Non-Kindle E-Readers

Turning the page on Amazon and Kindle to a new world of e-readers.

Since Amazon announced that they would no longer allow users to download their Kindle books, I decided it was time to leave the ecosystem. I was already unhappy with other things Amazon was doing (really, what Jeff Bezos was doing), and the Kindle hardware has been disappointing, to say the least.

What I loved most about being in the Amazon ecosystem for books was the Whispersync feature between Audible audiobooks and Kindle eBooks. This is something I will miss a lot. Even if I don’t have the seamless syncing between the two anymore, I can still maintain a setup where I jump back and forth between audiobook and eBook — it will just require a bit more manual effort than before.

With that said, I decided to download all my books from Amazon and set up Calibre on my Windows home server. The process was seamless, and I had no issues with metadata or other setup during the migration. Now, not only do I have more control over the content I purchased, but I can also read these books outside of the Kindle ecosystem — which includes Kindle e-readers and the Kindle app.

At the beginning of the year, I bought an iPad Mini 6 to be my dedicated e-reader, primarily using the Kindle app. For a short period, I moved all my books to…