I still have a Kindle, but I can buy books from Kobo

I dragged my feet until the last day to download all my purchased Kindle books, but I did do it, and validated that yep, with the serial number from my Paperwhite Signature, I can decrypt them in Calibre with DeDRM_tools. Cool.

My partner had already jumped ship to Kobo, because they had an ancient Kindle that wasn't getting updates anymore. (They love their Libra, by the way. Buttons!) But I'm not jumping ship yet. It seems like I just got this thing. I did, actually!

But I'm also increasingly exasperated with Amazon in general (especially the way they treat authors), and I'd just rather not buy things from them if I have alternatives. So with this stuff cracked open a bit, I wondered—could I buy books that would otherwise be platform-locked from somewhere else and read them on my Paperwhite? Then maybe switch to something else later?

Turns out the answer is yes, but it took a little bit.

I started out by creating my own Kobo account, and grabbing a free book with DRM. (Insert laugh track.) Here's one, and in the lower-left hand corner, it's got Adobe DRM 3, which I think is the worst kind?

Over on my Mac, I installed Kobo Desktop, then added the Obok plugin to DeDRM_tools. The next steps were a little fiddly, but after a little bit of back-and-forth of letting the book sync to Desktop, opening Obok in Calibre, and restarting either app when things didn't look right, I was able to get an unscrambled copy of the book in Calibre's reader, and it looked good.

Ok, cool! Sync to Kindle. Oh god, it looks like shit.

I mean, okay, it was sort of readable. But ugh! The worst part was definitely that justified paragraphs had just random lines where they didn't meet the right margin, but there was also just kind of crappy fonts and bad spacing and everything. I could have read books like this, but I didn't want to.

Still, it was enough to go off and plunk down $12 for my own copy of How To Do Nothing, which I have been borrowing from the library way too often and with way too much waiting in-between borrows. (I will be starting my next re-read soon.)

I kept thinking, though, that I wanted to be able to read them as comfortably as possible and I wanted them to look their best, so I kept digging. And I found the answer: I need to run them through Amazon's proprietary shit to convince the Kindle that they're actually sparkly modern books instead of old crummy books.

There are two routes for this. The first one is the cloud route; hit up the Send to Kindle page, open up the folder in Calibre that contains the EPUB, drag the EPUB over.

And now I've, according to the Kindle Store Terms of Use, "Distributed" content to myself, which Amazon of course reserves for themselves the right to "investigate" for "suspected violation or misuse of any Service"… well. Possibly could get snippy if they think I uploaded a book I didn't pay for, since they didn't get the money for it.

The other route involves the KFX Output plugin for Calibre, which drives Amazon's Kindle Previewer software locally on my Mac. This works out pretty well, if slowly. I can then push the KFX over USB.

Of course, I'm fully aware that Amazon still gets "information" about my "interaction" with "other content" on the Kindle. But it at least seems a bit less dicey.

It's wild to me that nothing is actually changed about the book itself; nobody's editing it and fixing up anything about it. It's literally just going through a different export tool and coming out as a Special Format.

Actually, it looks like Kobo does something not quite so awful, but along similar lines. Renaming an EPUB book to ".kepub" makes look much better, apparently, because it will use a substantially better book-renderer.

Alrighty. At least there's no proprietary toolchain involved in right-click, rename.

Anyway, this is all working out rather well. I am curious if Obok is gonna stop working at some point; maybe there'll be a new Kobo Desktop or something similar that locks it out. That'd definitely be a shame.

Because right now, I'm in a great place—I can buy ebooks and I can keep them, no matter what company pulls bullshit.