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Kindle Is Making It Harder to Switch to Rival eReader Brands. (www.howtogeek.com)

submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

189 comments fedilink hide all child comments

On February 26th, Kindle customers will lose the ability to download eBook purchases directly to their PC. If you want to switch to a rival eReader brand in the future, I suggest that you use the soon-to-be discontinued "Download and Transfer via USB" feature to archive your Kindle library.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Libraries (and Libby, the app they use) are also making it difficult to do anything but read in a browser or use Kindle.

Sadly too true. To be fair though I don't think ANY librarian want that.

Here in Belgium we have an online library ( lirtuel.be ) that isn't actually too bad. I looked it up and they say they provided ePub/PDF so I registered right away. Then... I discovered what they meant wasn't ePub/PDF but rather DRMed ePub/PDF (here is an example https://www.lirtuel.be/resources/67aaf2124e480409978b68fb with ePub logo on the top right). Anyway I contacted them explaining that my ebook reader (reMarkable) does not support DRM and thus I couldn't read the content. They pointed me to their documentation https://confluence.demarque.com/confluence/cantook-station/fr/faq/verrou-numerique-et-identifiant-adobe/qu-est-ce-qu-un-verrou-numerique-drm which implies it's all "normal" to use that. I insisted, they didn't reply.

Long story short, I'm either not using their service anymore or using DeGourou https://github.com/Bingwithyou/DeGourou to make the content legally loaned actually usable. Sad state of affairs but I'm convinced none of the actual librarians, namely people who care for making knowledge discoverable and accessible like that. I'm sure they've been coerced by same big publishers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

The librarians I've talked to simply don't know how any of this works. I've been told 3 times (the 3rd one today) that epub version of books are not available. Today it was a "trained computer aid that offers technology assistance" saying the epub format I download just last week is not available from the library.