Quote:
Originally Posted by Worldwalker
I believe that the Kindle is the only e-reader that's actually tied to a specific company, in that you have to email your own documents to an address at Amazon to have them loaded, and I'm not even sure about that. Maybe you can just hook up a cable, like you can with all the rest. (Kindle owners, help?) Just about every other device on the planet, though, you can hook a cable to and transfer your books, wherever they may be from. Most of them nowadays look like just another drive to your computer, too; you can just copy the books onto that drive, in the proper place of course, and there they are. And of course we calibre users just pick "send to device" and calibre does all the heavy lifting.
|
It's little different for Kindles, Worldwalker. The email route to getting stuff on the Kindle is a convenience, not a requirement. It's also a useful way of getting documents onto the Kindle which are not in a format the Kindle can handle natively - they go through an automatic conversion before being sent out to the Kindle. It's equally possible to simply plug the Kindle into your PC/Mac via USB and transfer documents directly to the appropriate directory on the Kindle (obviously having already ensured that the documents are in an appropriate format). The two main issues with the Kindle are that it can't handle EPUB format directly (needs to be converted to MOBI), and it can't read ebooks which are encrypted with non-Amazon DRM. But DRM-free MOBI files can simply be loaded via USB (or email) - I just bought a couple of C J Cherryh ebooks from the author's own website and side loaded them onto my Kindle and now very happily reading them.