So the journey continues from the world of Windows10 on a newer laptop with all the random unannounced reboots, CPU fan spinning so fast I think the PC will meltdown to LinuxMint19 on a ten year old laptop.
In the past week I have adjusted from MS Office Powerpoint ($$$) or ($$) [if your employed in a corporation that uses MS Office so you can get a copy at a reduced expense] to LibreOffice Impress ($0 – but donations are appreciated). The Linux OS standard web browser, Firefox, is easy to import bookmarks, etc. External hard drives get automounted when the USB is connected. The wireless HP OfficeJet Printer is seen and available after every boot-up. Things were going well, or so I thought.
Then enter Amazon and its Kindle Fire and all the “protection” known in the publishing world as DRM (Digital Rights Management). I was ready just to use the Amazon Kindle Web Reader shown at the top of this post since there is no Linux app from Amazon to read your books on your PC like they have for Windows. It was at this point the DRM issue became very apparent since I was interested in saving a copy of my library on this Linux laptop. I am guessing for years I have been in denial about this DRM reality but the author of the tool DeDRM says it best from his web page:
The problem here is that America’s copyright lawyers figured out how to change the rules of ownership. When you buy a paperback book, its content belongs to the author, but the physical book belongs to you. You can loan it to someone, trade it, sell it, or just keep it and reread it as many times as you want. But when you “buy” a Kindle book, you’re renting temporary authorization from Amazon to store the book on up to 6 Amazon-approved devices.
Geoff Stratton
Enter the program for any OS called Calibre. With this application I can install a plugin from Geoff Stratton and enter the 16 digit license from my Kindle Fire and I can bring my Kindle book collection over to my Linux PC and remove the DRM with Geoff’s plugin so my own copy does NOT require a certified Amazon product to display the book. This is essential for many reasons that Geoff explains below:
This arrangement is bad for customers, for a number of reasons:
1) Any Kindle book that you “own” can disappear at any time, because of technological failure, change of license, or simple human error.
2) If Amazon ever abandons their Kindle business, all your Kindle books could vanish in a flash. Wait, though, isn’t Amazon too big to disappear? Maybe. But Kodak, Enron, General Motors, Sears, and the Smith-Corona typewriter company were once “too big to fail” American institutions too.
3) DRM interferes with legal uses of copyrighted text, like satire, reuse in teaching materials, and citation in reviews or academic papers. As a one-time IT guy at a public university, I frequently battled with DRM-ed written and recorded materials that instructors or researchers wanted to excerpt. The worst offender here is DVD region encoding.
4) DRM-ed Kindle books are incompatible with non-Amazon book readers and software. Sure, Amazon software is supported on most platforms now, but what about a decade from now? How many people still have the equipment to read a floppy disk, VHS tape, phonograph record, or audio cassette? A lot of music, art, and writing gets lost every time our storage technology changes to a different format, whether you’re talking about reel-to-reel tapes or clay tablets. If it’s important to you, make as many different copies of it as you can stand.
So strictly for personal use .. I downloaded “calibre” for my LinuxMint PC:
Then it is just a matter of following the directions to take the DeDRM plugin from Geoff’s site and configure Calibre to “know” your Kindle Fire.
Well, it has yet to work out that easily. All of a sudden my Fire does not want to play with my Linux PC and that seems a little coincidental to all of a sudden have an issue. I found two Calibre “dot” files on my Kindle and I think this might be a way that Amazon blocks this kind of activity.
So for now, I will read my Kindle books via the web reader and will have to get back to y’all about this DRM stuff.
Stay tuned.
-SF1
BTW: To add to my day, WordPress decided to update the software used to edit/publish blogs, so that has been yet another learning curve for this #60-something