Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dewey 1551 days ago
> I find it sad that a company with Amazon's reach plays this dirty with what users are allowed to have on their devices. :(

To be honest I'm always surprised how easy it is to put things on your Kindle even if they are not purchases from Amazon. I regularly purchase ebooks some other place and then just send it to the Kindle with Calibre's feature using the amazon sharing email address and it works without a problem for years.
3 comments
goosedragons 1551 days ago
It has limitations. I don't think Amazon really likes it much as a feature anymore but I think they know people would be really angry if they got rid of it. They haven't bothered adding support for newer file formats beyond KF7. You can sometimes trick an ePub on there by renaming it .zip and get an AZW3 but it doesn't always work. They also make it annoying to get covers on emailed documents.
link
mariusor 1551 days ago
Yes, calibre is a powerful tool. However not all content can (or should) go via it.

My specific use case is something like the integration that Pocket has with Kobo ebook readers: I see an article I want to read on the internet, I add it to Pocket and then at my next sync I can read it on my device.

An email that Amazon controls is no replacement for a proper API. Having tools to convert to mobi is not a replacement for supporting open ebook formats.

link
criddell 1551 days ago
Have you tried Instapaper?
link
esperent 1550 days ago
Testing it out now. I just signed up on the website then it popped up a "Get the App" button. Clicked that, and it brought me to this link:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tumblr&ref...

Which is the Tumblr app! What the hell?

EDIT: ok, figured it out. After signing up on the website, I'm given a page which has a single item called Getting Started. Nothing else, no menu, no header, no footer. So I clicked the link and it brings me to the Getting Started page on blog.instapaper.com

I now realize this is actually hosted on Tumblr so the Get the App button there is from Tumblr.

Not a great onboarding experience so far. Hopefully the rest of the app is better.

link
mariusor 1551 days ago
Yes. A long time ago though, and all I remember is that it didn't quite manage to give me the same flow as I had with Pocket/Kobo. Maybe I didn't look deep enough into it.
link
edgartaor 1551 days ago
Yes. I was reluctant to buy a Kindle to read my already owned ebooks but using Calibre to sync to my Kindle it's really simple.
link