Last week I talked about not sending money anymore to Amazon. Today was international Switch Day, to encourage people to leave enshitified platforms for saner and cleaner alternatives. I don’t have much to switch away from left though. From FOSDEM, this weekend in Brussels, I’m hearing rumours about some well known US internet services seeking to relocate to EU jurisdictions. A different type of switching, but highly interesting.

I, in line with today’s theme, made some steps to improve my Amazon hygiene.
Making it easier for myself to read outside of Kindle world will go a long way of leaving Amazon behind. Moving towards new routines makes leaving old routines behind more doable, I hope.
With that in mind I centralised my e-book management fully in Calibre. A tool I have been using for years, just not for all my e-books yet. I changed that today.
Using the Epubor tool it was easy enough to ensure the e-books I bought in Kindle world and in Adobe world can be accessed by Calibre. All non-fiction titles (some 500) I bought over the years from a range of sources have now been added to Calibre.

This brings two immediate benefits:

  • I can now move all of these titles to my NOVA BOOX e-reader directly
  • Using the Calibre content server, I can search and read my collection directly from within my Obsidian notes. (I already have a note for each book)
  • I will organise the non-fiction books in Calibre a bit more, and then also move over the 800 or so fiction titles from Amazon for similar easy findability and access. [UPDATE 20250202 I added all the fiction e-books I have to Calibre as well. Every title of the 1200 e-books or so I bought since 2010 is now accessible in Calibre for me]

    Meanwhile I also initiated my ‘books to maybe buy’ list in my notes, to counter instant gratification urges.
    On the e-book purchasing side of things, I noticed that ebooks.com has a search filter for DRM free books, but Dutch platforms Bol and Libris don’t. Bol and Libris use watermarks for Dutch e-books (meaning they’re DRM free but the files contain a reference to the buyer) and Adobe DRM for books from outside the Netherlands.

    I’m trying to move away from buying Amazon e-books. I read quite a bit, 60-100 titles per year. Most of those in the past years have been e-books from Amazon (some 1000 titles in my Amazon collection). Ideally I want my spending at Amazon to end, because Amazon.

    The question is, what are alternatives?
    And how much friction will changing things introduce in both acquiring and reading books?

    Like in any silo, inside it things are frictionless, and there is a hurdle to leaving. The hurdle here is to a large extend the sum of Amazon’s practices towards publishers plus how book publishing and selling are organised globally and the resulting lack of viable alternatives.

    There is very little generic e-book publishing (meaning you’d own the title outright). Amazon ties it to Kindle, the two major book selling sites in the Netherlands each tie it to a different DRM-infested channel (Kobo/Rakuten and Adobe respectively). You’re licensing a copy, rather than owning it as they can withdraw access at any time. It also means if they go out of business or leave your local market you’re locked out of your purchases.
    For most e-books you are tied to specific apps or devices with their specific stores. There is no meaningful separation between the medium file and the reading device, they are mostly a package deal.

    Another Amazon lock-in effect results from price. I check all books with other vendors before buying. They practically never (as in maybe once in a year of reading) beat Amazon’s pricing. For paper books this holds too, as the Netherlands uses a fixed book sales price. This effect is specifically aimed for by Amazon.

    Finally, Amazon often is the only source available to me for an e-book, especially when it comes to English language science fiction.

    So the preferred conditions are:

    • e-books over paper books
    • no DRM for e-books
    • directly from author or publisher
    • wide ranges of books in multiple languages available
    • not needing several reading devices
    • from an independent bookstore (paper)

    Over the years I have bought e-books directly from authors (like Cory Doctorow who wrote the posting about Amazon’s practices I linked to above), and independent publishers (like Verso in the UK, for which I currently have a subscription), both e-books and paper books. I prefer e-books, especially for fiction, as I read fiction every evening in bed. An e-book reader comes with its own light and is easy to hold while lying on my side.

    Non-fiction I’m more ok with paper, although I enjoy immediate digital annotation in e-books too.
    Not many authors provide direct sales through their site, let alone e-books, and the same is true for publishers.
    I do frequent independent book stores regularly/mostly (both online and in physical stores), but that of course is for paper books.

    For e-books there’s no DRM free route it seems, so it boils down to picking a different Dutch/European silo next to Amazon. This reduces part of my Amazon lock-in and spending, but leaves wide swathes of English publications unavailable to me if I would move silos entirely.
    I can afford to escape Amazon’s price lock in, although it would probably double the cost or threefold of my reading for titles I buy, as I’ve regularly used the steep reductions Amazon uses to under 5USD. The local library is of no use for non-Dutch books, e- nor paper. I did get myself a university library subscription allowing easier access to paper academic books, and electronic journals, both categories outside of what I use Amazon for.

    Next to moving sideways into a more local silo for e-books, an additional step I think is weaning myself from the instant gratification of buying an e-book. Coming across an inviting title, and immediately grabbing it on Amazon to add to the pile of books to be read is how it usually goes. Likely better to allow myself time to search the best route to get them. For non-fiction I have notes about books I think are interesting, but haven’t acquired yet. For fiction I until now merely do that for titles that have been announced but haven’t been published yet. Keeping a list may help reduce my Amazon spending.

    In summary:

    • Start reading within the Dutch Kobo/Rakuten silo.
    • Keep a list of titles I’d like to acquire and explore at later moment the best way to doing that.

    I’ve bought 7 titles this January through Amazon (16 last December). Let’s set myself a challenge of keeping that number from rising!

    Bookmarked Ich hatte nie Angst um mein Leben, das begann erst mit Vucics Machtübernahme (interview with Marko Vidojkovic by Evelyn Schalk)

    Interesting interview from last year about Serbian author and journalist criticaster Marko Vidojkovic being threatened since the populist president Vucic took power. I’ve worked a bit in Serbia and at times interacted with cabinet level people. I’d be interested to read Vidojkovic’ 2020 novel Ðubre (Trash) about Serbian politics and society. It hasn’t been translated in English or German though, afaict.

    Found via Heinz Wittenbrink‘s annotations.

    Last weekend during our vacation camping along the Loire, while I was reading and flipping a page on my Kindle it somehow got stuck on the cover page. It seemed to be still on (backlights working), but didn’t respond to anything I did, nor to a reset. As the battery drained sometime after, it looked like the photo shows.

    The book I was reading, upon David Weinberger’s advice, was Cheap Complex Devices by John Sundman. I was deep enough into the novella that I can’t somehow shake the notion that the book itself has had an influence on this Kindle flop. Or maybe it was the humidity after a rainy day on the campground, with gallons of….

    RESET.

    ^^xxx^x

    A new device should be delivered tomorrow.

    I’ve reconfigured my book list automation so it also publishes them to the book section on my blog.

    About a year ago, late 2021, I made it easy for myself to publish lists of books I’ve read in OPML. Before I first made those lists in early 2021 I would publish postings about some of my reading in the book section of this site. Switching to making OPML lists based on my internal notes meant I had stopped posting to the books section. There’s however no reason why I wouldn’t do both. The OPML lists are hardly discoverable, and posting them here as well means they are being shared in RSS too. Yet, I don’t want to do things twice, so tonight I automated it.

    The script that goes through my internal book notes on my laptop to create the OPML lists, now also creates posts for each book in my site. Not for all books, just for book notes that have changed in the last week and are part of the current year’s reading. It builds on my existing personal Micropub client I use to post other things to this site too. Meaning that if I run the script weekly it will automatically post any books I’ve finished that week. Today at the start I set the script to any book read this year, so this year’s reading list is up to date.

    I read daily, and browse bookstores often. At times you pick up a book in a store, or come across it online, look at it and think that it might be interesting, only to conclude it isn’t and leave it. Until you encounter it a next time, and think it interesting and again conclude it isn’t. Some of those might be interesting at a different point in time when my own interests have shifted to align with it better.

    Others I’d better not read because they’re badly written, or there’s strong indications the content doesn’t live up to its backflap pitch. Better to spend my reading time on a different book.

    For that group I want to break out of the repeated ‘oh this might be interesting…..oh it’s not’ cycle. I already keep notes about books I haven’t bought yet but might. It’s a sort of preselection stage before both my current reading stack and my anti-library. I now added a Won’t Read List, for books I haven’t bought for which I want to ensure my future self also won’t. You might say it’s type of critical ignoring. I do positive curation in my notes, but now adding negative curation too for those books I repeatedly encountered and rejected.

    Through my feeds I follow the book notes and recommendations of other bloggers, and have found some fun and great books through them. For their negative recommendations I never had a use before, but now there’s a way to curate those for myself too.

    The inaugural version of my personal ‘Won’t read list’ has two books. Maybe I’ll add it to the OPML book lists I share online.