When I was a kid me and my brother read a lot, we devoured books so much so my mum had to keep taking us to the library to get more. Eventually when we got a bit older we started buying our own books and both our rooms became full of Terry Pratchett, JRR Tolkein and other amazing authors. I love reading it transports me to a better place.
As I grew up and got older I went off to University and my books stayed behind, I fell out of love with reading. This would continue for a long time afterwards. I moved back home after uni and never really picked up a book. Eventually I moved out and started life on my own on the other side of the country and my books stayed at home. When my brother finally left home he took them all with him.
Somewhere in that move away from from home I got a Kindle, the idea of being able to take a library of books with a compact form was very appealing. The added backlight meant I could read in bed properly as well which was a major plus since that’s where I do most of my reading these days. The Kindle store also was a great way to pick up cheap books here and there, this was before I really cared about digital ownership and freedom from DRM.
If you’ve read any of my other blog posts you’ll know I’m a huge fan of self hosting and getting away from big tech. So when Amazon announced that you’d no longer be able to download the files you “rent” from them I decided it was time to ditch them and move on.
First step was grabbing all my books from Amazon, this was a tedious manual task but I eventually managed to get around 150 books of there in a unfriendly DRMd format. I won’t go into the step by step details on how I got rid of the DRM but Calibre and some duck ducking (that just sounds wrong, I mean searching!) provides a very easy way to do it and also convert them into the much nicer EPUB format.
Next up was how do I read them? I already have a kindle so it makes sense to continue using that but I need to get away from the Amazon ecosphere. Luckily I started looking at this around the time Winterbreak was released but I’d missed the boat by literal days and my kindle had automatically updated patching that vulnerability. I put it into aircraft mode and used Calibre to send any new ebooks to the kindle. A few months later a new vulnerability was released called Adbreak which finally allowed me to jailbreak my kindle and be free!
Introducing KoReader. If you can and have the time/patience to jailbreak your kindle then I highly recommend it for KoReader. It’s a one stop amazing reading experience. You dump you epubs on there and start reading simple as that. It also has some absolutely amazing configuration options, my favourite so far is inverting the screen which makes it a lot nicer to read in low light conditions while having the backlight low. It’s also faster than the native kindle experience which is really interesting.
To organise and sort the metadata I used to use Calibre but switched over to Calibre-web instead. It looks nicer and I can create multiple users so I can share my library with my wife if she wants. It’s super easy to setup and you can easily import your existing Calibre library.
Another neat feature of KoReader is that it supports OPDS feeds couple this with Calibre-web and I can sync my library from my homelab to my kindle whenever I’m on my home wifi.
Overall I feel like I have a pretty good setup for my books now. Buying books in a drm format is getting easier and easier these days as well so there’s really no reason to be locked into Amazon now. When this kindle dies I’ll be looking for another e-ink reader that isn’t Amazon.