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Comment by OvbiousError | Hacker News Reader

The alternative I see mentioned here is kobo. I haven't used/owned a kindle so I don't know what amazon do better than the kobo store. I can say that I've bought over 50 books on the kobo store, can't recall a single instance of it not having a book I wanted.

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Another reason people (e.g., my mother in law) buy kindles is that the price of ebooks is very often much less from Amazon than from the Kobo store. My mother in law wants to be like us and so she recently bought a kobo. But then she bought herself a new kindle as well simply so she can buy cheaper books and then transfer them (which she hasn’t figured out how to do, and which according to this thread will no longer be possible).

I don't think you can download ebooks from the Kindle store and transfer them to a Kobo unless they happen to be specifically DRM-free ebooks (which very few ebooks are, and basically none from the big publishing firms)? And even then a format conversion would be involved.

(If you mean transferring them to the Kindle reader, you can of course download the books directly on-device.)

You can remove the DRM pretty easily, which is likely why Amazon is making this change.

It's getting harder. Calibre + DeDRM doesn't work on all kindle books, especially some of the newer formats.

> Another reason people (e.g., my mother in law) buy kindles is that the price of ebooks is very often much less from Amazon than from the Kobo store.

Note that Kobo will price match plus credit 10% of the difference. It’s pretty quick and I’ve never had one of my requests denied.

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