POST ORIGINAL DATE JAN 23

This weekend I decided I'd finally had enough of the closed ecosystem that is Kindle, and that I wanted to move my 600 books bought on that platform over the past 11 years into something I have more control over.

I own my physical books, yet I felt I did not truly own my Kindle books, because I absolutely hate the desktop app, and it's hard to print out things I want or manipulate the material in other ways – I feel like I'm missing out on some of the benefits of owning digital material.

My books are mainly non-fiction and used for research and learning, whether cookbooks, politics, or running biographies/training books, and I realised I had actually stopped buying digital books so much and was once more opting for physical books, and that it was often because of these limitations.

A flurry of research ensued, then I decided to go for a Kobo reader device (it can accept all kinds of ebook files), and to organise my books locally using Calibre open source software, with a master folder in my Mac's iCloud Documents folder, meaning I have a cloud backup of my collection.

The latter also means that I can access them from my phone or iPad, and I'm just using the Books app which happily opens them when clicked on from Files on an iOS device.

I'm only 25 books in to my “conversion”, which has to be done book-by-book by downloading the files from the Content page on Amazon's website (yeah, I had to use the DRM removal plugin for Calibre, but ethically I'm fine with that – these are my books, for my personal use), but it looks great, and I feel I finally have control over the books. Also I can now buy books, documents, pamphlets etc from anywhere and they all get treated the same.

I feel like it is “liberation of knowledge” and long overdue!

This also plays into the feeling that underpins a lot of my decisions regarding how I use the internet at the moment – that big tech is not out for our wellbeing, and that we should be creating, engaging with and supporting systems and ideas that loosen its grip on us, where possible. Books appear to me to be a fundamental part of how we learn and grow, and it felt wrong being tied in to Kindle for them, just as it would feel wrong being forced to buy all your food from the supermarket.

It’s early days, but it feels good and I hope I’ll look back and wonder why it took me so long.

UPDATE July 23 - No turning back, it’s all worked like a dream, all my books are on my Kobo, and I turns out I can live happily with not buying books “over the air”.