon would be pretty happy to take your money regardless of where you might be. Yeah, the one time I've run into this issue as an American (with a book I wanted available on Kindle in the UK but not the US), I was told when I e-mailed the publisher that it had to do with international publishing rights and their contract with the author.
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Jul 6, 2013 05:12
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The Kindle 3 WiFi I've had for over two years finally decided to die.  Last night while I was reading it switched itself off and would not start back up. I hard reset it (pulling back the power switch for 30 seconds) and after a few minutes it booted back up, finished reading for the night and went to sleep. This morning the thing had turned itself off again, hard reset again but it wouldn't power on, plugged it into the charged for a few hours and it finally rebooted. That lasted only a couple of hours though and now it's dead and won't turn on no matter what. The light doesn't even stay on when I plug it into the charger or my PC, comes on for a few seconds and then disappears. It was about 3/4 charged when it first died and earlier on when it came back to life for a few hours after charging the light was green, so I'm pretty sure the battery is fine. It's out of warranty but I contacted Amazon support chat anyway to see if there's anything I could do (there wasn't) but I got offered some reduced refurbished Kindles. Can get an old 4th gen for 47 quid, touch for 68 or Paperwhite for 75 quid, all of which are about 20 quid cheaper than buying a refurbed model direct from Amazon, so that's pretty cool. Think I'll grab a Paperwhite next week. They also offered me a refurbished Kindle Fire/Fire HD for a bit cheaper than normal as well for whatever reason. But before I fork out for a newish device I was wondering if anyone had any ideas about kicking some life back into my old Keyboard model? Or if anyone knows how I can access the data so I could back up my data? Also I bought a new case for my K3 about three weeks ago, now it seems that's money wasted 
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Jul 6, 2013 19:39
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You might have better luck contacting amazon phone support. It's worked for people in the past.
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Jul 7, 2013 00:41
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Picked up a Kobo Aura HD today at Indigo. So far, I'm blown away. It's awesome, and I'm enjoying the e-book experience a lot more than I thought I would. Certain books will never be replaceable (like large picture books) but I can definitely see this being the way forward for my fiction reading. The newest version of Calibre is pretty great, it formats your normal epubs into the Kobo E-Pub format which gives you all those great book stats (time spent reading, time left to finish it, etc) as well as the header/footer with the chapter title and number of pages. I also set up my default font as Adobe Garamond Pro, which is a pleasure to read with - and Calibre's polishing/reformatting of e-pub files makes everything consistent and eminently readable. I also figured out how to make it work with Pocket, so that's pretty seamless now too (it just syncs every morning at 6am, or I can force it). All that's left to do is figure out what the hell this Shelves stuff is all about, and start sorting my books!  EDIT: To say, I just successfully turned my Samsung Galaxy Nexus (on WIND Mobile) into a Wireless Access Point (using FoxFi) and was able to connect to the internet! If I bother to sync my Calibre library with DropBox, I could see it being a useful way to get a new book if I needed it for some reason... but with 4GB of storage and an SD slot, I doubt that'll be necessary. Nice to know it can be done, though! Guitarchitect fucked around with this message at 04:24 on Jul 7, 2013 |
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Jul 7, 2013 03:43
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My paperwhite just had a meltdown (large parts of screen blank, working very slow) when I added some books through Calibre, after a restart and changing the sorting I discovered what book was causing the problem and deleted it. I looked at the book in Calibre and there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with it. What could of caused this?
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Jul 7, 2013 18:32
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Koburn posted:My paperwhite just had a meltdown (large parts of screen blank, working very slow) when I added some books through Calibre, after a restart and changing the sorting I discovered what book was causing the problem and deleted it. I looked at the book in Calibre and there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with it. What could of caused this? You'll have to answer some questions regarding the book such as:
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Jul 7, 2013 23:24
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Koburn posted:My paperwhite just had a meltdown (large parts of screen blank, working very slow) when I added some books through Calibre, after a restart and changing the sorting I discovered what book was causing the problem and deleted it. I looked at the book in Calibre and there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with it. What could of caused this? Depending on the source of the book, it may simply be extremely poorly formatted. ePub and Mobipocket (including AZW) are simply XML/HTML formatted documents but it is conceivable that someone would format a book improperly. If the book isn't one of those two formats, then I don't have a good explanation. If it's a PDF, it may just be quite massive and difficult for the device to render...
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Jul 7, 2013 23:34
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Koburn posted:My paperwhite just had a meltdown (large parts of screen blank, working very slow) when I added some books through Calibre, after a restart and changing the sorting I discovered what book was causing the problem and deleted it. I looked at the book in Calibre and there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with it. What could of caused this? If you can upload it somewhere and shoot me a private message with the link, I can help figure out how to fix it and why it wasn't working.
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Jul 7, 2013 23:49
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I don't suppose there's any word on a new Paperwhite-competitive e-ink Nook? As I understood it only the tablet stuff got bought out by MS. I really love Nook's form factor & buttons.
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Jul 8, 2013 17:45
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Vegetable posted:Thank you guys, this was helpful. I'll keep an eye out for the new iPad mini. Come to think of it, even if the new Mini doesn't get Retina support, you'll at least get better specs. You might also want to consider a new Nexus 7 when Google updates that.
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Jul 9, 2013 14:39
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Crackbone posted:I don't suppose there's any word on a new Paperwhite-competitive e-ink Nook? As I understood it only the tablet stuff got bought out by MS. Barnes and Noble is not doing very well, to put it mildly. I would be surprised if they ever release another Nook. Your best hope is if someone buys out the whole division from them.
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Jul 9, 2013 17:05
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Microsoft tossed $300 million in to Nook last year and will likely just buy the whole division if it came to it.
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Jul 9, 2013 17:09
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bull3964 posted:Microsoft tossed $300 million in to Nook last year and will likely just buy the whole division if it came to it. Probably, though I think their interest is more in the content portion of the business than the hardware itself since that's the really profitable portion of the business. Obviously there would still need to be Nook devices out there to read the content, but who knows whether Microsoft or anyone else would even be interested in developing dedicated e-ink readers for them or just use the Nook marketplace with their existing tablet/smartphone structure.
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Jul 9, 2013 17:23
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That gets into quite a larger question of the place of e-ink readers in an increasingly tablet dominated market. For example we know straight from the horse's mouth that Amazon makes no profit on the Kindle Fire HD and Kindle Paperwhite (at least as current as October of last year. What this means is, e-ink readers will only continue evolving in the market as long as their R&D costs get offset by media sales. At the end of the day, Amazon and B&N are "software" vendors (in this case, the software is book licenses.) Their hardware exists only so far as it forwards their goal to sell software. As soon as hardware stops helping those software sales, it will be axed or at the very least have the development curtailed. We already saw this in two places, the Kindle DX and the Nook tablets. Both are still for sale, but they pretty much exist in their final forms and won't see a new model anytime soon. Microsoft taking the reigns from B&N changes little about that. If e-ink readers help the bottom line of selling books, then they will continue to be sold. If they only help a little, expect the hardware refresh cycles to lengthen and eventually stop. If they help a lot, expect continued evolution of the product. If they become a cost center that can't be justified by additional media sales, they will be axed. This goes for B&N, Microsoft, or Amazon. It's difficult to paint a picture as to how things are shaping up right now as the biggest source of data (Amazon) doesn't disclose either the breakdown of hardware sales nor the revenue generated between tablet and e-readers. However, we will get a general idea how things are shaping up by whether or not the Kindle eReader line gets refreshed for the holiday season again.
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Jul 9, 2013 20:32
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Given that I've been desperately trying to get away from the Microsoft Ecosystem (a really nasty experience with account lockout due to hacking), I'm not going to be happy if they hover Nook into that.
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Jul 9, 2013 21:15
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the first company to make a really good hybrid e-ink/LCD display is going to make a killing - I think that's really the only way forward. Don't get me wrong - I got a Kobo Aura HD and I am enjoying the e-book experience WAY more than I thought I would. I'm a near-total convert. Personally, it won't stop me from purchasing books. But I don't see it having the kind of growth/turnaround needed in order to push the industry further. It's a single-use device, and until that changes it's going to be a niche product. Just look what happened to MP3 players once smartphones came along... In any case, the race is on - Apple's Patent pixel qi's 3qi Then there's the idea of LCD on one side, e-ink on the other...
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Jul 10, 2013 00:06
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ConanThe3rd posted:Given that I've been desperately trying to get away from the Microsoft Ecosystem (a really nasty experience with account lockout due to hacking), I'm not going to be happy if they hover Nook into that. Did you buy books in .lit format?
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Jul 10, 2013 00:57
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Will Kobo Desktop bug me if I leave it installed but don't use it? Do I need it for updates after initial setup, or can the device (Aura HD) do that on its own like my Kindle?
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Jul 23, 2013 05:25
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sirbeefalot posted:Will Kobo Desktop bug me if I leave it installed but don't use it? Do I need it for updates after initial setup, or can the device (Aura HD) do that on its own like my Kindle? Kobo will happily download the latest updated itself when you press sync. As for Kobo Desktop, it hasn't nagged in my experience about not using it.
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Jul 23, 2013 10:16
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Just bought a paperwhite for a friend in America... it was much more expensive than I thought it would be. Amazon must be losing tons of cash on every Paperwhite sold here in Japan.
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Jul 23, 2013 10:20
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tarepanda posted:Just bought a paperwhite for a friend in America... it was much more expensive than I thought it would be. Amazon must be losing tons of cash on every Paperwhite sold here in Japan. I wouldn't be surprised. Amazon has always been quite willing to forgo short-term profits for the sake of building marketshare, and the Japanese e-book market is still young. It's in their best interest long-term to dump the hardware to get more Japanese readers trying out e-books for the first time invested in their ecosystem rather than someone else's.
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Jul 24, 2013 13:03
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tarepanda posted:Just bought a paperwhite for a friend in America... it was much more expensive than I thought it would be. Amazon must be losing tons of cash on every Paperwhite sold here in Japan. Wow, you weren't kidding. The Paperwhite is only $79.62 in Japan.
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Jul 24, 2013 18:39
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Call Me Charlie posted:Wow, you weren't kidding. The Paperwhite is only $79.62 in Japan. Is there a brick-and-mortar store that one can buy a Paperwhite at in Japan? I'll be there for a couple weeks in October.
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Jul 24, 2013 19:42
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God drat, if shipping wasn't like 40$ I'd try to get someone in japan to grab me another one.
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Jul 25, 2013 00:19
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Sofmap in Akihabara has them as well as a bunch of covers/accessories. They occasionally run sales on them too.
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Jul 25, 2013 00:35
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You can get a Paperwhite at Staples.com for $90 with coupon code 41178.
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Jul 25, 2013 23:02
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I have a new Paperwhite on the way from Amazon. I would prefer to primarily charge my Paperwhite through a wall adapter and I was disappointed to see that Amazon would charge me $20 for either of their branded adapters. I have Apple's 5 watt USB adapter. Can I plug my Paperwhite into said adapter and have it charge with no problems?
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Jul 27, 2013 16:19
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I've used my Kindle Touch with both an iPad and a dumbphone adapter so you shouldn't run into any problems there.
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Jul 27, 2013 16:25
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mistressminako posted:I have a new Paperwhite on the way from Amazon. I would prefer to primarily charge my Paperwhite through a wall adapter and I was It's microUSB, any microUSB charger will work. I use the same one that my cell phone uses.
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Jul 27, 2013 22:16
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Yep, the only issue is needing a micro USB head on your USB cable.
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Jul 28, 2013 06:47
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