Quote:
Originally Posted by vishcompany
I do sympathize with your points of view regarding open source.
I'm sure you read Richard M. Stallman, so you won't mind accepting less comfort for the sake of openness or freedom.
There are readers, which can be updated with openinkpot firmware, some companies even provide the sources for the bigger part of the firmware, eg. Pocketbook claim to do so (they are of course not allowed to show the sources of ADE).
When it comes to books: You anyway can buy any book from any store. If you feel strongly about DRM, just don't buy DRMd books. It has nothing to do with the reader, actually.
You might have to accept less comfort, until the book is finally on your reader, but it is possible.
As soons as you strive for comfort and ease, you will very quickly find yourself in some kind of walled garden. That's just how the situation is at the moment and the more I appreciate your persistence.
If you ever happen to come across a book, which is only available with DRM and you need it for whatever reason, calibre with some plugins will be your friend here. By the way, calibre is licenced under GPL, it's a fantastic library software and makes administration and conversion (if necessary) as easy as possible.
To make a long story short: If openness and freedom are predominant, get a reader which can be upgraded with openinkpot. If you want some extras (pearl screen, touch), get any of the recent readers (doesn't make much of a difference) and still buy only DRM-free books. Oh, before I forget: Get calibre.
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Thank you.
Yup, I'm definitely willing to live with less comfort. Desktop Linux has come an amazingly long way, and I really don't feel the compromise now anywhere near as much as I did a couple years ago even, but it is inescapable that I run a minority OS. And that's just how it is.
I guess my main issue with the way some stores are run is 2 things.
1. The Kindle model - lock out the most common format, and support a proprietary format instead.
2. The Sony/Apple model - force DRM on all creators, if they want to sell through their store.
I admit I was wrong to lump the Nook in with that sort of behavior. I've now learned they don't do either of those things, and that's good.
Store? Fine. Optional DRM? Fine I suppose, I just won't buy those if I can at all avoid it. But the above shenanigans I don't want to support by buying their device.
I have actually just installed Calibre, and I'm going to give it a test-run on my Android phone. So far I'm really liking it. I've loaded a few books onto it, and done a file conversion from RTF to EPUB (no DRM, so I haven't had to deal with that issue yet).
I'm leaning towards the Kobo Touch pretty strongly at this point. It seems to hit the most points for me.
They do support Linux, and their firmware is indeed open source (or they have open source firmware available...? Not sure which), though it isn't OpenInkpot. On the more functional side, it seems to support a lot of formats, has touch, Pearl, and a really good price. It's looking very appealing to me.
Most of the others I've looked at that are even more "open-source purist" than that have had... a lot of technical issues to put it mildly. And/or they were way out of my price range.
I'm giving the Nook another look-over too, but it doesn't seem quite diverse enough for me. It has a couple extra bells and whistles, but honestly I don't think I'd use them.
Starting to narrow the field and get the hang of how this particular market works.