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E-books are fast becoming tools of corporate surveillance
(www.fastcompany.com)
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this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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Privacy
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If possible, get your books in epub format, get an eInk Android tablet for less than £100 and enjoy.
Kobo masterrace checking in
Do you have a recommendation on which one to get? The different options seem fairly similar. Biggest concern is reading outdoors.
I have the Clara. It's smallish but I prefer smaller for an e-reader.
Most eink displays should do just fine outdoors, so you shouldn't worry about that.
Thanks for the advice!
Love my kobo libra h20, would highly recommend. Easy to sideload epubs with calibre.
Awesome, thanks for the input. I’ve got a calibre setup too, so that’s good to hear.
Libra 2. I use it outdoors often, the screen is very clear.
Good to know, thank you so much for the advice!
Any recommendations on privacy friendly eink tablets?
Kobo
I got Onyx Boox and installed a firewall on it.
Most of the books I have on my reader are not available in epub or formats like it, rather as pdf/djvu scans. So I'd add it might be absolutely worth it to pay more for a big screen.
Also the device never ever connects to the internet. Gives you more freedom.
You can easily convert pdf files to epub then do a little light editing to make sure you don’t have weird artifacts like page numbers the book name or author name. I can process a pdf to epub in 20 minutes at most (most are a minute it two) for average novel length, which I understand is a big ask for lots of folks but it’s worth it to me to have the file in a format that I can keep and use on pretty much anything.
you could share your books uploading them to libgen. I mean, they are probably already there but in an annoying PDF format. Not everyone has the knowledge to convert a PDF to an epub with good formatting.
I would like to do something like that but I don’t want to be scrutinized about technically being a bootleg publisher.
The books I did it to are from small authors writing for niche communities and I don’t want to make it easier to pirate than buy in that case. Anyone else can find those same PDFs on a website easy to search and well recommended by the community so the information is available, and if they want an ePub they can format it themselves or just buy the version from Amazon and support the author.
Mind giving a rundown of how you do it? I tried it many, many times and never accomplished much
You now have the book on EPUB to be placed in your personal cloud or whatever.
"Do a light editing" you mean read through a huge book? I have downloaded automatically-converted versions like this and they're unreadable at times. Also would that work well on complex math formulas?
Edit: might try doing so to upload for others, but looking through the whole book must be long, tedious work, definitely not something I'd do for every book.
No, I mean use your eyes to see if there are any obvious breaks in the text, most of the time they’re repeated and follow a pattern that is easily searched and every instance replaced with a button press.
Yes, but far from all mistakes are like this. You'd need to manually scan through a potentially long book. Fine if you do it occasionally for some books to contribute to Libgen, but you'd go insane if you try to do it to your whole library for personal use.
Edit: I meant not repeated and more or less obvious mistakes like these, rather those like "one term got mistaken for another real word", which you won't catch automatically.
Comment here
I’ve been doing it for years to my personal books I download that I can’t find in ePub, I have no issues with my sanity. I also usually do this before I read the book, and double check my editing as I read it. 98% of the time I caught all the errors that were not present in the original text (it copies typos perfectly) .
Cool, I just don't have patience to scan through a 1000-page book prior to reading) Do you upload these for others to use? And again - what software?
Well, in the linked comment, on the second line where it says to import the converted epub into editing software like sigil,there was a link to a piece of software called sigil, it’s for editing EPUB files, and it’s called sigil. It’s the second link in the comment that takes you to the EPUB editor software called sigil.
I have been tempted to upload them for others to use, but all the authors that I’ve done it for are really small niche community authors, and I do not want to take support away from them.
Just because I’m a broke ass bitch and have decided to re-copy them however I see fit for my personal consumption, doesn’t necessarily mean I want to become a bootlegger publisher.