It's a pity Calibre to date refuses to be refactored into a self-hosted service.

The core logic should be portable, with the app just being an interface to it, but no, the entire project is so much spaghetti it would feed the entire boot for over a year... such a shame.

optimal solution (lol)

My kindle has never been connected to the interwebs. Always used Calibre, wonderful software. About two weeks ago I used it to transfer books, worked with no problems.

This is about the Kindle Store. Calibre will continue to work, it just copies files via USB, you don't even need Calibre for that.

I'm poor. I pirate stuff. When I can, I buy physical copies of the stuff I like.

Here's a reminder that Boox makes amazingly good e-readers in all form factors Amazon does (including a variety of tablets!), with stylus support (USI 2.0 for smaller devices, EMR for their Note series and above), fully open (recent Android versions, regular updates, unlockable bootloader, straightforward to root devices), support KOReader, with a solid built in reader (plus support for cloud sync, including syncing books to a free 10GB Boox server storage), support for OPDS (a better way to access your library than Calibre's sync, plus it can be utilised with most digital libraries too), and altogether quite well priced devices.

At the moment I have on my hands a Go Color 7 gen2, a Note Air5 C, and a Palma2 Pro. The experience is surprisingly good for a "random Chinese brand", the hardware, compared to similarly priced devices, is superior (seriously, 4/6/8GB RAM, 64/128GB internal storage, SD card support), not to mention their customised e-ink waveforms (which give you near LCD-like scrolling with minimal trailing effect and little to no ghosting, something I can't say about my Kindles...)

The only downside I found of these devices is the relatively bad battery life in locked/standby (due to Android, but you still easily get over a week per charge with average use, or about 20-22 hours of active use!), and the speakers... definitely not meant for audiobooks.

It's crazy to think that Amazon literally started as a book store.

this is also why i started buying physical books and using my local public library again.

At least for the kindle platform, they've stopped offering a USB option a while ago, precisely to keep people from circumventing their planned obsolescence.

All hail the high seas

There's not really any advantage of using txt files over open standard drm-free epubs. You can still generate them yourself using txt editors or publishing software, you can still load them over USB. But epubs give you quality of life features on eReaders like title pages, table of contents, chapter headers, formatting markers like bold and italics.

can't you just load epub with calibre or another sync to? I'm pretty sure that's what I do because that's what I'm doing