Future-proofing my ebook collection given the churn in ebook formats

[jgaiser]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Not that I expect it to be a problem, as Amazon still supports the Original Kindle, and I suspect there are at least one or two people who actually use them today.

Not original kindle, but my kindle keyboard still works just fine and is old enough not to worry about newest format. When and if things change, I'll find somewhere else to spend my money.

[darryl]

Originally Posted by maximus83

What I do today:

• Buy mostly Amazon Kindle ebooks due to selection and price. Download and liberate files with open source tools.
• Convert and manage the files in Calibre.
• Store the converted files in a cloud drive.
• Access them with android devices using 3rd party ereader apps.

It does not matter who you buy the books from so long as you can remove the DRM. Your reasons for buying from Amazon are valid and remain valid.

And yes, Calibre with Apprentice Alf is the best solution I have found.

Forget the cloud drive except as a backup, preferably not the only one. Even the term "the cloud" is a marketing-friendly term for storing your files and even running applications from someone else's server. And the customer's rights are often ambiguous at best.

It doesn't matter how you access your books or what you use for purposes of "future-proofing". If your concern is privacy, Amazon certainly has access to your Kindle and collects information. Last I looked it is unclear what Amazon can do with sideloaded books and what information is kept, nor even whether books purchased fron them and disinfected are treated the same as other sideloaded books. But none of the larger retailers are any better, irrespective of format. Your reading habits are valuable. Baen and the like may be better. Also, remember that Android is probably the worst OS for privacy outside of IOS.

AZW3 or EPub? Once disinfected it makes little difference. There are open source applications which will read them both, including Calibre's viewer. But why choose? Disk space is cheap. Keep both formats within Calibre?

Finally, I would point out that Amazon is not a monopoly. It is simply the best and most successful ebook retailer by a country mile, arguably aided by the ineptness of much of its competition. It is certainly not the most "evil" of the ebook retailers, and is somewhat responsive when it makes mistakes, unlike, for instance, B & N.

[Atunah]

I have bought kindle books since 2008. As far as I can tell, I can still load books I buy today on my K1 I got in 2008. Although its a bit slow with calling home at this point. I charge it about every month or so to keep it alive and like to try it out by putting a book on it. Just to see the shiny sparkly bar.

So at this point my library is backed up from today back to 2008.

If something changes, I'll figure it out going forward.

Reminds me I need to get another external storage as mine went kaputt. But since my books are on my computer with calibre and also in a cloud, not all is lost.

I already lost all my paper books once when moving from one continent to another. That was painful. Its a bit easier to take care of an ebook library.

[eschwartz]

Cool, an actual K1 owner!

I knew you existed...

[cromag]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Cool, an actual K1 owner!

I knew you existed...

Dude! Just because you read it on the internet ...

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by cromag

Dude! Just because you read it on the internet ...

Are you impugning the word and honor of a MobileRead member in good standing?

[JSWolf]

I've read of some people keeping an older unused Kindle registered to their account just so they can use the USB download function without having to worry about KFX sometime in the future.

[GERGE]

Google Price offers the same for for many of the books. The problem would be the self-published books if Amazon becomes unbreakable. Amazon exlusive selfpubs consist %30-40 percent of my sci-fi/fantasy reading, they are only books I buy from Amazon.

While I would keep reading them with my iPad, that would really be terrible.

[latepaul]

Having gone for the cheap laugh I'll do the serious answer.

Use the tools available now to convert to an open format. Probably epub is best. Open source tools are better because they're more likely to still be around. Make backups - plural. And finally relax a bit. Stuff happens.

I haven't got all the music I ever bought. I'm missing some DVDs and I I longer have a vhs player but still have tapes.

And those - films, TV and music - are items I'm likely to reuse. I do reread but not as often.

If I lost my library tomorrow I'd be annoyed sure. But I'd be losing a bunch of books I never got around to reading, some I've read once and a handful I reread regularly. Those last ones I can replace, I.e. rebuy, easily. Maybe I'm fortunate that my favourite books are readily available, but I think that'll be increasingly true given the way things are going. Things don't go out of print any more.

And that's if something happened overnight. But it won't. There'll never be a point where mobis and kf8s available one day and only kfx the next. And if that ever happened, you'd notice and that would be your last purchase from that particular store.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I've read of some people keeping an older unused Kindle registered to their account just so they can use the USB download function without having to worry about KFX sometime in the future.

That's basically what I do. I still have my original K1 (so yes, there are two of us apparently).

I have to agree with others here. Why worry about things you can't control? I have only bought a couple of books from Apple (the first just to give it a try, and second was the new enhanced Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone just to see what it is like) simply because I can't format switch those books. I buy the vast majority of my books from Amazon or Baen, remove the DRM if there is any (not all Amazon books have DRM) and then format switch them to epub and read on Marvin. I have all my books in multiple locations, so it's pretty unlikely that I'm going to lose them.

IMPO, the odds are pretty high that any format that Amazon comes out with will be cracked fairly quickly if it becomes necessary. The big thing to keep in mind is that it's the publishers who put DRM on books, not the book stores. Neither Tor nor Baen use DRM for their books. Eventually, I suspect, like the music industry, the book industry will move to dropping DRM as more and more authors and publishers see that DRM doens't really solve anything. Amazon is in the business of selling ebooks. I will be very surprised if they do something that causes customers not to be able to buy an ebook on an older device.

[Phogg]

Originally Posted by latepaul

Stone tablets.

Ah, the true apex of literature.
A three dimensional medium most suited for depicting bold three dimensional characters.

Thanks all for the discussion, very useful insights.

Some responses in no particular order:

* Somebody well known here on Mobileread pointed out in a PM that while Amazon may not be an actual monopoly, they could sure use some competition to be more open in their formats. IMO, competition is good for everybody, including consumers and Azon itself. So for me, it makes sense to continue my plan to buy from sellers that are trying to use a format based on an open spec, like Epub. Hoping to eventually nudge Azon in a more "open" direction.

* That said, it's ALSO true what others noted here: you can still convert most if not all Amazon ebooks today if you can obtain the AZW3 file. So for now, there's no harm in getting Azon ebooks provided that you can still convert them into a usable "open" file format.

* While there's not a total consensus on the formats issue, even here at Mobileread as evidenced in the older "format future proofing" threads that somebody linked to, it does seem that of all the imperfect file specs and formats available today, epub probably has the broadest industry and library support, and the most going for it. Being in epub doesn't solve all problems (since everybody implements it differently and then devices also render it differently). But since epub3 is directly based on HTML5 and CSS3, it's at least based on universal W3 web standards and moving in the right direction, basically "converging on a standard." Storing your ebook files in epub today seems to make it most likely that you'll be able to use open source tools in the future to get your files converted to whatever format you need.

[eschwartz]

Boycotting Amazon as part of a wider movement to convince them to be more open -- or at least to not actively support their closed spec which necessitates reverse-engineering by people who could spend their time doing more important things -- is certainly an option.
And I am not going to say you shouldn't do that.

But it didn't answer the question of "how to future-proof".


Storing your files in EPUB makes no sense though, I am afraid. calibre is open-source and already supports both AZW3 and EPUB, so there is no "most likely".
Store your books in the original format, whether that is EPUB or something else makes no difference.
Conversions are inherently lossy, so always save the original copies and work from there. Same reason why you save music as FLAC, and images as RAW.

You could, however, argue that you should purchase in EPUB.
But converting from AZW3 to EPUB in the name of storage/backup and future-proofing is simply silly.

[Fbone]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

[snip]

But converting from AZW3 to EPUB in the name of storage/backup and future-proofing is simply silly.

I do this to ensure that the DRM has been removed.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by Fbone

I do this to ensure that the DRM has been removed.

You go to the effort of a conversion just in order to see:
if the conversion worked, that indicates the DRM was stripped?

... Because you know, that conversion does not trigger a DeDRM... although if the tools are properly setup I don't see what you are worried about...

...

Sure, whatever.
Opening the book will do the same thing.
So will pdurrant's DRMCheck.py and complementary AppleScript wrapper: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=121387



...

Either way, you haven't disproved what I said.