… and stay well away from suppliers like Amazon that lock the e-things you buy from them into their proprietary ecosystem.
Fortunately, there are plenty of alternatives to Amazon for ebooks. Many are DRM-free, even if you must pay for them. See, eg, Guide to DRM-Free Living: Literature | defectivebydesign.org.
In 2012 I was struggling to find space for my print-book collection. Friends’ glowing reports of Kindle encouraged me to get one and begin accumulating an ebook library via Amazon.
It wasn’t long before I began to chafe at Amazon-Kindle’s major limitations, which included
- Severely lacking library-management functions, whether online or via the Kindle devices and apps. One could not view, sort, or search on any standard metadata other than title and author.
- Severely limited search function. The only accessible metadata was title, author, date purchased, and ranking (!?); searching couldn’t be restricted to any of those; and there was no concept of a “regular expression”. Given a phrase, even in quotes, it’d search separately for each of the words. Want to find books by Joe Bloggs? Be prepared to sift through all books ever published that have Joe or Bloggs in the title or author’s name …
- Ebook files entirely encrypted, with even the filenames just random strings of characters, and only readable with Kindle (app or device). So no metadata, not even book title, is visible outside of the Amazon-Kindle environment.
- No accounting for taste, but I just didn’t like the Kindle.
It quickly became impossible to access and track my growing ebook library in any organised fashion. Eg, I couldn’t easily check whether I already had a particular volume of a series, let alone easily find all available volumes in a series on the Amazon website.
So, after investigating options, I installed the free open-source Calibre eBook Management on my Windows laptop, imported as much as possible of my ebook library into it, and began buying ebooks from anywhere but Amazon. I bought an 8" Android tablet to use as a reader instead of the Kindle, and am still using that.
I now have almost 800 ebooks in Calibre, which has all the library management functions one would expect, including a sophisticated search that can access any metadata, and can even search the content. I even created a database of my 300+ print books in Calibre by importing metadata from an app that could scan barcodes and look up the metadata online.
These days I often buy commercial ebooks from Booktopia, which usually has the ones I want and usually charges about the same as Amazon for them. The ones with DRM do have to be ‘fulfilled’ by Adobe Digital Editions or Kobo, but can then be imported into and managed by Calibre.
I can access my Calibre library via ebook reader apps on the Android tablet. I much prefer the tablet to a Kindle as a reading environment, but if I did want to use a Kindle with Calibre, I could. It can communicate directly with most e-reader devices and apps to deliver and update books, either wirelessly or by connecting the device to the PC.