Kindle, Kobo, Humble, and DRM thoughts

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?

waiting for my Kindle

My new Kindle still hasn’t shown up yet. It’s due on Nov 4, which is fine, but a little inconvenient, since I’m on vacation next week, and it would have been nice to have a new Kindle to play with.

I’ve already sent my old Kindle back for trade-in, and it’s been accepted, with no issues. But now I’m not sure I should have traded it in. It looks like the new Kindles don’t allow the download and transfer option like the old ones did. And that’s the way I generally get Kindle ebooks over to my Kobo; by downloading them, pulling them into Calibre, letting it convert them, then copying them to the Kobo.

So, since I now have no older devices registered to my Amazon account, I can’t download books anymore. I probably should have kept the old Kindle, just so I could keep that ability.

Mind you, Amazon has said nothing about this, so no one is sure if this is just a temporary thing, or a change in policy going forward. Either way, I probably shouldn’t worry about it. The main point of buying a new Kindle is so that I can use it to read my Kindle books. And it should be at least as good as the Kobo.

My old 2018 Paperwhite wasn’t quite as good as the Kobo, so I’d been copying all of my Wheel of Time books over to the Kobo and reading them on it. But now, I’ll want to go back to the Kindle anyway, I think.

This does leave me wondering what I’ll do with the Kobo. Of course, I have plenty of DRM-free ebooks that I can read on either device, easily. And I have a bundle of Terry Pratchett ebooks that I got through Kobo, so there’s those too.

Kindle Colorsoft

When the new Kindles were announced this week, I pretty much jumped right in and ordered a Kindle Colorsoft. I used to be a lot more cautious/frugal about ordering new bits of hardware, but I seem to have decided that “you only live once”, as the kids say, so now I have a fancy new color Kindle on its way to me. It should be here on Nov 4. I traded in my old Kindle Paperwhite, so the total cost after trade-in discount is around $233. I got the Paperwhite in 2018, so I was due for a new Kindle.

Of course, I also bought a Kobo Libra Colour just a few months ago. So now I’ll have two color e-readers to choose from. Part of me feels ashamed for my flagrant consumerism here. I feel like I should have held out and waited for the new Kindles, instead of buying the Kobo. Or decided to stick with the Kobo and give up on the Kindle. But, eh… you only live once.

I’m using the Kobo to read my Wheel of Time books right now, despite having bought them through Amazon. Once I get the Kindle, I’ll probably switch back to it, and see if the screen is as good as (or better than) the Kobo. (The Kobo screen is definitely better than my 2018 Paperwhite, but that’s to be expected.)

If I like the new Kindle better than the Kobo, then I guess the Kobo will become a secondary device. I’m pretty sure I’ll hold on to it, either way.