Quote:
Originally Posted by tomsem
Nicer if you side load, and don’t mind taking the time and effort to manage all of that content and associated tool chain (presumably including maintaining de-DRM tools). I value my reading time and for me it would be taking time away from the main activity, and would gain me almost nothing.
The Amazon ‘policy’ is long standing, probably since Kindle 3 (at least). Side loaded content is ‘second class’ (but: send-to-kindle is even more convenient than side loading and you don’t need any cables, free cloud storage and syncing, and you aren’t denied any essential reading features). This is not going to change, obviously. It was never promised, so it should be expected, not disappointing. By all means, get a Kobo device.
The Kobo mobile apps are kind of terrible and have not significantly improved over the years (have you ever tried to use them?). And unlike Kindle platform, there’s no way to read 3rd party books with them, as far as I can tell. So if you are like me, who actually enjoys reading on a phone or tablet, Kobo is a non starter, however flexible their eReaders are.
We’re lucky to have choices.
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I don't mind managing my library myself, in fact I enjoy it. As my library is pretty big (as in tens of thousands) and library management on the Amazon side is very primitive (no features or sorting options besides collections and now series, which are not enough for me), Calibre is a must-have. And I only read on eink, so don't care if the reading apps are good or bad.
I do still use my Kindle. I still like it. But yes, if Amazon continues with the only-our-content-and nothing-else policy, I might not buy any more Kindles in the future. Which is a pity, because hardware-wise Kindles are very nice.