Tag: kindle

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In several jurisdictions (certainly the USA and Australia, Germany too) Amazon Kindle customers are told that by February 25th the ability to download books to your computer (for later transfer to your device over USB) will be disabled. I haven’t seen it in my Dutch Amazon store yet. That makes me wonder if it is a phased roll-out. This won’t prevent you from reading your e-books in any way, but will prevent you from storing them in useful formats outside of the Amazon silo (so that Amazon no longer can remove them at will).

I realise my steps to move all my Amazon bought e-books to an environment I control have been timely (yet, also late by several years one might say).

Within the next 10 days downloading Kindle book files and using Epubor to move them into your Calibre library should likely be a priority if you care about long term autonomy over your e-readings. Enshittification avoidance is a civic duty I’d say.

Where enshittification happens it must be made to hurt the companies choosing it. Like by no longer sending money their way. So this step just makes avoiding Amazon purchases easier to keep up for me.

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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.

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    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.

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    Amazingly useful plugins keep getting made for Obsidian. Plugins that help reduce friction to getting my material from other sources into flat markdown files that I then can edit, rework and do with as I see fit. Earlier I mentioned the Zotero plugins to extract PDF highlights and Zotero links into Obsidian. Today I started using the Kindle highlights plugin. It connects either to your Amazon account or you feed it your myclippings.txt file from your Kindle device.

    It then pulls in your highlights into one note file for each book. You can edit the template for that note, to make sure it includes the information and metadata you want. Each highlight has a link directly to the highlight in your book, and when I click it opens my Kindle app on my Mac and jumps right to it.

    Previously I would either download a CSV through the export notes function on a Kindle device which mails you your notes, or copy the myclippings.txt.

    Using myclippings.txt is still the only way to get highlights from a book you did not add to a Kindle through Amazon (e.g. a direct upload from my Calibre library).

    With one click, upon my first sync I now have about 100 notes with highlights from books I read. I never was a heavy highlighter, because of the friction of getting those highlights to a place where I could use them. That may now change.

    Image: a screenshot of how highlights from one of my books now show up as notes in a markdown file, using the default template.

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    I have now read several non-fiction books on my Nova2 reader. This is a marked improvement from before. I dislike reading non-fiction on my Kindle. Part of it is in the slightly bigger screen of the Nova2, and easier flipping back and forth between parts of a book. Part of it is that it’s a separate device, and not the same screen I read on for relaxation. An important part is also the ease of taking (handwritten) notes while using it.

    A very pleasant additional side-effect of this e-reader, compared to the Kindle, is that in the past few weeks I have bought several e-books outside of Amazon. Because the tablet is a generic e-reader, I can now shop around for a much better mix of price, absence of DRM, and local/independent bookshop. This allows me to go outside the silo Amazon wants to lock you into more easily/often.

    Two useful things I found out today about my Nova2 e-ink reader/tablet, while trying to figure out how to retrieve and use notes made on it:

    • Any markings / scribbled note I add by hand to a book or pdf, are accessible as a table of content (under the TOC button even). These can be exported to PDF for all notes, or for selected notes.
    • Next to marking things in a text, you can split the reader’s screen to have the text on one side and a notepad on the other (it doesn’t automatically set it to the left hand side when the reader is set to left handed, don’t know yet if I can change that manually). Hand written notes are then connected to the book and like the notes made in the document itself can be exported and accessed as pdf.

    It sounds like a good and easy enough experiment, getting your own simple e-book out in the market. My eye fell first on Reinier Ladan’s Dutch language video on making zines (everything old is new again), via Frank’s newsletter. Today Robin Rendle’s post Volume A popped up in my feeds as an experiment to learn how to publish an e-book in a way that just gets something out there. Those two small nudges coalesce into the idea that it should be very doable to collect a few connected blogposts and turn them into a slightly more coherent whole, for publication as a separate artefact. A decade ago I already reworked my closing SHiFT keynote Maker Households into something of an e-book draft at the suggestion and with advice of Henriette, and my Networked Agency or information strategies material would lend itself to it as well. The second nudge was the realisation that the e-book Elmine and I created in 2011(!) on How To Unconference Your Birthday (get the PDF in the sidebar on the right) is already zine like, and has both digital and physical form. An update after a decade makes sense as we already concluded after visiting Peter’s unconference and doing a short video session at Lane’s, and could be part of such an experiment in publishing e-books.

    Everything old is new again. I think I should pick up some of the things where I left off decade ago. But this time not as some big scheme, my grand theory of everything all at once, but just as a small thing. As then it might actually happen.