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Comment by betwixthewires | Hacker News Reader

I actually read more books now. I download them and load them up on my phone and read them like crazy.

Also discussions on sites like this have expanded my articulation and understanding of many concepts and topics. I spent a lot of time, years, dedicating a significant potion of my life to reading educational material of all sorts.

I don't know if I use the internet differently, maybe, I don't use Facebook or twitter or tiktok or any of that. We forget the access to information we have, it would be unimaginable 30 years ago. I can delve into literally any topic I want as deep as I want to go, I can read any book I want right now, for free if I were so inclined.

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I bought a Kindle and that was nice, but I'm terrible at remembering to bring it with me when I leave the house, and the (admittedly small) effort of having to connect it to my computer to load epubs onto it is enough friction to stop me from doing it in the first place a lot of the time. I usually obtain them from less than legal sources and buy a hardcopy if I like it.

For awhile I was buying ebooks straight from the Kindle store on the device itself but something about paying the same price for a file as a hardcopy left a bad taste in my mouth. I'd rather have something to put on my shelf and I can loan to friends. Plus paying for the book up front is a bit of a risk if it sucks, because I can't return it or resell it or even give it away to someone else.

The past few months I've just been loading the books straight to my phone and I've read more new books in the last 3 months than I have in the last 3 years. Definitely a game changer.

Last time I used a Kindle, you could just email a book to your Kindle email address and then the book would appear in the library. Much easier than physically connecting to copy books.

I consume most of my content within the browser itself, For long reads, however, I regularly send the content over to my Kindle via. 'push to kindle' [0]; sometimes makes for a good bed time read.

[0] https://www.fivefilters.org/push-to-kindle/

So Kindles don't support epubs, and for whatever inane, absurd reason Amazon does not let you use their send to Kindle function with their own ebook format azw3. You have to convert them to mobi if you wanna email them, which is missing some QOL features last time I checked, which was admittedly a looong time ago so maybe that's changed.

I do own a kindle but reading from it is so unattractive over reading from the Hard copy. Has anyone here tried audible? Are audiobooks good? I've read a few audiobooks, but it still can't match reading from the hard copy.

I broke my Kindle by dropping it a few years back and the number of books I've read really took a nosedive from then. Maybe it's time to buy another one.

I once left mine under the bed, but the cats pushed it out during the night and I stood on it. The screen is very fragile. Back then I could find no way at all to repair it.

I did just buy the latest model on Amazon for $30 during Black Friday. I find reading on the Kindle is way better than on the phone because it removes all the distractions.

What apps do you use for books?

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