Category: Kobo

I’ve been wanting to write a blog post on the stuff that’s been going on with Amazon and Kindle lately, and it seems like more stuff keeps happening, and I never get around to writing that post. So now here I am, writing a post about a bunch of semi-related stuff.

I’ll start with the news that Dark Horse Digital is shutting down. I’ve actually been expecting them to shut down DHD at some point, ever since they started making their books available through Comixology, which happened back in 2015. I had hoped that, when they did it, they’d strike a deal with Amazon/Comixology to transfer their user’s libraries over to Amazon. Or, for certain books, make them available as DRM-free downloads. (I can understand where they wouldn’t be able to make some of their old stuff available DRM-free, due to licensing issues, but they should be able to make stuff like Hellboy and BPRD available, since those have already been sold DRM-free through Humble.) Well, they didn’t do any of that.

I had around 300 books in my DHD library, with about half of them unread. Some of those books were single-issue comics, and some were 400-page omnibus volumes, so it was really all over the place. I found a TamperMonkey script that let me download the books as DRM-free CBZs from the DHD web site, so I went ahead and used it to download most of my library. You need to download the books one at a time, so it was time-consuming. Initially, I was going to limit myself to downloading just my unread books, but at some point, my OCD kicked in, and I decided to download almost everything. I managed to stop myself from downloading various random freebie issues, but I grabbed nearly everything else, including stuff that I’m pretty sure I have from Humble bundles. So that’s taking up a little more than 20 GB. I actually feel pretty good about this now; I have a bunch of good DRM-free books that I can read in Panels, which probably works better than the old DHD iPad app anyhow.

This process triggered something else I’ve been putting off: figuring out what to do about the growing library of DRM-free comics and other stuff that’s filling up my PC hard drive. I’ve got it all in OneDrive, but I’ve always had OneDrive configured to keep all my stuff local (on my desktop PC). But space on my PC has been getting a little tight. I have a 1 TB SSD in there, and I’ve been dropping below 100 GB free. Which seems like plenty, but I want to keep at least 10% free. So I finally bit the bullet and turned on the files on-demand feature in OneDrive. Then, I let it offload some of my bigger CBZ files, and got myself back to 150 GB free.

I also set up my backup program to skip trying to backup offline files, otherwise it would have tried to pull them back down every time I ran a backup. That was another mental hurdle to get past. Now, I won’t necessarily have a local backup of some files either. But, hey, I trust OneDrive, I guess. Oh, and I still have plenty of space in OneDrive itself. I’m using around 370 GB of my 1 TB, so that’s about 35%.

On a related topic, there’s been a lot going on around Amazon and Kindle lately. First, there has been a lot of talk on Mastodon and Reddit around people wanting to drop out of the Amazon ecosystem, due to Jeff Bezos cozying up to Trump. That’s been going on for a while now, and I’m not happy about it, but I’m not ready to set fire to my Kindle just yet.

Second, there’s a lot of anger around Amazon’s recent decision to discontinue the “download and transfer” option for Kindle books. I already faced that issue when I traded in my Paperwhite for a Colorsoft, since download & transfer never worked for the newest Kindles. If I still had the old Paperwhite, I probably would have spent some time this week downloading a bunch of my Kindle books, removing the DRM, and pulling them into Calibre, for safekeeping. But I didn’t really have any good options for that this week.

Just out of curiosity, I tried copying a few books directly from my Colorsoft into Calibre, to see if I could strip the DRM that way, but it didn’t work. I think there may be a way for me to get around that, but it’s probably not worth the effort.

So, for now, I’m still “all in” on the Amazon/Kindle ecosystem, for better or worse. I have a ton of books and comics in my library there, and no obvious way of getting them back out. Which is fine. I like the Colorsoft a lot, and reading my comics via the Kindle app on my iPad is a pretty good experience too. And I don’t expect Amazon to shut any of this down any time soon. So hopefully I’m good there.

I have been thinking a bit about how I should approach new book purchases though. I still need to stick with ebooks, for the most part, due to my failing eyesight. I can buy stuff for the Kobo instead of the Kindle, and that at least takes a few dollars away from Amazon and gives them to somebody else. Mind you, I have no idea who the CEO of Kobo is, or what their political leanings are. (And now that I’ve written that, I’ve realized that I can probably find out… OK, so it’s this guy apparently. Seems like a decent guy? And he’s Canadian, so that helps…)

I did buy one book for Kobo recently, and thought about buying some more, but then I realized that I’m going to have to overhaul my system for tracking my wishlist and my list of purchased books if I move away from Amazon. And I have some thoughts on that. (Which should probably be in their own blog post, but I’m on a roll now…)

My current system is all-Amazon, basically. I have a Kindle wishlist in Amazon. If I’m interested in a book, I add it to that wishlist. If I decide to buy it, I do it on Amazon, and it gets removed from my wishlist automatically. Then, I add it to Goodreads from the handy “Amazon book purchases” screen there. And, if I ever forget I own it and try to buy it again, there will be a banner on the Amazon page saying “you bought this book already dummy” or words to that effect.

So that got me thinking about alternate wishlist and book-tracking systems. For my wishlist, Bookbub might work. The main purpose of it is to let you know about deals on books you want, but it seems like it could work as a general wishlist tool. And it links to both the Kindle and Kobo stores, so that’s good. For replacing the Amazon-owned Goodreads, a lot of people seem to be going to StoryGraph. It looks like it could work well as a Goodreads replacement. Of course, if I do any of this, my life inevitably gets more complicated. Honestly, right now, I think I’m going to keep one foot in the Amazon/Kindle ecosystem and one foot in the Kobo/etc world.

I could keep going on this stuff, but I just noticed that the sun has gone down, and it’s time to eat dinner. So I’ll stop here.

I’ve been buying various Humble bundles going back to 2012. I think the first couple were probably book bundles. Then, they started selling comics bundles too. I’ve been buying two or three of their bundles every year since then. So it’s not a ton of stuff, but it adds up. Some of the comics bundles, if you download all the books, can take up a lot of disk space. The largest one I have is a Star Trek bundle that takes up 25 GB.

My general approach with the DRM-free Humble comics bundles is to download all the books onto my main PC, then back them up to DVD. I’ve kept them in a local folder on the PC, only moving individual books to OneDrive when I’m ready to load them onto my iPad.

But I’m starting to rethink that. I have 1 TB drive in my PC, and I try to keep at least 100 GB free on it. I bought a couple of Humble bundles this week, and the comics one (Black Hammer) pushed me over the edge into having just under 100 GB free. I found that my local Humble folder had 175 GB worth of comics in it.

In OneDrive, I have 1 TB of storage, and I was using about 170 GB of that. So there’s plenty of room on OneDrive for the comics. I keep all of my OneDrive files local on my PC, so I don’t gain much immediately from moving the comics there. (Though there is some overlap, with stuff I’d copied to OneDrive and also had on my PC.) So I’ve spent some time over the last few days moving stuff from my local folder to OneDrive. I’m almost done now, with the last couple of bundles uploading right now. As you can imagine, it takes a long time to upload 175 GB to OneDrive.

When I’m done, I will consider changing the settings in OneDrive so that the Humble comics folder is offloaded and not always available on the PC. I already have both my MacBook and PC laptop set so that OneDrive is in “files on demand” mode, but I’ve resisted doing that on my main PC, since I like to be able to have the OneDrive files included in my daily backups (via Bvckup 2).

Overall, I’m trying to let go a bit of the idea that I need to have all of my DRM-free comics on my hard drive and backed up. Humble has now been around for more than ten years, and I’m pretty sure all of the stuff I’ve bought from them is still downloadable from their library. So it doesn’t seem as though I’m likely to suddenly lose access to it at any point soon. And, hey, it’s just comics, and honestly, I’ve got so many of them now that I’m probably not ever going to read them all anyway.

Another idea I had was to move them to a separate OneDrive account, as an archive. I have Microsoft 365 Family, so I can set up another user on the family account and move the comics over there, so they’ll be off the hard drive, out of my main OneDrive, but still safely in the cloud. That could be a lot of work though.

Well, I guess the system I have is good enough for now. The other Humble bundle I bought this week was a book bundle, the Ursula K. Le Guin bundle. Humble has been doing book bundles with Kobo recently, including the Terry Pratchett one from earlier this year. For the Pratchett bundle, I actually downloaded all the books from Kobo and pulled them into Calibre. I don’t think I’m going to bother doing that with the Le Guin bundle. Since I now have both a Kobo Libra Colour and a Kindle Colorsoft, I don’t have to worry that much about stripping DRM and moving files around, if I don’t want to. I can read the Kobo books on the Kobo and my Kindle books on the Kindle.

I’m not really happy about the overall situation with DRM on books and comics and music, but I guess I’ve accepted it, to some extent. And I think I’m starting to accept that I’ll never read every book and comic I “own” before I die. I read something some time ago by (I think) Steve Leveen that reframed the issue of having a large “To Be Read” pile as a positive rather than a negative thing. Rather than thinking of your backlog as a burden, think of it as an abundance of options. Every time I want to sit down and read a book or comic, I have hundreds of options to choose from, without spending any money or leaving my apartment. So that’s a good thing, right?