My only real complaint about Overdrive is the premise that a copy of a book can be lent out x times. It’s a concept pushed by the publisher trying to create scarcity where none exists. Overdrive can’t do anything but capitulate. I suppose I’m also bothered by the “x copies available” concept.
I organize by age (using a ring buffer method) and have an honest “am I going to read this again?” review of my oldest shelf every few months or so.
https://github.com/joeycastillo/The-Open-Book
This may be up your alley.
One is on the device, has never purchased any books, and is a placeholder for easy software updates etc (I quite like their UI).
The other has all my purchases, but is never put on the reader. Instead I download, then use Calibre to create an open copy (for personal use only) and move it to the reader via USB sync.
It usually takes about 30 seconds to do for a book, and the result is a legally-obtained curated collection. And every book is tagged with where it came from (its legal provenance) for my own peace of mind.
My main motivation however is actually the metadata. Publishers/authors haven't got a clue when it comes to title, author, series, genre, covers etc., so all my books are now standardised and categorised and each has a cover of exactly the same size and aspect ratio. Maybe I'm an obsessive, but if you do it as and when you buy a book then it really does take a minute or two at the most. And the result is quite satisfying and, more importantly, as future-proofed as I can reasonably get whilst also being a very easy library to navigate.
In the US and many other Western countries (mostly forced by the US), circumventing or otherwise removing DRM is illegal in and of itself, even for personal use.
I like Kobo's devices for the most part, but I've only ever used KOReader on them. Kobo software seems to contain telemetry. As a side note, you can circumvent the registration requirement after wiping the reader by inserting an entry to a sqlite3 db, thus allowing your reader to be unaccounted for by Kobo or Google Analytics.
For the registration requirement you're right, but as I'm not replacing their software then by the simple expedient of a dummy account I don't need to do anything to the device, even the DB entry, and personally I'd rather not bother. Nice to know, though, thanks.
Second, strip the DRM using Calibre, and store the books off any cloud-based platform and on your own drives, as you always should in any case given the proclivity of many content companies to just flagrantly bullshit their way into excusing themselves when they frequently steal back their customers access to stuff they ostensibly own.
Once a piece of digital content is actually yours, in your own device drives, it's only then really yours.
Keep the on-device cloud-based versions around if you like the user interface of your platform or reader, but your own digital copies elsewhere. The retailer doesn't even need to know (though I personally wouldn't give a tin shit if they did anyhow).
Yes and no. There's an important distinction between _having_ something and _owning_ something. You can have possession of figures carved from contraband elephant ivory. But if anyone who was inclined to care about such things decided to take action, a court could compel you to destroy it. Same thing with any illegal item.
But these are all "ifs and buts." Hence why it's a matter of principle and not practice. At the end of the day, most people are fine with "buying" a book that they don't own as evidenced by the sales.
most people are under the impression that they own the things they've paid for, and the inevitable rug pulls always take them by surprise.
rejecting the bullshit rules of rent-seeking parasites would be a more worthy principle to pursuit.
It would be great to be able to resell digital purchases, but that’s only on the consumer’s interest, so will never happen without an act of ${rule_making_body}.
But damn I wish my Steam library had a resale value.
If it says "license" on the button rather than buy then find another store...
This is not legal advice and is my own personal opinion.
Buying a DRM book and stripping the DRM doesn't deny the seller, nor author, anything they previously had. It just lets you do what you paid for.
Just send them your own EULA at "purchase" if you think that unilateral terms no one reads should be binding on the other party.
This is not legal advice and is my own personal opinion.
I've heard, explicitly from lawyers, that sending an automated process (like a website) amendments to their EULA won't hold up at all in court. It's clear that the EULA is take it or leave it, and throwing changes at something that you know will ignore them doesn't accomplish anything.
It'd be nice if we could do it, but it doesn't fit into the reality of law.
I think that the walls of text do need to be reigned in in acceptance of the fact that it's absurd to hire a lawyer to review all of those contracts, but I also somewhat sympathize with courts' opinions of "So you think you could just use the product and the contract doesn't apply to you because you didn't want to... Read?"
Anything that isn't 'common sense' needs to be a contract that a lawyer reviews for me
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_LLC_v._ReDigi....
> On March 30, 2013, Judge Richard J. Sullivan ruled in favor of Capitol Records, explaining that the transfer of digital data from one storage medium to another constituted a violation of copyright, because the copy was ultimately an unauthorized reproduction, and therefore outside of the protection of the first-sale doctrine
AKA distribution. Without distribution, the owner cannot claim damages. So making your own copy for your own use does not fall under this.
"You have been found in violation of our EULA and we have therefore permanently deleted your account. Please check our support page at <404> for more information." - Any Service, to Any User.
Now what, for Any User? Hope you're famous enough to raise a stink on Twitter to get your account back? Pay $1B in legal costs to sue them?
And while iOS, MacOS, Windows, Android are not known to deliver exact details of everything you do it is known they send back some "telemetry".
Given the way the world is going, your comment - while true now - may not be valid in 10 or 20 years.
They can't.
There are KFX workarounds, like getting Amazon to provide the book in the older format, but then you lose all the features only present in the KFX format.
Or were you talking about epub? I used to buy epubs from the Google store but I only bought titles that weren’t DRMed. Are epubs from Google or Apple or Kobo easily cracked?
... also, I think this is why Jobs didn't bother protecting music with DRM (except for identification of the purchasing account).
My wife and I are ruthless about not collecting stuff
Plus, increasing library circulation often increases funding, making it a virtuous cycle.
I have a relatively good memory so I remember many details of a story. In spite of that, the flow of rereading a good story is a pleasure.
We listen to music over and over why not reread.
Books or music as a service, when you think you've bought them, is terrible.
is obviously to get a bigger apartment.
In other words - I wish for unlimited storage. A house, unfortunately, isn't even close. There was a book I read, once, which had a house much larger on the inside than on the outside..
I use a Kindle for a lot of books, one reason is that it's so much easier when traveling. Another reason is that my vision isn't as good as it used to, years before I got the Kindle I changed from paperbacks to the larger variants simply to get the larger font. The Kindle lets me adjust the font to something I can read comfortably in every condition. A physical book is still better in many respects though. It looks much better, it's easier to skip forth and back, and if the book contains maps or drawings (fantasy or tech books), a physical book is tons better.
House of Leaves was such an experience to read. I really liked how they had a unique take on the medium and act of reading.
Sometimes they get 'adopted', and if they don't then often whoever tries to check them out (which is presumably someone who wants to read them) is allowed to just take them as they are non-stock. And at the worst, the librarians will find another home for them (they are not usually destroyed; sometimes they join the book sale which benefits the library anyway).
I think used bookstores failed because they didn’t curate their selections enough. You can’t go into one expecting to find a specific book — you go there to discover new books. When the shelves are packed with books nobody wants, it removes the reason to go there
The story is that publishing on a Kindle has the publisher give Amazon the right to sub-license copies that are "indefinitely" licensed to the purchaser; this is in contrast to iTunes where it really feels like they're giving you a "forever" license to something, since I haven't been able to find a story about movies outright disappearing from libraries (besides via changing countries which is an iTunes quirk).
I recently got a new ereader (Pocketbook InkPad Lite) that's working well for this: https://www.neilvandyke.org/ebooks/
However, I'm very militant against DRM, so in situations where I'm unable to acquire a DRM-free book, I will de-DRM or pirate it.
Also there are book scanners out there, but don't know the price on these.
I personally read on a Barnes & Noble Nook, my fourth e-ink reader. I absolutely love it, I would go so far as to say that the current generation has a _better_ reading experience than dead trees. But I use Calibre and remove the DRM, for the same reasons that you state. I view the books not as entertainment but rather as culture. Culture worth preserving.
My apartment is running out of space for all these books, and maybe the solution to this is that I need to borrow from the library more often instead of buying my own books. I really wish I could have an e-reader, but again, I don't want to spend money on things that will lock me into a single vendor indefinitely and might just arbitrarily go away.
I learned my lesson in the early-00s when online music purchases were DRM'd and I lost a lot of my collection due to Yahoo music shutting down. I also remember one of the problems being that purchases made in one store would not be compatible with a competitor's MP3 player, which locked you into a single vendor. Couldn't switch to iPod because it didn't work with the DRM that was designed for my Dell DJ (which was a POS that broke all the time but I had to stick with it because of my existing music collection).
I'd hate to have that same problem but with books instead of music.