eBook Readers: amidst the dust, you persist

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Lately I’ve been trying to get back into reading books (book review when?). As a kid I got a Kindle Paperwhite (I think 2nd gen) one day as a present (couldn’t tell you the occasion), and I’ve spent a lot of time over the years reading with it, to the point where I practically preferred eBooks to normal books. Granted… my opinion on that is now much more complicated, but I will get into that later.

For now, I’d like to focus on something I find interesting about eBook reading devices: though not perfect, especially with regards to a certain company, their uses have remained so consistent that they have been practically frozen in time over the past 10 years. Sure, there have been little improvements like night color to make the screen redder at night (I don’t really see the point if it’s already an e-ink screen that emits little blue light in the first place), or how Kobo devices support reading articles saved to Pocket… er, while it still existed , and of course waterproofing so you can read your raunchy smut in the bathtub, but I’d wager most people would feel similar levels of satisfaction today with a decade old eBook reader compared to a modern one.

Pretty boring, huh?

Sometimes boring is nice

We live in a world where, in the pursuit of infinite, constantly increasing growth, companies have taken it upon themselves to invent any new reason you should buy a new device. What this often leads to is overcomplicated devices that, while capable of more, are also far more prone to failure or problems that wouldn’t even have been a consideration in the past. Now, I’m not trying to argue that we should not have computers. I don’t even believe JavaScript is the worst thing in the world (although it has its problems). But… I think it is slightly telling when Windows 11 doesn’t support PCs from as new as 2017 (which really isn’t that old in my opinion), and its predecessor Windows 10 will often slow them to a crawl when trying to do basic file management or web browsing, yet a system like Linux Mint that is actually designed not with maximizing profits in mind, but making something that is good, unsurprisingly runs like butter on a device like that.

What I’m describing is a complicated problem (though certainly not one unrelated to capitalism), but even if software wasn’t continually designed for increased hardware demands the way it often is, anything connected to the internet still becomes a maintenance burden if there is any expectation of sensitive information being stored on it. More importantly, as I alluded to earlier, we live in a world where companies believe “innovation” means slapping an operating system on any household appliance one could think of, such as the meme-worthy Samsung fridge . While it’s cool that I don’t have to buy a Roku in order to stream movies to my TV now, I often still have to because we have several competing smart TV OSs with their own app stores and developent targets, meaning I can only really access my personal Jellyfin server on Google, Amazon, and Roku devices (no Tizen OS from Samsung or whatever the hell Xumo is).

More annoyingly, my TV is a jack of all trades / master of none that can’t even remember my picture settings on my HDMI inputs correctly (I use this TV to play games often, so reduced latency via Game Mode is a must), it inserts awful looking noise reduction by default, and it CRASHES. Not often, mind you, but the fact that I can just be enjoying a quaint game of Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker for the Nintendo Wii U when my TV crashes is just… BRUH. I previously used a “dumb” 1080p Samsung TV from maybe 2007 and it was perfect! It did what I asked it to and nothing more. Didn’t crash. Didn’t spy on me without my consent (or at all).

I’m not saying all of this so I can pretend like eBook readers are completely exempt from these problems, because they aren’t. DRM especially is probably the worst part of using eBooks and makes me hesitate to buy anything digital, but at the very least I can say that if you avoid things like the Kindle Store and keep your Kindle perpetually in Airplane Mode, it’s actually not that bad. More importantly, however, because the act of reading is something so simple and difficult to screw up, my 2012 Kindle Paperwhite is still totally viable for use to this day, in an era where rocking a 2012 smartphone would draw strange looks (and would leave you vulnerable to malware and unable to use the latest secure messaging software like Signal). Really, there’s nothing stopping me from using this thing for the rest of my life save for its battery degrading.

Except… these devices also came out in a time before every company felt the need to be Apple and make their devices practically impossible to repair, so should the battery crap itself, the repair process is easy and costs a mere $20. So I really could use this thing forever!

Fine print

About DRM: Amazon is evil (and more importantly, book publishers are evil), so they feel the need to prevent you from owning what you buy. They employ what is known as Digital Rights Management: in this case, encrypting your eBook files such that they cannot be used unless loaded into their specific, proprietary software, paired with your online Amazon account. It’s awful for multiple reasons, chief among them being that if you ever break, lose, or merely decide not to use your Kindle anymore, and opt for a competing device from Barnes & Noble or Kobo instead, your Kindle books are incompatible and can’t be read from those devices. How about that, we managed to engineer a way to make damn books locked to ecosystems and incompatible with unauthorized devices. It’s corporate tyranny, plain and simple.

Worse still, while methods exist to strip DRM from eBooks that you are supposed to own (but actually own a non-perpetual license to read said book for a limited period of time, aka a RENTAL), Amazon is cracking down on these methods so that people will be forced to keep using their crappy services if they want to keep their (potentially enormous) book collection. So yes, in some ways, eBook reading does exhibit all of the shitty qualities of modern technology. And that’s without even getting into the 2009 scandal where Amazon remotely deleted copies of George Orwell’s 1984 from everyone’s Kindle libraries. It matters not what the reason for this was; Amazon should, under no circumstance, even have the power to reach into your device and take away a book you bought. This is like if they broke into your home and grabbed one of your hard copies. It’s theft.

How to protect yourself

This, combined with Amazon and other major eBook vendors’ ability to snoop in on what you’re reading , is why I recommend avoiding the Kindle Store altogether and keeping your device in Airplane Mode, ensuring you don’t even save any WiFi connections to it so it couldn’t connect (to a password protected network, anyway) even if it wanted to.

From here, you can basically treat the Kindle like an iPod for reading: buy your books on your computer and transfer them to your Kindle using a software like calibre . You’ll have to ensure that you get your books without any DRM on them, and thankfully there are websites like this one from the Libreture service that can point you to bookstores that sell books DRM-free. Speaking from personal experience, I’ve managed to buy many DRM-free books from Humble Bundle , and of course the famous fanfiction website Archive of Our Own actually supports Kindle-friendly downloads of all uploaded works, a feature I have taken advantage of several times.

While DRM is introduced as a method to combat book piracy, this is nonsense. DRM usually relies on self-defeating encryption where the decryption key is eventually downloaded to the device in order to decrypt the book, making it trivial in most cases to break DRM. What this means in practice is that the tech-savvy pirates who intend to reproduce eBooks will not only easily break the DRM, but the DRM only needs to be broken once before a network of pirates can continue sharing the cracked copy. As a result, the only people who are actually affected by DRM are those who don’t know anything about encryption and merely wish to read their books on their Nook instead of their Kindle. It’s a big lie: given how ineffective Amazon and other companies’ DRM has historically been, it is safe to assume that DRM is intended not to curb piracy, but to take away the ownership and freedoms of ordinary customers. Why? Because if you can’t read your Kindle books on a Nook or a Kobo, tough luck, guess you’ve gotta drop $160 on another Kindle! (in other words: it is profitable to take away people’s freedoms like this). This is without even getting into the total nightmare that is eBooks for public libraries.

Unfortunately, there are some books that simply cannot be digitally purchased DRM-free, likely because their publisher is stingy about DRM. In these cases, I recommend, if you are able to (if not, I understand), buying the physical book instead. Unlike an eBook, you are free to let others borrow the book, you are free to sell the book when you are done with it, and it cannot be legally taken away from you. They also are often cheaper beacuse of the used market. It sucks to give up the conveniences of eBooks in this case, but if a book were not available digitally without DRM, this is what I personally would do. In the past it may have been viable to buy the book from the Kindle Store and then just remove the DRM with easy to use programs, but given how Amazon is making this much harder, I don’t intend to bother any longer. It is much easier to simply boycott DRMed books outright, especially since the market for hard copies isn’t going anywhere.

Still, eBook readers can be awesome

In spite of all of this, if you are willing and able to keep your eBook reader offline and DRM-free, you could basically just use it forever. There isn’t much that needs to be done to make a great eBook reader, and this is why I really like them. They can be simple, single-purpose and controlled. They do have a tendency to be on the pricier side, but because there isn’t all that much reason to buy the latest and greatest, you can basically just buy one and use it forever, and even save some money by looking to the used market (I will note that one thing I’m not really sure about is whether account creation is mandatory for Kindle, Kobo, or Nook use. I hope it is not).

Thanks for reading!