What is the Point of Kindle/eBooks?

Before my Sony ereader went tits-up I used to read a lot of novellas on it. Those took me just a few hours. I called it research, given the genre in which I write.

You get a lot of free books with ereaders these days -- Bronte, Dickens, Austen, Shakespeare and so on; all the obvious ones. But I still order print copies of those off Amazon because longer books mean there will be more chance of me wanting to flip back and check something and as has been mentioned, this takes an age on an ereader.

And it uses battery charge.

PeteDutcher said:

I (think) Nook lets you highlight text and attach notes to it.

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Kindle does, too, but I find it a pain. Also, I often don't know that I'll want to find a line or scene again until something else comes up later. I like to flip through real pages. It's just much, much easier for me.

mirandashell said:

Hmmmm... that does put me off getting one. When you have a book, you know it's on the shelf and it's yours. You're not dependent on someone else holding it for you.

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Scenario...

You wake up, smell smoke, discover your house is on fire. Will you save your books, (after the children and pets of course.)

With a e-reader, even if its lost in the fire, you can get another and all your books are stored in a cloud from B&N, Kindle, or Amazon. You do not have to repurchase your own paper libray.

> could I then copy the file from my Kindle to my computer, as a back up?

Backups seems to be a recurring question.


I have a Kobo eReader, which is based on Adobe's Digital Edition (a stripped down version of Adobe Reader with eBook DRM) as its software core. It also sports an integrated SD card reader.

Main memory (DRM'd books)

The books I paid from Kobobooks (eq. to Amazon) are stored on the Kobo's main memory, which is managed through Adobe's DRM. Should I lose my eReader or should it break for some reason, then I have to deauthorize the device and re-authorize the newer one. The DRM'd books get uploaded on the next sync. So I don't have to backup anything. My risk here is if Kobobooks goes belly up...

SD Card (DRM-free books & PDF documents)

The ePub books I have, which don't have any DRM attached, are put on an SD Card. The Kobo recognizes those books and documents and show them like any other book. But I have to make sure I have a copy of that SD card somewhere. Adobe's DRM won't sync that. So all the non-DRM books I want on my Kobo are put on the SD card first, then I put the card into the Kobo. This is a PC -> eReader thing, so the backup is performed on the PC. Should I lose the eReader or the SD card fails, then everything I have was already on my PC to begin with.

I don't know how Kindle manages its books, but I suspect its DRM works pretty much the same way.

ETA: The way the Kobo / Kobobooks / Adobe DE works in my case, is that I also have a license for two more devices (three in total). So I can also read the DRM books on - say - an Android-based phone and an iPad, as well as the Kobo eReader.

-cb

If one were truly concerned about an e-book seller removing the content from the cloud or the device, one could conceivably use a program like calibre and some associated drm-removing scripts to back up one's books in alternate formats. Were one not *too* concerned about the legalities, of course.

I have heard tell of such nefarious deeds, but my question was regarding having books sent from Amazon, through Wi-Fi, directly to your ereader.

Can you then copy the book from the Kindle to your computer as a back-up? If you plug it in to your computer, does the book show as a transferable file on the "external drive", i.e., your ereader?

scarletpeaches said:

I have heard tell of such nefarious deeds, but my question was regarding having books sent from Amazon, through Wi-Fi, directly to your ereader.

Can you then copy the book from the Kindle to your computer as a back-up? If you plug it in to your computer, does the book show as a transferable file on the "external drive", i.e., your ereader?

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Yes.

Spanking.

Right. A Kindle it is, then. Seems obvious to me; copy everything over to your computer for extra back-up, and screw Sony up the wazoo for their crappy customer services.

I assume there'd be a problem reading DRM books on another Kindle, but I only buy DRM-free smut anyway. Everything else? Print.

You can add notes, highlight text, and set bookmarks.

You can copy files from your Kindle to your hard disk and back.

You can read a book you've purchased once on multiple devices that you have registered with amazon, including iPad, iPhone, Mac, and your PCs.

Your archives are available to you on all your amazon-registered devices.

If you have an epub file, you can convert it to the kindle format with free software.

DRM is treacherous territory. I don't know another way they could have done it, though.

scarletpeaches said:

I assume there'd be a problem reading DRM books on another Kindle, but I only buy DRM-free smut anyway. Everything else? Print.

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If you have two Kindles, registered under your account, the DRM files are shared. You can also digitally lend some books to friends.

Al Stevens said:

DRM is treacherous territory. I don't know another way they could have done it, though.

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By giving up on DRM, which more and more authors and publishers are doing.

If one were to be interested in removing DRM from your legally-purchased ebooks and thereby guaranteeing that your legally-purchased ebooks will be available from now until the end of time (or the end of the Internet, at least) without worrying about the lifespan of any publisher, manufacturer, or cloud hosting service, one could very easily find the means to do so with Google.

All of my legally-purchased ebooks are DRM-free about ten seconds after I download them.

Note: I'm not sure about laws in other countries, but in the U.S., it's not illegal to strip DRM from your legally-purchased ebooks for personal use. It may be a violation of the publisher's TOS (the same way you don't technically "own" any software you buy, you just buy a license to use it), but they can't actually do anything to you unless you distribute DRM-stripped files.

scarletpeaches said:

I have heard tell of such nefarious deeds, but my question was regarding having books sent from Amazon, through Wi-Fi, directly to your ereader.

Can you then copy the book from the Kindle to your computer as a back-up? If you plug it in to your computer, does the book show as a transferable file on the "external drive", i.e., your ereader?

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Yes. The Kindle comes with USB cable supplied and you just plug it in and it mounts. Documents are all in one big folder on the Kindle, so you can just copy over that entire folder to your PC. Or you can go and copy specific files for that book. They have sensible names, so you can find them okay. You can also copy from your PC, say compatible format books you got from places other than Amazon, and you can also put on personal documents. PDFs and text documents can just be copied over without any kind of conversion in between. It's dead easy. One of the Kindle's big selling points is how easy it is to manage. Even my Dad hasn't managed to screw his up yet and that's saying something.

The main point of an ereader for me is that if I didn't have one then many of the books in my genre just wouldn't be available to me. Some of them I might be able to get with print on demand, or by importing, but at an inflated price for a paperback compared to a paperback I could buy in a shop.

This gives small presses a long reach. People all over the world can access books from a small press which couldn't possibly afford to distribute paper books internationally.

They keep books available that would otherwise have disappeared and only been possible to find second hand.

They're good for writers in that they give them longer to build up a readership, freeing them from the need to make it in six months or whatever before the book stores stop stocking the books.

My paper book collection had reached a "one in, one out" stage. There's no more room for more bookshelves, never mind room ON my bookshelves. There's certainly not room to add another hundred or so books to my house every year.

Large print books for the visually impaired are expensive and the range is restricted. With Kindle someone with bad eyesight has access to the same books as everyone else, and doesn't pay any more for them. I don't have to read large print books, but even with only minor short-sightedness so far I appreciate the ability to tweak the font and spacing to what's compfortable for me.

I haven't stopped buying paper books, by any means. Some books are things of beauty in themselves that I want to own for those qualities as much as for the content. But for most fiction then what matters is the text and the Kindle gives me that just fine and once I'm into the story it makes no difference to me that I'm reading on a screen, or pressing a button instead of flipping a page.

The range of books available is fantastic. Okay, so you can order books at a book store if they're not on a shelf. But how, at a book store, could you, for example, compare samples of several different translations of a foreign language book, to see which one you prefer? They've probably only got one version of the book, so that's the translation you're lumbered with.

I have the Fire. It's not eink, so if you hate screen reading it might not be for you. I love it. Not just books, but apps, internet, email, and a small office program if the writing mood strikes, though I'm not convinced I'd love typing on it for any period of time. Pandora radio even!

You can book mark and highlight, and while your library is saved in the cloud, you need to download any book you want to read to the device. But it can be removed to save storage. I also have Kindle on my netbook, so I COULD download it to my Netbook and save it there, in case I was away from the internet and needed to transfer a book to the Fire.

I have also emailed docs to the device, like lecture notes from grad school. THAT is handy. You can read any .pdf or doc on it, and it's a simple matter to increase the font size if it looks small.

Hmmm... interesting stuff.

I'm coming around to the idea. It's just that I love paper books. I love to curl up in bed with a book. It helps me sleep.

I guess I need to actually hold and try out an ereader before I make my mind up.

I prefer paper books and hardbacks, however a couple years ago I found myself traveling a lot. My wife got me a Kindle 3G and it's been a boon companion. It's great for the daily bus commute to the office or for domestic/international travel.

One of the features that I came to love was the "experimental" web browser. Thanks to Amaz0n's Whispernet, I was able to surf the Interwebz for free on any 3G signal in any country. During a two week stint in Brazil earlier this year, my co-workers were spending $50 a day on hotel internet while I was able to surf for free. The capabilities were extremely limited and the web-browsing was clunky, but it worked in a pinch. It'd be like buying a Porsche that can make waffles. Sure it can do it, but is that what it's really designed to do?

That said, if I'm not traveling or commuting, my go-to is still a tangible book. But the e-reader certainly has appeal and it's come in handy more times than I can count.

My two coppers.

My Sony had 'collections' which I divided up into folders for Loose Id, Total-e-Bound, Samhain and other publishers.

Is it true there's no folders/collections function on the Kindle? That's not entirely necessary but due to the fact I have hundreds of ebooks, it was a way of organising my smut.

True, SP, Kindle did not implement folders in their original e-readers and archives. I don't know about the newer ones. They'll have to eventually. It was a common complaint.

I'm anal enough to keep a catalogue of my print books in MS Word, colour-coded as to which I've read, and which not, so I can easily do the same with my ebooks. Just to keep a record of "Whut smut?"

Amadan said:

All of my legally-purchased ebooks are DRM-free about ten seconds after I download them.

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Which of the DRM removal procedures did you choose?

Al Stevens said:

Which of the DRM removal procedures did you choose?

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The python script and calibre plug-in from Apprentice Alf's blog.

scarletpeaches said:

I'm anal enough to keep a catalogue of my print books in MS Word, colour-coded as to which I've read, and which not, so I can easily do the same with my ebooks. Just to keep a record of "Whut smut?"

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You can also delete a book you've read from the Kindle. Amazon puts it into your archives, which are accessible any time. I guess that's a kind of a folder.

My 2nd gen Kindle does have folders ("collections"). There is only one level. You cannot create sub-folders. However, I think you can add a book to multiple collections - so it's more of a tag than a folder.

Archived items is useful for the smut if you want to let your mother look at your kindle, since "Archived" always shows up at the very bottom of the list.

Amadan said:

The python script and calibre plug-in from Apprentice Alf's blog.

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Thanks. I didn't know about that one. I was using command line python scripts, which is a pita. This way is seamless.

Some people like ebooks and find ways to do all the things they want to do with them. I don't see a reason for getting upset about other people using a format you don't happen to want to use. Thats like saying chocolate cake should even be on the menu because you don't happen to like chocolate.