Interesting Links for 29-09-2022

[andrewducker]

1. Labour left vow fight-back after Starmer speech

(tags:labour politics uk )

2. Old, labyrinthine, bookshops are still magical

(tags:books shopping viaSwampers )

3. Too many people don't know that your period being two weeks late can mean you're legally past abortion limits in many US states

(tags:abortion pregnancy time )

4. Reminder that you don't actually own any movies or TV you "buy" from Amazon (or Google, or most other providers).

(tags:movies drm Amazon OhForFucksSake animation )

5. What did the Bank of England do to bonds yesterday and why?

(tags:economy economics uk doom )

Comments

[mountainkiss]

Do you own books?

[andrewducker]

Physical ones, sure.

Electronic ones, not if they have DRM - in that case you can't back them up without cracking their encryption, so they can be rescinded at any point.

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html for an example.

[channelpenguin]

I am totally for cracking the DRM on books. In fact I need to get round to it on my more recent purchases...

[mountainkiss]

Can't read NYT because paywall but very happy to take your word for it, thank you!

Man, that would be scary. I must have spent £10-20k on e-books with Amazon over the last decade.

[andrewducker]

I don't expect it to happen often with books.

But for some reason, despite the licensing being similar, the outcry over books is much higher than it is when TV/movies just vanish.

[mountainkiss]

Perhaps people regard books as more lasting in their nature due to their origin?

[alithea]

I do not know about more recent Kindles but mine stores my books on a hard drive which means I can remove Amazon's ability to delete my books by disconnecting it from the internet. Doesn't help if you have more ebooks than you can store on your device or want to download new books of course... But better than the situation with streamed media at least.

[bens_dad]

My kindle is c2014. Before the flash drive died on it I regularly copied books both ways between my kindle and my linux machine, via USB.

I only worried about keeping it off the internet once I jail-broke/rooted it so that it could read .epub files too.

[mountainkiss]

Yes, I see that. I think that must also be true of me, though it's not without risk because the device itself will have a finite life.

[alithea]

There is that, I've already had mine die once and was very surprised when it recovered after a charge and a few days turned off. I should probably investigate how much of it I can back up.

[snippy]

I wish I could pay someone to decrypt all my e-books.

[andrewducker]

If you tell me where they're from I can see if I can track down a solution?

[channelpenguin]

there are various addins for Calibre that might do the job

[andrewducker]

That's what I used to use. But I don't know what source they're using for their books so I want to make sure I get the right thing.

[snippy]

Thank you, that's kind. I buy my ebooks from Barnes & Noble. My issue is that I am afraid of not having the mental capacity to learn and then do the work. Also I have over 350 ebooks!

[bens_dad]

Barnes & Noble sell e-ink readers.
https://www.theverge.com/23188252/barnes-noble-nook-glowlight-4e-e-reader-ebook-review says

In contrast to Amazon’s Kindle but like Kobo’s e-readers, the Nook supports the ePub format so you can read books obtained outside of its bookstore. I was happy to find that it’s relatively easy to quickly sideload ePub files to it. Within 10 seconds, I was able to connect the Nook to my MacBook Air using the USB-C cable and drag and drop an ePub file into the e-reader. You could do the same on a Kindle, but this is a long, complicated process involving the Calibre app — at least for now. There are rumors that the Kindle’s “Send to Kindle” function will soon be able to easily convert ePub files into a format Kindles can read, which could level the playing field here.

(Kobo are another ereader manufacturer)
I wonder how easy it is to backup books from those readers to a laptop or PC ?

[andrewducker]

As someone who used to have one, it was a small faff to set up, but trivial afterwards.

[snippy]

Thank you. I read on an iPad using the nook app (so presumably downloading ePubs). My MacBook Pro has a USB port so presumably I could connect the one to the other and attempt to download the ePubs. But then how do I remove the DRM so I can back up those books?

[bens_dad]

DRM does not stop you from copying or backing up your books (although machines that use DRM may also try to stop you from finding the files in the first place) !
What DRM does is stop you from *reading* them on another device.

I don't *think* an ePub can have DRM - my understanding was that was the whole point. However a glance at the webpages about kepub files on Kobo devices suggests that they can.

The usual (but not always the only) answer to removing DRM is Calibre plus a plugin which supports the particular DRM used in each of your books, as Andrew Ducker and ChannelPenguin have suggested.

I do not get on with Calibre, because it wants to take over my ebook collection and I am a command-line-loving Aspie who needs to be in control of the computer.

There are ways to remove the DRM in bulk, so 350 books should not be 350 times the effort, though there may be a few that are much harder than the others.