Technology

My wife lost her amazon account (with all her ebooks) twice and she still buys ebooks there. I managed to import a Kobo from Paraguay to try and get her off the hook but it only worked for like 3 months as almost everything is amazon exclusive these days.

(both times she lost the accounts for disputing credit card charges that were not tied to her account)

wink

My friend Anna was telling me about some Archive or something she found online. I wasn’t really paying attention as they were serving dinner.

To expand on this a tad: Calibre allows you to manage your digital library. And Calibre-Web allows you to access an existing Calibre database via your e-reader. Once it’s set up, your Kobo can download books directly from your Calibre instance.

There are a few good ebook stores that offer DRM-free versions of ebooks, which you can add to your Calibre instance. Or Calibre has an (unofficial, not technically supported) extension that will automatically strip DRM from files when you add them.

I’m personally a fan of buying a physical copy, and acquiring a digital copy.

It's through Overdrive, a service that lends books to library patrons. Overdrive's current interface for mobile devices and browsers is known as Libby. At one point in time, both Kobo and Overdrive was owned by the same company.

Note, libraries only offer a small selection - the selection mine offers is a lot different from the library up the street from me. It's all curated from organization to organization.

Edit: Overdrive also operates Kanopy, a library video streaming app; as well as Sora, an K-12 reading app.

Someone should make a youtube sketch where a woman keeps getting suspicious of her boyfriend cheating on her.

And the bf IS being secretive, and dismissive. The girlfriend isn't being paranoid, or crazy. The boyfriend IS giving her legit reason to think he's hiding something. Every Tuesday he won't return calls. Gets dodgy about asking where he was. So she decides to follow him.

And when she follows him turns out he goes over to a guys house. And then, men and women keep showing up. Gotta be 30 people in this house. So now she's thinking her boyfriend is doing sex cult shit. Like in eyes wide shut.

So when she finally breaks down the door, and goes in, turns out he's just in an ereader book club of the month. They all read the same book, at the same pace. And then discuss.

So when she asked him what he was doing those days, he told her that "she wouldn't understand", he just meant that she was illiterate and wouldn't understand reading. And when she asked where he went, and he said "It's a secret", that's just the name of their book club. And when she asked who's perfume she smells on his jacket, he said "That's just Julie. I eat her pie, while staring at her rack." He just meant she brings baked goods for all the book club members, and they look at the book rack for the next book the club will read.

And then when she's finally relieved, and all the confusion has been sorted, she asks if she can join the book club. So he says "You can.....but I don't know if you're the type of girl who would want to participate in the late night post book reading orgys."

The biggest problem I have with Kobo isn't even really something that's their fault or that they can do anything about. Amazon through their Amazon Unlimited program has locked a bunch of major authors into exclusivity contracts where they're contractually barred from distributing their ebooks on other platforms. That in turn means a bunch of major authors are just completely unavailable anywhere but Amazon, and of course Amazon ebooks exclusively only work on Kindle devices. It's a vicious feedback loop where authors refuse to leave Amazon because it's the market dominator by a large margin and consumers refuse to use anything else because all the authors are only on Amazon.

If you can make do with non-Amazon sources of ebooks it's great to do so and we really need more people doing exactly that in order to convince authors that the Amazon shackles aren't worth it, but it's definitely a struggle sometimes.