I know this isn't what you're asking for but the kobo H2O is what I use and it's fantastic. It's not sucked into Amazon's shitty ecosystem and right out of the box it works for loading pirated content. I get all my books from the zlibrary onion site and you literally drag and drop files into the file folder. It's e-ink so the battery lasts forever, it gets super bright for outside reading, and it's waterproof. I can't speak to modding but I haven't bought a book since 2020 because of it and I honestly prefer it to most physical books at this point
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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After initially setting up your kindle, just keep it in airplane mode. Upload new books with calibre
If you skip updates long enough, someone might find a security hole, and if you've skipped the update that fixes it, you'll be able to jailbreak it, install koreader, read epubs without conversion, use the filesystem for ebook organization.
Also, you'll avoid advertisements, which Amazon is now pushing to the homescreens even of kindles that were bought with the extra-cost no-ads option.
Do you do it for privacy or just so that new updates don't break it?
Privacy mainly
Personally, I did it just to save battery. But recently I made the mistake to connect and it updated to an interface that I don’t like and the battery that was bad (it’s 7 years old) seems to be worst.
Buy any kindle you prefer. Install calibre. Connect USB cable between kindle and computer.
Done.
Now download ebooks from anywhere, import into calibre and sync to your Kindle.
I have the paper white touch screen one.
I own both a Kindle Basic 10 and a Kobo Clara HD.
Both devices can sideload books just fine out of the box, and you will be able to read them without having to do any hacks or jailbreaks. The easiest way to sideload and keep track of your books is using Calibre on a computer.
But I will say that the sideloading experience of the two devices are night and day.
Kindles are very clearly built to funnel you into the Amazon book store. Buying books from Amazon is smooth and easy.
For sideloading on Kindles you must convert to mobi, azw, azw3 or kfx. All of these have different feature support. So if you want Book covers, the updated layout engine and typesetting, then you must use kfx. But Calibre can't natively convert to kfx. So you will need to install amazons ebook previewer and a plugin in Calibre to make Calibre convert to kfx via the amazon ebook preview application. Each conversion takes roughly 2 minutes, and randomly fails for no apparent reason.
If you decide to use Kindles' email option for sideloading, then your books will be converted to mobi, so you lose out on a lot of features. And the kindle sees the books as documents, not books.
If you sideload with Calibre and try to upload books with book covers, then it will work fine, and for a couple of seconds after uploading the book it will work fine. Then the Kindle will realize that should definitely look up the book cover om Amazon, and if it finds the book if will overwrite your book cover, if not it will replace it with a blank page. You can then reconnect your Kindle to Calibre and Calibre will fix your book covers properly. But if your Kindle is able to look up the book on Amazon it will continue to overwrite your book cover.
Finally the organization of sideloaded books sucks on Kindle. If you sideload via email, then you can organized the books through Amazon's website. If you sideload with Calibre you can't, and your only option is to manually organized your books into folders on the device one by one. This is extremely slow and tedious.
Sideloading books on a Kobo can't be done via e-mail, but Kobo supports epub out of the box, which most ebook are. If you want the books to load and navigate faster, you can convert to kepub, this requires a plugin for Calibre, but no additional software. Each book conversion takes 2-3 seconds, and the book arrives on your Kobo with a functioning book cover, full functionality and zero fuss. Additionally Kobos automatically organize books into folders based on both author and series based on your metadata in Calibre, making it a breeze to organize your entire library on your computer and just transfer things, already organized, to your kobo. Kobos also has an additional section called "Collections" which you can map to any field in Calibre you like. I have mapped mine to a Genre field, but you could organize stuff by anything you want.
So if you are planning to primarily sideload books, I would strongly encourage you to look at a Kobo instead of a Kindle.
Regarding the format of the files: Absolutely not true in my experience with a paperwhite.
Maybe it's model specific, maybe calibre takes care of it for me but I am sure that I sideloaded epubs and they worked fine. Both via Amazon e-mail and calibre.
Amazon e-mail automatically converts to azw3, and Calibre also automatically converts to azw3 when transferring to a Kindle.
If you drag and drop the epub directly to the device it won't work.
I may be very well wrong but I believe to have dropped epubs directly after compiling some web novels myself.
But I probably misremember it and it was calibre doing the lifting.
I know this is the wrong /c/ for this, but.. your local library probably has tons of content you can check out on your Kindle for free.
Seems like a good tip, but I'm from the EU so other than physical books and outdated PC's with dialup (okay, dialup might be going too far haha) I don't think there's anything else at the library here.
You can sideload on to any kindle.
Paperwhite (non-SE) is the version to go for. They go on sale every month or two, check camelcamelcamel.
https://singlelogin.re/
https://calibre-ebook.com/
Have fun.
Also, buy the ad-supported version from a place other than Amazon, and tell Amazon you got it as a gift and would like to remove the ads.
There’s a non-zero chance the customer service will remove it free of charge because I don’t think it’s possible for someone to pay to remove the ads if it wasn’t purchased from Amazon directly.
This is a great tip. I bought a used Voyage a couple years back and it wasn't even listed as ads-free. I had just planned on leaving it in airplane mode like my previous kindle, but was pleasantly surprised.
Every single Kindle supports sideloading books via USB, or even, you can send non-legally obtained books OTA via the Amazon email on your kindle (yes, if you have a Amazon account you can have your device Linked to an @kindle.com mail address).
But, be worry about some issues. Be sideloading or emailing, Kindle devices natively don't support ePub books. So, if you sideload via USB you WILL need to convert the books to some format like .mobi or .azw3 to be able to read it on the Kindle.
On the other side, if you email the files, Amazon servers do the converting for you, so you can easily send epub files and the Kindle servers adjust the ebook, you just need to have your Kindle connected to WiFi.
The only issue with emailing the files is you can't use custom covers with them. If that's not a concern, it's definitely the easier route.
As others have mentioned, Kobo is a good device, especially if you use and are familiar with a Linux desktop and command line, as this can circumvent sign up while still getting updates. Discussed here:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=171664
Then it's just a quick visit over to oceanofpdf (or wherever you can find pdf/epub books). Download book, mount the Kobo, copy the book file, unmount, and enjoy!