A Night Unremembered
13 years ago
Wednesday, April 8, 2015
Rand Who? And Other Things
Rand Paul has officially announced he is running for the Republican nomination and was immediately attacked by a number of people, both within and outside the Republican Party. I understand the criticism but I do not understand the attacks.
No one seems to think he stands that proverbial snowball's chance to get the nomination, much less win the general election. Most predict that he will fail quite quickly... and I tend to agree. This country is not ready for a Rand Paul and, I'd say, Rand Paul is not ready to lead the country.
The current president has, I think, put us in a deep hole; especially internationally. I think he did so with the best of intentions but we are still in a hole and I think it is very deep. And it is going to take a special kind of leader to get us out of it.
Meanwhile, I have other things on my mind. The most important of these is ebook formats and proprietary e-readers. Faye purchased a Kindle Fire and I think she is having "buyer's remorse." One of the problems is that Amazon appears to want complete (or almost complete) control of ebook purchases. I do not like that. I am an "open source" kind of guy; I want to be able to have multiple choices for purchasing anything. And there seems to be choices other than Amazon for her but many are more scam than real. One of them seems to just offer access to books that are out of copyright... for $20 a month. Heck, she can just get those from the Gutenberg Project. I go there often but she wants books from contemporary authors and is not interested in the classics.
I already tried to convert a purchased short story ("Second Son") using Calibre but it failed due to copyright protection. Unless we can find an app for the Kindle that reads .epub format, there's no way I can share that with her Kindle.
You know the rule: If the wife is not happy, the home is not a happy place.
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4 comments:
As soon as I buy any book on Amazon, I immediately decrypt it using a Calibre plugin. It can then be converted for any device.
Amazon doesn't want control over where you get your books, although their bastardized Android version certainly makes it difficult to use anything besides their store. But as long as you have a decrypted book in pretty much any format, you can email it to your device and they'll convert it for you and send it to your device (or, use Calibre to do it manually).
Maybe your problem is books that were bought for Nook? I'm guessing the same Calibre plugin supports decrypting epub files, too, but I can't say for certain, not at my home desktop...
Er, email it to your Kindle email address, rather (go to http://www.amazon.com/myk for that. The Devices tab lists your Kindle email, and also your serial numbers (used for decryption)).
Perhaps we should chat live. I ran Calibre on the book (a short story: "Second Son")but it failed due to "DRM" (copyright encryption?) so I could not share that with her. I like Calibre; it works fine on books that are not "DRM" but it doesn't work for what I want to do. Thinking of picking up an Android tablet (small and cheap) for her as a dedicated e-reader.
Thank youu for being you
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