Question about side loading

[haertig]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Well, I've never had a hard drive go bad on me.

I can't say that, but I can say that I've never lost anything because a hard drive went bad on me.

[maddz]

Originally Posted by haertig

I can't say that, but I can say that I've never lost anything because a hard drive went bad on me.

I'm on my 3rd drive for the old iMac. I did loose stuff the first time it crashed, but nothing major (emails mostly). That was pre-ebooks, though. After that, I was more meticulous about back-ups. The second and third crashes I maybe lost a few days of email, but again nothing that couldn't be retrieved. Both the first and second crashes were complete failures - the first in warranty when the iMac got knocked over, the second just happened with no warning. The third I had sufficient warning to make a full back-up just before taking the machine to the repair shop.

Each time the replacement drive was bigger than the previous one. I'm still using the old iMac because of software issues with Catalina, but only as a remote machine with occasional forays into Excel (Office 2009 won't run on anything more modern, and I refuse to touch 365 with a bargepole) and other legacy software (e.g. GURPs Character Assistant for 3rd edition). I'm also keeping it for old Spiderweb games that will never be updated.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

If you bought eBooks from Amazon (pre-Kindle), Books-On-Board, or Paperback Digital, they are gone. There are other stores where the eBooks are gone and didn't get transferred to Kobo.

Well, yeah. Books-On-Board represents one of the two biggest chunks of ebooks I bought (the other is Sony books that didn’t transfer) that are no longer accessible to download. But one, I had notice in both cases and two, they still represent a tiny, tiny portion of my ebook library. Again, what’s the worst worst case scenario? That I have to rebuy the odd book I didn’t get to or want to read again (which almost never happens)?

[cfrizz]

Originally Posted by haertig

I hope this logic does not carryover into general computer backups. "I've never had a harddrive go bad on me, so I don't bother backing mine up."

Yup, I've never had one go bad on me either, but all it takes is ONE time and then you may very well be screwed! To each their own, but don't come crying to me if something happens and you lose everything, when there was a very simple before hand fix for it. I have ZERO sympathy.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Well, I've never had a hard drive go bad on me.

Count yourself lucky. Hard drives going bad is a pretty common occurrence in IT. For the end users, it can be anything from an annoyance to a disaster. For the corporate storage, it's a matter of replacing the faulting hard drive before the hot spare and another drive fail (RAID 6 arrays). The most common problem is the SSD cache drives reaching their end of life but that's not really going bad and we do get alarms when 90% of write life is reached.

As the old saying puts it, the best way not to need a backup is to have one.

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by CAFlanny

Just curious, do you side load all of your books, including the ones purchased from your device's store?

I side load all my books, I never turn on wifi. That's one feature they could remove in my case

Originally Posted by Sirtel

I sideload everything, no matter where I bought them. Mostly because I change the formatting (I have specific preferences).

That's another reason.

Beside that, I almost never buy books from my device's store (Kobo). I mostly buy my books from Amazon.

[maddz]

Originally Posted by Sweetpea

Beside that, I almost never buy books from my device's store (Kobo). I mostly buy my books from Amazon.

Same here. I don't much like the interface, and there's the additional Adobe step.

Although with some recent 404 errors with Amazon nodes and Chrome, I was thinking about switching to Kobo, but luckily they got sorted after a customer support conversation.

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by maddz

Same here. I don't much like the interface, and there's the additional Adobe step.

Although with some recent 404 errors with Amazon nodes and Chrome, I was thinking about switching to Kobo, but luckily they got sorted after a customer support conversation.

I haven't bought an Adobe DRM infected book in years... If I do buy a book from Kobo (bought one last week, actually) I make sure there's a social DRM. Otherwise I'll either buy it at Amazon or not buy it at all.

Haven't had any problems with downloading from Amazon, but then, I avoid Chrome like a plague (for me, that's the new Internet Explorer )

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Sweetpea

I haven't bought an Adobe DRM infected book in years... If I do buy a book from Kobo (bought one last week, actually) I make sure there's a social DRM. Otherwise I'll either buy it at Amazon or not buy it at all.

Haven't had any problems with downloading from Amazon, but then, I avoid Chrome like a plague (for me, that's the new Internet Explorer )

I much prefer to buy ePub then I do from Amazon. It's usually easier to deal with the ePub then a KF8 version. Yes, I've seen some pretty rubbish eBooks (formatting and/or code). A lot of self-published eBooks on Amazon are dreadful under the hood.

[gmw]

Like JSWolf I much prefer to buy epub, so I never buy from Amazon. Typically I buy from Kobo or not at all; it's not like I'm short of reading material so I can afford to wait for books to fall out of Kindle Unlimited or other such anticompetitive arrangements. And Kobo have price matching that I've used a few times.

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I much prefer to buy ePub then I do from Amazon. It's usually easier to deal with the ePub then a KF8 version. Yes, I've seen some pretty rubbish eBooks (formatting and/or code). A lot of self-published eBooks on Amazon are dreadful under the hood.

Maybe there's a difference in that I have an old kindle (Kindle Touch) connected to my account (my husband's). That one is broken (literally) but it still works perfectly as device to download for

Besides that, there's a much larger selection of Kindle books than drm-free/social-drm epubs.

And regarding formatting, I always put everything into Calibre and once it's in there, it's generally very easy to fix any real formatting problems...

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Sweetpea

Maybe there's a difference in that I have an old kindle (Kindle Touch) connected to my account (my husband's). That one is broken (literally) but it still works perfectly as device to download for

Besides that, there's a much larger selection of Kindle books than drm-free/social-drm epubs.

And regarding formatting, I always put everything into Calibre and once it's in there, it's generally very easy to fix any real formatting problems...

I prefer not to have part01, part02, etc for filenames. I know I can rename them, but that's just something else to be done when fixing the Kindle eBooks. What I don't get is why is it that a lot of Kindle eBooks use (a rather stupid) 7% text indent?

The thing is with Kindle eBooks, I have to either shift using KindleUnpack or convert and then error check and fix the errors before the fixing of the resulting ePub can begin. So Kindle eBooks have two extra steps when fixing the code. Renaming the files and fixing the errors and then I can get to fixing the code.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I prefer not to have part01, part02, etc for filenames. I know I can rename them, but that's just something else to be done when fixing the Kindle eBooks. What I don't get is why is it that a lot of Kindle eBooks use (a rather stupid) 7% text indent?

The thing is with Kindle eBooks, I have to either shift using KindleUnpack or convert and then error check and fix the errors before the fixing of the resulting ePub can begin. So Kindle eBooks have two extra steps when fixing the code. Renaming the files and fixing the errors and then I can get to fixing the code.

Well, I don't do any renaming of internal files or error fixing/checking. Nor do I care what the code is like, as long as it works on my ereaders. So I only change the things I need to, like fonts and font sizes, line spacing, margins, indents, paragraph spacing etc. That's enough for me.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I much prefer to buy ePub then I do from Amazon. It's usually easier to deal with the ePub then a KF8 version. Yes, I've seen some pretty rubbish eBooks (formatting and/or code). A lot of self-published eBooks on Amazon are dreadful under the hood.

While I now have the fix for this, for a while I avoided buying books from Amazon because every time the Kindle software would forcibly update itself and that was a hassle to put things back.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Well, I don't do any renaming of internal files or error fixing/checking. Nor do I care what the code is like, as long as it works on my ereaders. So I only change the things I need to, like fonts and font sizes, line spacing, margins, indents, paragraph spacing etc. That's enough for me.

That is code changing. CSS is also part of the code.