![]() I imported the Adobe EPUB version of The Martian and had a usable (which is to say pirated) version of it on my Kindle in a jiffy. Calibre is an extraordinarily ugly application that can convert digital books between several formats and will excise the DRM in the process. ![]() And after downloading the book into ADE, what could I do with it? Read it in the ADE application on my laptop? Again, no thanks. EPUB is supposed to be an open format, but because of the digital rights management necessary to limit checkouts, I had to install Adobe Digital Editions software to access the book. Amazon has a Kindle version, of course, but my library had only the OverDrive READ format, which is for reading in the browser (no thanks), and the Adobe EPUB format. Unfortunately, in my eagerness to get books for my new device, I didn’t notice that The Martian didn’t come in a Kindle version. 1 One of those books was Andy Weir’s The Martian, which had been recommended on an episode of The Incomparable and became available for download a a week or so after the Kindle arrived. So where does the piracy come in? Well, when I ordered the Kindle, I went to the library’s web site and put a few books on hold for it. If my wife absolutely needs something for her book club and there’s a long line of holds on the library’s copies, we buy an electronic version and she reads it on her iPad. Since electronic books don’t take up any space, we could go back to our old ways, but we’ve gotten used to using the library. I have a collection of old engineering texts that I still add to a few times a year, but our everyday reading comes from the library. So we stopped buying and switched to using the library. The space required to hold our combined library forced us into buying (and finding room for) far more bookcases than we wanted. My wife and I were big readers when we were younger and we both had huge book collections when we got married. You might be wondering why I don’t just buy books. ![]() I’m sure the patrons of every library that used OverDrive bitched mightily about this omission until it was fixed. Its digital book holdings are administered by OverDrive, which must not have had an arrangement to handle Kindle books for quite a while. So you could check out books in formats you could read on your computer (ugh), your iPhone (ugh), your iPad (don’t have one), your Nook (hahaha), or your Sony Reader (stopyourekillingme), but not on the reader that most people use. Suffice it to say that it’s nice to be able to fall asleep reading and not lose my place.Īs for the library, the Naperville library has offered electronic books for quite a while, but in the early days they didn’t include books in the Kindle format. I won’t waste your time telling you what I think of it, because most of you are on your third or fourth Kindle by now. No sense overcommitting to something new and scary, right? Of course I went the cheap route and got the $19 standard Kindle. Picked up one for me and one for the boy. A Paperwhite for $44 or a regular Kindle for $19… sounds good to me.
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