I’ve got Amazon’s Kindle app on my Android…and I do not like it. They keep interfering with me! They download stuff to me, they sync when I don’t want to, I can’t get rid of the “carousel” of titles, they sometimes close the book I have open, and I’m tired of it. I want a “dumb” app, that I can connect to with a USB cable, and that’s it. My home PC is where the files stay, and they only move onto an Android reader when I want them to be there.
What I’m afraid of is that only a Kindle can read Kindle azw files.
Thus, my second choice would be to castrate the Kindle app, so it doesn’t connect via Wi-Fi or 4G to anything, giving me the same control. I’ve written to Amazon asking how to do this, but they haven’t answered.
Also, just a quick shout-out of THANKS to all y’all. The SDMB techies are great, and I’ve gotten some extremely good and helpful answers here. The collective knowledge on this board is astonishing, and I’m VERY grateful for all I’ve learned!
No relevant experience with alternative readers, but you might just try kneecapping the Kindle app as much as you can by denying it background data access, turning off auto start, and turning off notifications, etc.
It sounds like the OP wants to use an app rather than an e-reader, but if you want an e-reader, then a plain vanilla Kindle (not a Fire or tablet) will work fine. Mine has both 3G and WiFi capabilities, but I only turn on the connection when I am actually downloading a book. The other 99.5% of the time it’s pretty much just a fancy book. I’ve never had it interfere with anything I’m reading.
On another note, I hate the fact that Amazon has decided to call both its e-reader and its tablet by the same name (and then throw in all the other fancy names like Fire, Paperwhite, Voyage, Oasis, etc.) It makes it nearly impossible to explain the difference to someone who is not very tech-savvy.
Not sure if you’re looking only for an app for an android device or if you are considering getting an ereader. Either way, I suggest you look into Kobo. I don’t really know anything about the Kobo app for android, but I have a Kobo ereader and really like it; the hardware is just about the same as Kindle and Nook but the software makes it much more versatile.
FWIW, when I’ve used the Kindle app on my Android phone, I haven’t noticed any of the things you’re complaining about.
I would think that would depend on whether or not the files have DRM. Some of the ebooks sold by Amazon do, some don’t.
Actually, they don’t anymore, perhaps for the reason you mentioned. When they first started selling tablets, the called them (various versions of) the Kindle Fire, but a couple of years ago they dropped the word “Kindle,” reserving that for their ereader devices and apps.
It’s not clear from the discussion, but Kindle can read multiple formats including .mobi, .epub, .pdf and even .txt, I think. I have all kinds of stuff (from my own production) on my devices that isn’t .azw/.azw3 and Kindle don’t care.
In fact, Kindle is the best PDF app for my purposes - I use it to show presentations from my Note II to an HDMI display.
Unless things have changed in the last 3 or so years, don’t bother with the kobo app for Android. I used it for several years and it kept getting worse and worse. It wanted to update weekly or more often, which was a pain, but what really did it is every time it updated it would have to reload all the books.
I now use the Kindle app on Android and have no problems with it.
I turned off syncing at my Amazon account because my sis and I share the same books and don’t want our kindles keeping each other’s places. I also turn off wifi to my kindle unless I actually want to download something at that very moment. I don’t have any advice for android kindle apps because my phone spends most of its life in airplane mode. I don’t want people calling me on it.
I’ll explore these! Thank you for the suggestions!
How? I can’t find any menu of options. I’d love to do all of this, and can’t figure out how. (And I can’t find any documentation or advice via Google.)
How?
Actually, I have one of those too, and love it. (And, yes, connectivity is welded in the off position!) But it’s a little too big to carry around with me everywhere, while the Android is more portable (and one needs one these days anyway!)
I have owned a couple Kobo eReaders and loved them. I think they all have Wifi now but you can turn it off. You can side load books with a USB cable. They work great with Calibre.
I just started playing around with Moon+ and have found it to be far superior to Aldiko. The main problem with Aldiko is not how well it reads Epubs (no problem with that) but how very little you can customize it. Moon+ can be pretty intimidating at first because of the sheer number of appearance and control options, but in the end you can make it look and act almost any way that you wish.
For example, on my old Sony electronic ink reader (with a feature-adding mod patched in) I had a thin black bar at the bottom of the screen with white lettering showing the page number and pages remaining, plus the current time and the battery charge. Aldiko doesn’t offer anything like that, the only addition being to show page numbers, which it shows as a tiny number inside the text window itself, often obscuring words. Moon+ allows me to add a bar very similar to what I had on the Sony reader, listing battery charge, time, chapter name, chapter page x of y, and percentage of book read. It lets me configure the fonts and line spacing better than Aldiko, and it also reads CBR/CBZ comic files. I had to come back and dig up this thread and see if Moon+ had been the alternative suggested here, and sing the praises of Moon+.
