Quote:
Originally Posted by Sirtel
There is one reason one should consider "mucking around" (besides library organizing) and that is backing up your books. If you don't remove the DRM and make your own backups, your only hope is that the stores where you bought your books will never go defunct or close your account (the latter is known to have happened to several Amazon customers, for example). Granted, if you're the type who reads everything only once and deletes, this may not matter to you.
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There are two reasons for me. You've captured one of them. I have a bunch of Amazon purchases. I have them all on my PC in Calibre with the digital rights encryption stripped off. If you own a Kindle, there are clear instructions that turn up on a Google search for how to do this using the DeDRM plug-in. They're backed up and I have them forever. I converted them all to epub so I can easily move to another brand of reader.
The other reason is that some ebooks have problems that make them incompatible with your ereader. A well known one for Kindle users is the representation of special characters in some epub documents. Ellipsis, long dash, etc. They get garbled by the Amazon cloud document converter. With Calibre, you can convert an epub to an epub. It will change the representation of those special characters and the Amazon cloud document converter will convert to the proprietary Amazon azw3 format properly. I also use Calibre to add or change covers, fix the metadata, and occasionally edit style sheets. With my current Kindle, I have it permanently in airplane mode and use Calibre to side load ebooks to my ereader.
I'm in this thread because the Paperwhite has a few annoying things that have me looking for another brand. I could move to a Kobo in minutes since everything is already in Calibre and in epub format. I'd probably want to make one pass at all the metadata to clean it up before pushing everything to a Kobo. Kindles don't do anything with the metadata so it's not 100% accurate in my ebooks.