What's it like using the Kindle without Amazon?

[stumped]

Originally Posted by ilovejedd

Only if you wish to use it for books with DRM.

If your books are DRM-free, you only keep a short reading list on the device and you're fine with the software limitations, then Kindles are fine.

only if your own flavor of OCD does not give you a hard time for having features that you cant use

e.g. simply had to hustle up use of an overdrive card to see that feature of my Kobo in action, even though I'd previously gone for months happily not borrowing any library books ( I know it was months because when I looked into what was going wrong, I found that my library had left overdrive 5 months earlier ! ).

maybe someone who had vowed to have nothing to do with amazon (which does make me wonder how they would buy the kindle) can convince themselves that registering with fake credentials is not a breach of principle, then at least they'd get collections enabled, and access to firmware updates

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by stumped

only if your own flavor of OCD does not give you a hard time for having features that you cant use

maybe someone who had vowed to have nothing to do with amazon (which does make me wonder how they would buy the kindle) can convince themselves that registering with fake credentials is not a breach of principle, then at least they'd get collections enabled, and access to firmware updates

In the US, this is actually doable since Best Buy, Target, etc. sell Kindles. Firmware updates can be done manually and it's actually pretty aggressive on automatic updates regardless of registration status so no need for fake credentials. Mind, there's nothing of interest for me in newer Kindle firmwares so I actively avoid those. You really only need to register if you need Kindle Cloud Collections and Send to Kindle/Kindle Personal Cloud.

Honestly, having to manually create and add books to collections suck so I find lack of Kindle Cloud Collections was no big loss anyway. For me, the collections is really mostly useful if it can be automatically managed with Calibre (or at least created on PC). In any case, my Kindles are jailbroken so this one's a non-issue.

Besides, my OCD wants complete segregation of my "normal" ebook and fanfic libraries so the unregistered, jailbroken PW fits the bill quite perfectly. I'll need to create a fake Kobo account so I can get that segregation when I buy a fanfic-only Libra H2O.

[dordale]

I've had a Kindle Voyage for four years or so now and a little over four years and just bought a Kindle Oasis 2 when the 32 gb ones briefly went on sale for $150. I signed in through wifi with each of them just long enough to register them to my account and make sure the dictionaries I wanted were downloaded to the device. They've been in airplane mode ever since.

I use Calibre to load any books--even ones I purchase from Amazon to my readers. I keep a large number of books on each (>1000) and don't have any problems reading and finding what I want to read on each.

I also have a Kobo Aura One and a Kobo Forma. I use all four of these readers regularly.

[jj2me]

My Kindle DX has forced me into this exact situation of sideloading only, since it no longer connects to 3G (DXs have no wi-fi). What I miss are Whispersync, and especially Amazon's "convert" function to convert and deliver PDFs (address an e-mail to your kindle e-mail address; attach the PDF to the e-mail; Subject line says "convert", nothing in the body).

Originally Posted by j.p.s

Kindle users want enough light to read by, the kindle manufacturer wants enough light to make the background look whiter. The manufacturer (tries to) control the software.

Thanks, good to know there's a rationale of sorts, even if it's backwards from what I would like.

I've also experienced the Oasis's auto-brightness sometimes upping and lowering brightness within a few seconds--maybe I produced a momentary shadow? I didn't notice any need for upping the light yet the Oasis did, and then quickly didn't.

Originally Posted by dordale

Regarding the auto brightness feature on my Kindles (Voyage that I've had for a number of years and Oasis 2 that I purchased recently)--I find I really like the auto brightness after using it for awhile. After initially turning it on, I make manual adjustments when I don't like the light level and the Kindle adjusts to my preferences so that eventually I don't need to make any adjustments.

Thanks, I didn't realize there was an auto-brightness learning function. Guess I'll stick with it.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

Kindle users want enough light to read by, the kindle manufacturer wants enough light to make the background look whiter. The manufacturer (tries to) control the software.

Originally Posted by jj2me

Thanks, good to know there's a rationale of sorts, even if it's backwards from what I would like.

I've also experienced the Oasis's auto-brightness sometimes upping and lowering brightness within a few seconds--maybe I produced a momentary shadow? I didn't notice any need for upping the light yet the Oasis did, and then quickly didn't.


Thanks, I didn't realize there was an auto-brightness learning function. Guess I'll stick with it.

The Oasis will turn the light off completely if it gets bright enough, but it isn't shy of turning the light to full brightness if ambient light is short of the cutoff. I think it would be some work finding all the bright ambient light levels the Oasis wants to boost its light for and would be interested to hear of methodologies that work and are easy enough to do.

The Oasis really starts eating through its battery at light levels above 12 and the power used at each level goes up exponentially.

See this thread for battery drain versus light level on a Kindle Voyage.
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=293683

[jj2me]

Thanks. That was fantastic work! Not only did you figure out how to collect that data, as my Stat Prof would have termed it admiringly, "You lived with the data." Great job, I need to go give you much-deserved (but now-meaningless) karma.