Good day everyone,
I’m being denied access to my ebooks by my provider, which is Tolino.
Back then I chose Tolino because it offered many means to access my books without having to bring along a bookshelf everyhwhere I went. Unfortunately it escaped my attention that Tolino was acquired by - drumroll - Roku. Since then it seems they enshittified the android app. As long as my device is connected to a VPN the app says “no internet connection” and won’t let me access anything. As soon as I disable my VPN it works normally. Yeah, that’s unacceptable.
Do you guys know a way to pull my books?
Further, can you recommend me fair ebook provider? Google Books apparently works, but for one Google is known to shut down popular services without further notice and, well, it’s Google.
zlibrary isn’t really an option, because it doesn’t have the works I’d like to read in my preferred language.
Honestly, I just self-host. I download my ebooks, use Calibre to clean them, convert them to my favorite format (ePub), and tag the shit out of them with metadata. My Calibre library lives in a folder that gets synced to all my devices (I’m currently using a commercial cloud storage platform from one of the big providers, but working on spinning up a Nextcloud instance). Then I just open my ebooks in Moon+ Reader Pro on my phone and read away.
This is the way
Have you considered self-hosting? If so, there are a couple of options, such as Calibre-web.
I haven’t until now, if I do I’ll limit it to my LAN, I don’t like having too much exposed to the web.
Should work even if you’re on the move, provided you have Wireguard or such to tunnel into your LAN.
Go to libgen.rs to replace your books and use koreader to read them.
I use Kavita to host my ripped ebooks and other reading stuff, can absolutely recommend.
Not sure how you can rip your existing Tolino collection, I only ever deal with the amazon DRM.
Some authors, like Brandon Sanderson, offer DRM-free books on their own stores, but discoverability is way worse for obvious reasons.
I’ve taken a look at Kavita, it does look interesting. In the past hours I tried a few apps, and found one with which I can continue reading.
I’ll try to look out for niche stores in the future, thanks for the hints.
ebook.com has a tickbox in its search tool to look only for drm-free books. I miss-clicked once, buying a locked book & was refunded with zero hassle.
Tachyon Publications straight out does not sell drm-locked books.
Not what you want to hear but:
Putting ALL of your traffic through a VPN accomplishes little to nothing… and may actually compromise you. Understand that we all have a digital fingerprint, as it were. A mess of tracking cookies but also lining up “personas” and the like.
An example I like is that Jim in Botswana is known to login to the same account as Jim from Sweden and Jim from Alabama. Also, Jim from Alabama has used some of the same VERY distinct language as Sophie Smith’s little brother. And Sophie Smith went to Polk High in 1997. And if this sounds crazy: THIS is why there is so much research into how to aggregate and analyze large swathes of data and stuff like LLMs largely came out of this as a bonus.
If you put all of your traffic through a VPN you are more or less making it easy. Jim from Sweden blah blah blah AND that same IP downloads a lot of copyrighted tentacle porn. Which has now greatly increased your risk vector in the event an example needs to be made.
Put traffic that needs to be VPN’d through a VPN. Put traffic that needs to be Tor’d through Tor (although, also do some research on the various attempts to compromise that…) and so forth. But the key is to not mix your “good” traffic with your “bad” traffic.
So you like copyrighted tentacle pork and went to HS in '97, eh?
Sorry just kidding. In all seriousness: This is a wonderful explanation on internet privacy nowadays, but I don’t know if TOR should be trusted. Surely we’ve all read some time that some nodes are under control of bad states and other bad actors who use those nodes to put some malicious payload into your traffic, right? But luckily, I personally don’t see the need to use TOR rn.
Yeah. I have a LOT of issues with Tor’s design. And the philosophy and its tendency to be used for heinous shit like CSAM makes me just not want to deal with it. Why should I help mask the scum of the earth’s behavior?
And while it has historically been used to protect some journalists and activists, Signal, twitter, and proper opsec/dedicated hardware have very much taken over for that. In large part because people have realized that masking your route to a destination doesn’t help if you are connecting from home and have been identified at the destination.
But people get REALLY pissy about Tor. Likely because it makes them feel smart to be “one step farther”.
can’t you just switch servers frequently?
Which still has the exact same issue of all your accounts and activity being linked together.
surely if you had something in the background automatically switching servers every 2 minutes or something it would rectify that. you’d never be using the same source long enough to form a pattern
Please actually look in to tracking cookies and other methods of tracking users.
Idk about removing DRM from your Tolino ebooks, but for access I can highly recommend Audiobookshelf. They added ebook support a while ago, and it’s actually really solid. Most important for me was that it actually syncs your read progress, something that’s not so easy to achieve with apps based on OPDS like Kavita. And you get selfhosted podcasts and audiobooks on top for free, which is nice.
There is tolino-calibre-sync on GitHub that syncs ebooks from calibre to tolino cloud. It seems to also have a command line api to download from tolino cloud. I don’t have a tolino so no idea if it works and there is an outstanding issue with login problems. Still might be worth a look.
I might consider this, but for now I’ll try to get away from Tolino and anything run by Roku.
If you want convenience, Google Books is pretty solid. Just make sure you have all of your books and are only uploading to Google. If you buy from Google, you’ll run into the same problem. I organize via Calibre and use it to push to both Google and a Kobo.
I personally have all my ebooks and use Google Books to read on all my devices. It’s more convenient than trying to self host stuff. When Google eventually drops Google Books I will have to figure out what to use.