!My e-reader compromise
---
rawtext.club:70/~xiu
2023-05-25
Boorloo/Perth, Western Australia
---
The kindle jailbreak[1] is a no-go. I spent half a day
taking it apart, tooling with it, fiddling with
jumper cables until my hands cramped, rebooted until
I was sick of the bright startup lights.

As much as I dream about being a cyberpunk hacker, I
just don't have the know-how or patience right now
to make it happen. Might need to cut my teeth on
something easier like repairing the button on our
car beeper. Hey, I changed the battery in one of our
remote controls last week, so anything could happen.

Anyway, having to relent on the jailbreak left me
grumpy about closed-source and proprietary tech. It
didn't help that while comfort culling my bookmarks
I found a now-lost mastodon thread along the lines
of, "If you think today's big platforms are too big
to fail, just remember that AOL and Yahoo were once
the Internet." (Or something like that.)

It inspired me to keep looking for something at
least a little bit open-sourcey and free-er for the
books I can't JUST get physical copies of, according
to my persnickey book policy[2].

Here's what I landed on:

epy[3] is a CLI ebook reader available under a
GPL-3.0 license. It's written in python and
maintained by wustho (Benawi Adha), an Indonesian
software developer. It's snappy, intuitive, easy to
pick up, and has bookmarking capabilities among
other features. And it runs happily on the
Vivobook[4] as well as my Big Internet machine.

There are people in my writing network who publish
exclusively on the Zon, but I guess I don't need
kindle hardware to read their work. I can just run
the kindle app on my phone or Big Internet machine.
Makes more sense to donate the device to someone who
can appreciate it more fully. I'm not that person
anymore.

Otsukaresamadeshita, little paperwhite. I'm grateful
for the time we spent together, and for how we now
part ways.

[1] gopher://rawtext.club/0/~xiu/phlog/2023-03-18-nophone-projectfail-birdstuff.txt
[2] gopher://rawtext.club/0/~xiu/phlog/2022-11-25-persnickety-paper-books.txt
[3] https://github.com/wustho/epy
[4] gopher://rawtext.club/0/~xiu/phlog/2023-01-15-permacomputing-manjaro-i3-asus-vivobook.txt