Primarily fanfic? Maybe that's why this guy's use cases and mine were so different. In his world, Calibre was designed to evade DRM and that was its major usage, where I was mostly thinking of people loading fic.

Which I should totally do more of.

Thing is Calibre alone can't strip DRM

But it's perfectly obvious that it's a step in the pirating process, right?

Well, that's what this guy was trying to convince me of--that it was an unspoken secret that everyone used it for that.

Wellllll, I mostly use Calibre with non-DRMd books. How they GET that way is a different question.

But I've never tried to email anything to my kindle. Either I get it from the Kindle store or the library (and then they come via 3G or for the library, wifi only), or I put it in Calibre, convert if needed, and load while hooked up via cord.

ita,

not necessarily. I use calibre for legit purposes. In fact, a few years back when I had to do some dodgy shit for ebooks I had purchased outside of amazon, but wanted to put it on the kindle (personal use, not sharing with anyone, not doing any bullshit), I'm not sure I even used calibre as part of that process.

Well, the easiest thing (as it turns out) is to go to the Amazon website and download an app called "Send to Kindle". Have done that and sent the book to my Kindle.

Why couldn't the customer service people - even the experts - tell me that?

And I just sent a note to Amazon ttelling them that they should have told me about the app.

Grrr.

I use calibre as a library. I've got fic in there, as well as Gutenberg and kindle books. I have used it to remove the DRM from my Kindle books for personal archival purposes (you have to install scripts and stuff to make Calibre do it), as well as convert library books only available in ePub to Kindle (I then make sure to delete them in time as I worship libraries). I've been significantly more within-the-ethics in book world than I was in music world, back when I listened to music less sporadically.

Mostly, Calibre is iTunes for eBooks, and can conveniently talk to my kindle for easy transfers.

Gris speaks for me: Calibre is the way I manage my ebook collection. While that includes stripping DRM, it also includes managing out-of-copyright books, fic, and ebooks that don't have DRM to begin with.

That said, if I make the mistake of trying to load an Amazon-purchased book that I stripped DRM from onto the Kindle, the Kindle squawks at me and demands that I delete it. It's really annoying.

Everything I use Calibre for is legit. It's very useful for turning .doc and .rtf files into ePub or Mobi. I also use it for managing my e-reader, but nothing in my library has ever had DRM.

I use it to strip DRM off of things I buy on Kobo to put on my Kindle. I've found a lot of popular fiction isn't available for Kindle in Canada due to rights issues. (Including free versions of public domain books...WTF!) Every single thing I've stripped is something I've paid for, and I'm not sharing it, so I don't feel too badly about it.

Don't get me started about not being able to subscribe to The New Yorker...that's the kind of thing that's perfect to read on the Kindle.