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Comment by cbdevidal | Hacker News Reader

Not sure if you’re joking but is it possible to even do that? I understand some books are kept on their cloud servers and only some get downloaded.

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Yes, it’s possible. Note: no downloads work in airplane mode. Cable works just as well though.

I had an old kindle that I never connected to the net or with an amazon account. I loaded books by USB.

Damn near impossible to find DRM free books to purchase though.

It is still possible to remove DRM and export to PDF or epub. Not point-and-click easy, though.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/1q1uza4/successful...

While Calibre makes it easy, it's even easier to just download a copy someone else has already stripped of DRM.

If publishers/authors want my money, they can release a version without DRM.

Calibre is a rather painful tool, but seems to remain the best.

Calibre web and calibre web automated downloader remove a fair bit of the clunk.

Yep. Go to yandex, search for book, download ebook, done. I’ll order a hardcover of the book if I liked it. I don’t mind reading on an iPhone (iBooks will open it and even sync it across devices). If I did, I’d use Calibre to load books on a kindle. I did this recently as a test and it worked on the second version ever made of the kindle.

> Damn near impossible to find DRM free books to purchase

My method has always been to buy physical books (which is also better to support the author, because they get a bigger % of the price you pay.

And then, there are other creative ways to download the ebook... (without buying from Amazon, or other monopolists.)

No, you choose what is downloaded locally. You can also get .mobi files and copy them to the kindle directly.

Not anymore, they have removed the option to download files for transfer via USB https://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2025/02/12/download-transf...

Ironically, files downloaded from "other" sources have no issue. So they're just making it harder to buy from Amazon legally.

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