Kindle, ePub, and Amazon’s love of reinventing wheels

Re:Kindle, ePub, and Amazon’s love of reinventing wheels by Tagbert on Wednesday May 18, 2022 @12:10AM (#31419147)

Calibre makes converting epubs and loading them onto Kindles. It handles a wide range of different ebook formats. I probably would work with your Kobo as well if you have some non-epub source documuments.

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Re:Kindle, ePub, and Amazon’s love of reinventing wheels by AlotOfReading on Wednesday May 18, 2022 @12:57AM (#31419368)

You can use Calibre to convert with kindles, but some documents don't convert well without a lot of effort/tuning and you really shouldn't have to. Spend your money elsewhere.

The biggest downside of Kobo for me has been Rakuten's update cadence. The system updates opt-out doesn't actually work from what I can tell and my device only comes out of airplane mode once every few months. Every damn time I do so it has to download an update, lagging out for a long time, and changing the UI in exciting new ways.

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Re:Kindle, ePub, and Amazon’s love of reinventing wheels by throw1230 on Wednesday May 18, 2022 @02:59AM (#31419970)

Whenever I had a problem, the Epub book was not built right and had the exact same issues before conversion. PDF doesn't work well, but I don't know anyone does PDF well on e Reader space

Calibre is king, set things right and you can just email books to your Kindle.

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Re:Kindle, ePub, and Amazon’s love of reinventing wheels by aaomidi on Wednesday May 18, 2022 @01:38AM (#31419574)

https://www.sendepubtokindle.com/

Works perfectly.

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Re:Kindle, ePub, and Amazon’s love of reinventing wheels by pxtail on Wednesday May 18, 2022 @03:14AM (#31420050)

Maybe it works but why someone would want to use 3rd party service with no privacy policy, TOS, owners etc.

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Re:Kindle, ePub, and Amazon’s love of reinventing wheels by Tenoke on Wednesday May 18, 2022 @03:48AM (#31420245)

Because all you give them is a (usually) public book and your kindle email. Most of us aren't afraid of anything that can be done with that information.

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Re:Kindle, ePub, and Amazon’s love of reinventing wheels by mkr-hn on Wednesday May 18, 2022 @07:38AM (#31421522)

There's a reason most states in the US have laws protecting library records. I don't know who runs this site or what privacy laws and policies (if any) they operate under, so I don't know how they might feel about certain books I might send through it and what they might do about it.

I don't want to send a copy of "And the Band Played On" (for example) and start getting Chick Tracts.

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Re:Kindle, ePub, and Amazon’s love of reinventing wheels by baisq on Wednesday May 18, 2022 @03:02AM (#31419983)

To do that you need to disable airplane mode on your kindle which means you have to see ads :(

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Re:Kindle, ePub, and Amazon’s love of reinventing wheels by Tagbert on Wednesday May 18, 2022 @08:36PM (#31429316)

I’ve had Kindles with ads. They are almost unnoticeable. If you are tight on your budget it is not unreasonable to choose the ad-supported model. Often the screen saver ads are offers for books that match your interests.

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Re:Kindle, ePub, and Amazon’s love of reinventing wheels by jsjohnst on Wednesday May 18, 2022 @07:44AM (#31421567)

Or you could give up the subsidy Amazon provided by seeing ads and then ads are gone permanently.

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Re:Kindle, ePub, and Amazon’s love of reinventing wheels by bowsamic on Wednesday May 18, 2022 @01:30AM (#31419542)

I’ve never had any problem converting an epub to a mobi

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Re:Kindle, ePub, and Amazon’s love of reinventing wheels by AlotOfReading on Wednesday May 18, 2022 @01:46AM (#31419607)

You'd generally expect that to be the case as they're fairly similar formats internally. Nevertheless, I did probably thousands of conversions in a decade+ of owning various kindles and encountered issues more than a few times. When my last kindle finally kicked the bucket I simply switched to a kobo.

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Re:Kindle, ePub, and Amazon’s love of reinventing wheels by bowsamic on Wednesday May 18, 2022 @04:21AM (#31420403)

That's a pretty low failure rate then

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Re:Kindle, ePub, and Amazon’s love of reinventing wheels by MomoXenosaga on Wednesday May 18, 2022 @06:29AM (#31421071)

You can get a Kindle for 89 euro. Amazon, smartly, subsidises their products. The cheapest competitor is at least double that.

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Re:Kindle, ePub, and Amazon’s love of reinventing wheels by kX4A8o4mVmX8aW on Wednesday May 18, 2022 @11:28AM (#31423990)

In the U.S. the cheapest Kobo is just under 100 USD: https://us.kobobooks.com/collections/ereaders. They go on sale somewhat regularly.

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Re:Kindle, ePub, and Amazon’s love of reinventing wheels by _fat_santa on Wednesday May 18, 2022 @08:58AM (#31422178)

A subsidized Kindle + Library Genesis is a potent combination.

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