Well that's a hell of a subtitle, innit?

I've sat down to write this guide like three times now, and it keeps happening. I started writing this 'cause I was gonna give my neighbour an ebook reader and he'd want to know how to get books on it, but then I figured it'd be useful to anyone with an old ereader and new books and it became this whole Thing.

The problem, y'see, is that when folk get to like the third step in the ebook conversion environment setup process they're gonna be all “Why are there so many steps, why is this such a pain in the arse to set up,” and the only way to answer that is with a bile-spewing screed about corporate greed and regulatory capture.

You should be able to just buy an .epub file from the author's website for a couple of bucks, download it, plug in your ereader, drag-and-drop and have it work every time. But that often doesn't work, because of Bullshit. It's really really hard to write a Bullshit Removal Guide without elaborating too much on The Bullshit, especially when it's the sort of late-stage-capitalism bullshit that gets everybody full of righteous indignation.

Don't worry. We're not gonna get all wound up and use our limited energy fighting the bullshit - we're gonna move around it and flow through it. It'll be like water to us. We are going to make a Bullshit Removal Machine and let it deal with The Bullshit on our behalf.

Getting this started will be a bit of a pain in the arse. I measure my pains in the arse using the cups-of-tea metaphor. “How many cups of tea will it take for me to deal with this pain in the arse” kinda situation.

The first step, setting up the Bullshit Removal Machine, will be a 2- or 3-cup pain in the arse, but the good news is you only have to do it once. After that, you should be able to feed ebook files through the Bullshit Removal Machine at a rate of about 50 to 100 books per cup.

Read the next section if you want to remind yourself why vintage ereaders are great and why the bullshit removal machine is worth setting up, read the section after it if you want to wallow in the bullshit a while and get to grips with how the hell we even got here, or skip the preamble and go straight to Setting Up The Bullshit Removal Machine.

E-readers look like they do one thing, read books. They've actually got two jobs: reading books, and being held in your hands, and those two jobs are equally important. We've all had the experience of seeing a fancy-looking tool at a great price only for our hands to tell us that it's actually a cheap load of plasticky crap; our fingers are harder to trick than our eyes, they know quality when they feel it.

Today in 2025, e-paper based ereaders are common and relatively affordable. In 2007, when the Sony PRS-505 first hit the market, these machines were expensive luxuries for the very wealthy. Although modern ereaders might be faster and cheaper, your hands can tell the difference between an everyday commodity plastic device and a rich man's toy.

Machines like this feel special, in 2025. You run your fingers over the meticulously-finished aluminium and go “Damn,” because most of the things we touch just don't feel quite as well-put-together as the stuff that rich folk had in the past. These things cost $300 in 2007, that's nearly half a grand in today's money - they hadn't figured out how to make the screens cheaper yet, so they put extra care into all the stuff surrounding it, to make it feel like it was worth the cash.

When touchscreens came in, it wasn't to add anything particularly useful - ereaders already read books after all - it was because they'd become cheaper than engineering decent buttons. These vintage machines are straight-up nicer to use than their modern equivalents. You wouldn't have to try very hard to argue that ereader technology hit its absolute peak nearly twenty years ago and has been kinda flailing ever since.

That's why people love these old machines. That's why I'm writing this guide.

That, and the whole “Repair is a political act” thing. Keeping old machines running is good for the environment, good for your wallet, good for society, and an insult to those who would prefer you pay them for a new machine, and those guys have enough money already.

So you have your 20 megabyte ebook file, you plug in your ereader, drag-and-drop, unplug, try to open the book and your ereader freezes for five minutes straight and then reboots itself. Why's that happen?

Long story short, blame Amazon and publishers.

The problem with ereaders is that they do one job, they do it very well, and they keep doing it until the page-forward buttons wear out. Worse still, back in 2007 at least, expensive luxury goods tended not to wear out too quick, and Sony really overengineered those page-turn buttons. This isn't a problem for us, it's great for us, but it's a problem for the likes of Jeff Bezos, who would very much enjoy selling you a new ereader every few years.

Ereaders are weird little machines that are hard to classify. On the one hand they're sort of like tablets or phones or computers, in that they have a screen and memory and a CPU, but on the other hand they're designed to only do one thing and do it well, so in that regard they're more like appliances, like a stereo or fridge, stuff that you replace when it's broken beyond repair, not when it's just Time To Upgrade. The people with the money don't want you to replace the battery once a decade until you die and then hand it down to your kids, they would rather you think of them more as a computer than an appliance, and buy a new one when the old one gets slow.

But how would it get slow? Books are books, they don't get more complicated over time. It's just text, right? I had a program for my ZX Spectrum that had all of Shakespeare's plays on it, it was 10p from a car boot sale and it ran just fine on a tape-deck computer made in 1980, why would an ereader from 2007 have problems with any ebook file?

Turns out, our man Jeff decided a good way to sell more ereaders was to make ebook files bigger. A bigger ebook file means it'll use more memory and CPU horsepower, it'll take up more space on the disk, older devices might not even be able to open it at all, sooner or later you'll run out of room.

How'd he manage that? I warn you now, it's dumb. It's so so dumb.

He made the cover images bigger.

That's it. That's all, he just mandated that if you wanna publish your book on Amazon, it's got to have a full-colour cover image that's 2,560 pixels tall by 1,600 pixels wide. Unless you've got a brand new 4K TV, your telly's probably 1,920 pixels wide by 1,080 pixels tall, spread out over 30 or 40 or 50 inches - can you make out individual pixels? Sat at arm's length away? With your glasses on?

An ereader's screen is six or seven inches. This is bonkers any way you slice it, but it gets worse.

The screen on the most recent 7-inch Kindle, as of October last year, is 1,680 pixels tall by 1,264 pixels wide. In order to display the cover, a brand new Kindle has to shrink down the image to squeeze it onto the screen. Oh, and it's black and white. 16 shades of grey if you wanna get picky. Not that you're gonna get picky, you're gonna immediately hit the page forward button (or swipe your finger awkwardly across the screen or whatever, touchscreens suck) and get into the story after glancing at this majestic absurd-resolution cover for maybe three quarters of a second.

The Lord of the Rings is just under 300kb of text. It's not unusual at all for a cover image on a new ebook file to be three megabytes all by itself. The cover weighs ten times as much as the actual book, and most of it is wasted - if you halved the size of the cover, you would need a magnifying glass to see the difference on your screen.

When the PRS-505 was released, Sony figured a 200mhz processor would be plenty of horsepower to read any ebook now or in the future. They didn't bank on Bezos pulling this bullshit.

Hence, this Bullshit Removal Guide.

So, if you read the previous bit, you're going “Well, we've just gotta shrink those ridiculously oversized covers down to the right size for the screen, yeah?” And, well, yeah, you're right, that's about 90% of the work right there.

To do this, we'll be taking your lawfully-acquired unencrypted epub files and running them through some free software called Calibre in order to, oh damn it,

If you're already a dirty pirate, or you already know where buy your .epub files DRM-free, you can totally skip this bit. I'm on my second cup of tea here. If you're new to reading ebooks, you might not know this yet, but there's a lot of bullshit to wade through and I'm gonna try and distill it down to the bare minimum, so here's God's honest truth.

For some books - maybe even for most books - the largest publishers insist that piracy should be the easiest option.

The ebook publishing industry is such a godawful mess that most ereaders can't read most legally-purchased ebooks, but all ereaders can read all pirated ebooks, and this is a situation mandated by publishers. For example, a Kobo can't read books you bought for a Kindle, you can't read a book you bought from bookshop.org on a Sony, and if you bought your books from Apple then I dunno what to tell you. But every ereader, phone, tablet and computer can read .epub, which has been the standard ebook format for nearly two decades now, and is the most popular format available on ebook piracy websites and shadow libraries.

The bullshit here comes from publishers. And from Amazon of course, but you already expect bullshit from them. Some of the big publishers insist on using copy protection, because even after twenty years of ebooks being a thing, they still think you can somehow stop a computer from copying text. It doesn't stop the pirates at all, doesn't even slow them down, but it does make it inconvenient to impossible to read an ebook legally. Sometimes they call this copy protection “Encryption” or “DRM” (which stands for Digital Restrictions Management, often euphemistically called Digital Rights Management by publishers), and the upshot is that if you wanna read an ebook you bought from Amazon, you can't just read it on whatever, you've gotta use an Amazon device or the godawful Amazon app to read it.

(They even took away your option to download book files at all as of February 2025. It's the Amazon app or nothing, and Amazon can stop you from reading your ebooks any time they like, because the decryption keys live in the cloud and not on your ereader. Don't buy ebooks from Amazon.)

Now there are ways of taking an encrypted file that you've legally bought and paid for, running it through copy protection removal software, and then putting it back into Calibre and running through the rest of this guide, but by the time you've gone through the extra step of messing around with decrypting the file, you'll have spent more time than you would have just downloading a pre-decrypted version from a shadow library. And you would've broken the law either way, because unlocking a book that you've bought and paid for is, bizarrely, illegal in the United States.

This is how people become pirates. Buy a book, assume incorrectly that buying it means that you can read it, end up downloading the same book from a dodgy pirate website, and you can see how folk might just have a look at what else Anna's Archive has to offer, while they're there.

If you wanna do it legally, and support authors - and you should - the best place to buy ebooks from big publishers is from ebooks.com. When you find a book you want, scroll down until you find “Download file formats” and it'll tell you whether the epub is encrypted or not, and if it's encrypted then it'll tell you that you can only read it using special (and inferior) software that's nowhere near as nice as your lovely ereader. If it's encrypted, you'll have the choice of how you want to break the law - you can buy the ebook from ebooks.com and then use software to unlock it (illegal and complicated and you can find out how to do that from some other website) or you can buy the book from ebooks.com and then download it from Anna's Archive or Libgen or Z-Library or any one of the various shadow libraries (illegal but very easy and you can find out how to do that by, uh… well I guess check the wikipedia article for “Shadow Library”). If you want to not break the law, then don't buy any encrypted ebooks; scroll all the way to the top and click on “DRM-Free eBooks” and ebooks.com will only show you unencrypted ebooks for sale.

(If you're thinking “Well shit, the pirates have won and the publishers haven't just let them but practically forced them to,” yes, you're right. I told you the ebook industry was messed up.)

If you wanna read old books out of copyright, Project Gutenberg has an abundance of free books for you, and you can fill your ereader to the brim with pre-1920's classics (and more recent books with permissive copyright terms) 100% legally.

Indie authors are well-represented on smashwords.com, and last I checked they didn't use or allow DRM at all, so anything you buy from there you should be able to read on a vintage ereader no problem.

Some indie authors sell DRM-free epub files on their own websites (they'll often make a big deal of telling you they're DRM-free), and they definitely deserve your money. Lately a lot of Incredibly Indie Authors (like the trans furry solarpunk anarchists on the Fediverse who all hate DRM) have been publishing books on itch.io or gumroad, and they're well worth checking out too.

Personally I think that if you buy a book, you should be able to read it on whatever you've got handy, and the overwhelming majority of people agree with me. It doesn't take much to argue that the massive waste of resources including rare earth metals and conflict minerals that goes into replacing perfectly functional ereaders with new ones is a much greater and more material evil than downloading books from shadow libraries. You could even argue that the only “morally correct” way of consuming encrypted ebooks is to pirate them and then put some money in whatever tip jar the author's set up on their own website. But then this would be a gibbering manifesto. Back to the actual guide.

Wow that's quite a collection haha, must've spent some money on that huh. Right, let's get them fed into the Bullshit Removal Machine which we will set up in the next step of this guide which from this point onwards will be less ANGRY AND RANTY.

Proceed to First-Time Calibre Setup