Anyone who has ever heard me rant about online ebook booksellers’ closed system (yes, I am talking to you Amazon) knows I think the way we are currently selling ebooks is ridiculous, immoral and dangerous. When I first started reading ebooks I almost gave up because I couldn’t figure out why my well-established sense of book ownership was being thrown away in the new commerce of ebooks. It was as if the booksellers\/publishers were trying to lease me books rather than sell them to me. At one pint (although I am not sure if it is still true or not) Amazon was able to erase purchased books from your library without any permission at all.<\/p>\n
I got over it, and with the help of Calibre<\/a>, I set up a DRM-free system that allowed me to ‘sideload’ all my purchases to all my ereaders, iPhones and iPads and eventually to my Android-based Nexus 7. All I had to do was avoid Amazon (because they are\u00a0a closed-system fount of evil) and iBooks (because their drm was too hard to crack).<\/p>\n I bought everything I could direct (and drm-free) from Baen<\/a> and eventually settled on Kobo as my goto source of ‘other’. Recently Tor has joined the ranks of drm-free publishers and so now 90% of my purchases I don’t even need to strip the drm.<\/p>\n Well as of this week that has changed. For the worse. I bought Hawk<\/a><\/em>, a new Vlad Taltos book from Steven Brust on the Kobo website as was my usual pattern but when I went to my Kobo library there was\u00a0no way to download the actual file. The download link was gone. I did a bunch of googling but couldn’t see that anyone else had the same problem so I figured it was a glitch. After I got no response from Kobo’s auto-help mail form, I eventually broke down and called. I got some half-ass explanation that it was an epub3 file and that I would have to use the Reader for Mac app that my Sony (something I de-installed ages ago) came with or read it on a proprietary Kobo app. Uh, no… I don’t think so.<\/p>\n The follow up email they sent me:<\/p>\n Dear Sir,<\/p>\n Thank you for contacting Kobo Customer Care. It was our pleasure assisting you today.<\/p>\n You contacted us today as you could not download a book (“Hawk”) from the website. We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused.<\/p>\n This is due to the fact that this book is in a specific format (ePub3). You can only download it via the software “Reader for Mac”.<\/p>\n To sign in using your Kobo account, Click on “Edit” >> “Preferences” >> “Account” >> “Sing in”<\/p>\n Should you have further concerns, you may visit our HELP section online at www.kobobooks.com\/help. Or call us at:1 (800) 368-5390<\/p>\n For your records, here is your Reference Number: xxxxxxxxx<\/p>\n Thank you.<\/p>\n Sincerely,<\/p>\n The Kobo Team<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I looked at Reader for Mac later and it had no such Edit::Preferences etc. Of course the software I have is years old as it resides on the e-reader itself. Sony Bookstore is defunct so I doubt there are any updates available. And I couldn’t be bothered.<\/p>\n Now that I knew what I was looking for the Google hits came fast and furious. Seem Tor<\/a>, for some unknown reason, has begun to package their ebooks as epub3 files. When submitted to Kobo, Kobo then auto-converts them to a proprietary kepub format that is not downloadable. No one seems to know why Tor or Kobo are doing this and apparently if I went to another retailer I would be able to download the epubs easily enough. That didn’t help me as I had already forked out the $11 for the book and shouldn’t have to pay again for something I already owned.<\/p>\n The Digital Reader.com provided a solution. So it seems if you\u00a0install the Kobo Desktop App and then download the file, you can then install a plugin called Obok (here is the \u00a0download link<\/a> from the digital reader site) in Calibre and be able to import the ebook files that way. Didn’t work. Other books I had purchased from Kobo showed up but not Hawk<\/em>. But a bit of comment reading showed that the issue was that Hawk<\/em> was already DRM free so the plugin didn’t work. But is seems the kepub files had been downloaded to \/\/Users\/admin\/library\/application support\/kobo\/kobo desktop edition\/kepub\/ (on my Mac) and I merely needed to copy the file from that (hidden) directory and add the .epub ending to get my book.<\/p>\n This however means I have to use terminal and command line since the files are hidden. After a bunch of screwing around I came up with this: This copies the contents of the kepub folder to my Documents\/My Books folder in the admin account I usually use. Then I manually added the .epub and imported the book into Calibre. Worked like a charm.<\/p>\n As for Kobo, I am very likely to go elsewhere because this is nonsense and I shouldn’t have to read my books in their ecosystem for no other reason than they are trying to force me to use them as my sole provider of reading material. I will likely fire off an email to Tor as well as there is no apparent reason for this file format.<\/p>\n
\ncp -r \/\/Users\/admin\/library\/application\\ support\/kobo\/kobo\\ desktop\\ edition\/kepub\/ \/users\/admin\/documents\/my\\ books\/<\/code><\/p>\n