5. Where Your Books Actually Come From

Nadia's requirement sheet ended with one question still open. She borrows most of her novels through a library lending app. Can the reader she buys borrow those novels for her directly, or will she still need her phone? Her sheet could not answer that, because the answer is not about the screen, the light or the buttons. It is about where the book comes from and who holds it.

This chapter follows three kinds of book onto an e-reader: a library loan, a book bought from a store, and a folder of personal PDFs. The course so far has covered what you read, how electronic paper works, how to read a screen specification, and how light and handling fit the room you read in. Now we look at the book itself. On a screen, a book is one of three things. It can be a file you hold, a licence a store grants you, or a loan that ends. Which one it is decides what you can move, what you can keep and what you can lose. A brand's reputation for being open or closed does not decide it. The route does.

Here are the three things side by side, before any device enters the story.

A file you hold is the simplest. Say a small publisher sells you a novel with no copy protection, or you save a PDF of a paper. That is a file. It sits on your laptop like a photo. You can copy it, back it up, and put it on any device that can read its format. Nobody can switch it off from far away. You can lose it the ordinary way, by deleting it or by losing the only drive it sat on.

A store licence feels like owning a book, but it works differently. When you buy from the Kindle Store, Amazon's terms grant you a licence to read the book on your registered devices and apps. That licence is personal, it cannot be passed on, and the terms say it can be revoked. Kobo's terms of sale work the same basic way for its devices and apps. So what you bought is permission tied to an account, plus a protected copy that only certain software will open. Software that locks a file to an account or device like this is called digital rights management, usually shortened to DRM. You keep the book as long as the account and the permission last. You can move it only along the routes the store allows.

A library loan is a licence with a clock on it. The library lends you a protected copy for a set number of days. When the clock runs out, the copy stops opening. You were never meant to keep it, and that is part of why libraries can offer it free.

Hold those three in mind. Every route below is one of them arriving on a device.

Nadia's library novel. Nadia uses Libby, the library app run by a company called OverDrive. Many public libraries use OverDrive to lend ebooks. She picks a novel, borrows it on her phone, and now wants it on an e-reader. There are three documented ways that can go, and each one depends on the kind of device.

On a current Kobo reader, OverDrive is built into the device itself. Models such as the Libra Colour, the Clara Colour, the Clara BW, the Sage and the Elipsa 2E have it. Nadia would open the settings, find the OverDrive section, and sign in with an OverDrive account or with her library card number and PIN. After that she can search her library's catalogue on the reader, borrow, place holds and download, all over Wi-Fi. She never needs to pick up her phone. If she does borrow on her phone in Libby, the book shows up in her Kobo library at the next sync, as long as the same library card is linked.

There are two cases where the Kobo still needs a computer. The built-in screen handles one library card at a time. If Nadia had cards at two libraries and wanted both, she would need Adobe Digital Editions on a computer and a USB cable. Adobe Digital Editions is Adobe's desktop program for opening and moving protected ebooks. The same computer route is needed when a library book does not match a title in Kobo's own store by its exact ISBN, the book's catalogue number.

There is a bigger condition. The built-in OverDrive feature is officially offered in thirteen countries and territories. They are Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, the United Kingdom and the United States. Outside those, the feature Kobo is known for may not be there.

On a Kindle, the route is longer. The Kindle's own software has no library catalogue and no Libby inside it. Nadia borrows in Libby on her phone or in a web browser and chooses the option to read with Kindle. That sends her to Amazon's site. She signs in and claims the book. Amazon then sends it to her registered Kindle over its wireless delivery service. So a second device is required every time, a phone, tablet or computer. And there is a hard limit. This read-with-Kindle path is offered by United States public libraries only. A library outside the United States does not offer it at all.

On an open Android e-reader, such as one of the Boox models running Android with Google Play, Nadia installs the ordinary Libby app, just as she would on a phone. Browsing, borrowing, reading and returning all happen inside that app on the reader. It works wherever Libby itself works. The cost was covered in earlier chapters: a full Android reader brings more upkeep and, often, a shorter battery life.

Now, what happens when the loan ends. On a Kobo, the book returns itself on its due date. The next time the reader connects to Wi-Fi, the loan is cancelled and the book is marked expired and locked. A Kindle behaves the same way. OverDrive tells Amazon the loan is over, and at the next Wi-Fi connection the Kindle marks the book expired and stops opening it. On both, a book already downloaded keeps working while the device stays offline. It locks as soon as the device syncs again. That is how the loan is designed, and it should not surprise anyone. On Android, the loan simply expires inside the Libby app.

Notice what this does to the brand stories. The Kindle is often described as closed and Boox as open. For Nadia's library novels that is roughly true. But the Kobo, which runs its own closed system, gives her the most direct route of the three, if she lives in one of its thirteen countries. Move her to a country that is not on that list, and the order changes. The route depends on the country, then on her library, then on the device.

The title matters too. A library licenses each ebook separately. A novel Nadia can borrow in one system may not be in the next system's catalogue, or may have a long hold queue. No e-reader fixes that.

So her open question closes with a check only she can run. Write down her country. Write down her library and confirm that it lends ebooks through OverDrive and Libby. Then pick one novel she actually wants and see whether her library lends it. With those three facts she can read the right route from the list above. In the United States, all three device types reach her library, and only the Kobo and Android routes skip the phone. In the United Kingdom, Canada or Australia, the Kobo works directly, Android works through the app, and the Kindle route does not exist. In a country outside Kobo's list, the Android route through Libby may be the only one, if her library uses Libby at all. Her sheet now has a library line: borrowing on the device without a phone is wanted, and the route has to be confirmed for her own country and library.

A purchased store book. Nadia also buys some novels. Those are licences, and the question is how far they can travel.

Start with Kindle. Books bought on Amazon arrive wirelessly. They are protected with Amazon's own formats, and other brands of e-reader cannot open them. Amazon does offer a download. In the Manage Your Content and Devices page on its website, there is a choice called Download and transfer via USB. That lets you save a copy and copy it onto a Kindle with a cable. It comes with two limits. Your account must have at least one physical Kindle e-reader registered to it. If you only read in the Kindle app, the option is not there. And the file you get is locked to the serial number of the Kindle you chose. It is a backup for that Kindle, not a way out of the Kindle system.

Kobo works differently because of what publishers choose. Kobo store books are protected in one of three ways, depending on the publisher. Some use Adobe's protection, some use a watermark, and some have no DRM. Every Kobo customer can download their books from the My Books page on Kobo's website. For a protected book, the download is a small ticket file, not the book. You open that ticket in Adobe Digital Editions. It then downloads the book as an EPUB tied to your Adobe ID, the account Adobe uses to track your protected books. EPUB is the common open ebook format. That copy can go by cable to other readers that support Adobe's protection, which include Kobo, PocketBook and Nook. For a book with no DRM, Kobo hands you a plain EPUB file. That one is a file you hold, and any device that reads EPUB can open it.

So the plain answer is this. Some purchased books can move between brands, and many cannot. A Kindle purchase stays inside Kindle devices and apps. A protected Kobo purchase can reach other readers that support Adobe's system, and a DRM-free one can go almost anywhere. You only learn which kind a given book is by looking at that book. Nadia's purchases add one more line to her sheet. Whichever store holds most of her bought books pulls her toward that store's devices, unless those books are DRM-free.

Owen's PDFs. Owen's situation is the reverse of Nadia's. He has no consumer store account and no library app. He has about eight hundred PDFs on his laptop, papers and textbook chapters, and all of them are files he holds. His question is simpler. How does a file get from the laptop to the reader, and does anything change it on the way?

Take three of his papers and follow them by three routes.

The first route is a USB cable. Plug the reader into the laptop and it appears as a drive. Owen copies the PDFs across. On a Kindle, the files go into the device's documents folder. The Kindle accepts PDF this way, along with Amazon's own formats, older MOBI files and plain text. Nothing is converted. The file arrives exactly as it left. One catch matters for other kinds of file: a Kindle does not open a standard EPUB copied over a cable. On a Kobo, USB accepts a wider list. That list includes EPUB, PDF, MOBI, text, web pages, rich text, the comic formats CBZ and CBR, and common image types. Again nothing is converted. Kobo has one quirk. An EPUB whose name ends in kepub dot epub opens in Kobo's own reading engine instead of the standard one. That has no effect on Owen's PDFs. The cable route is slow to do by hand, but it is the most predictable. What you copy is what you get.

The second route is a send-to-device service. Amazon's version is Send to Kindle, offered through a web page, an app and an email address tied to your device. It accepts EPUB, PDF, Word documents, text, rich text, web pages and common images. Here the file can change. Reflowable documents, the kind where text can rewrap to any screen, such as EPUB or Word files, are converted on Amazon's servers into Amazon's format. A PDF stays as a fixed page. That suits Owen, whose papers have figures and tables that must stay where they are. If he emails a PDF with the word Convert in the subject line, Amazon tries to turn it into rewrapping text instead. For papers full of equations and two-column layouts, that is a gamble worth testing on one file before trusting it. There are size limits: fifty megabytes by email, two hundred megabytes through the web page. A scanned textbook chapter can pass fifty megabytes, so Owen would use the web page for large files. Older MOBI files are no longer accepted by Send to Kindle at all.

Boox has two services of its own. BooxDrop works over your home Wi-Fi. You open a page in your laptop's browser, often by scanning a QR code on the reader, and drop files onto it. Send2Boox works from anywhere through an Onyx Cloud account, with ten gigabytes free. Both accept more than twenty formats, including EPUB, PDF, DjVu (a format common for scanned books), comics, Word files and audio. Neither converts. The file arrives untouched, and the Boox reading app, NeoReader, can rewrap text, crop margins or adjust contrast when it opens the file. Changing how a page is shown at reading time is a different thing from changing the file.

The third route is cloud sync. Supported Kobo models connect to Dropbox or Google Drive. The documented models are the Libra Colour, Sage, Elipsa, Elipsa 2E and Forma. Owen puts papers into a chosen cloud folder, and the reader downloads them unchanged, in the same formats it accepts by cable. For eight hundred files this is the route that scales. He keeps his reading folder on the laptop synced to the cloud, and new papers appear on the reader with no cable. On an Android reader, any cloud app from Google Play can play the same role, and each app handles files in its own way.

For all three of his test papers, the result is the same file on the device, unchanged, by cable, by Boox's services, by Kobo's cloud folders and by Send to Kindle unless he asks for conversion. Whether those fixed pages are readable at his forty-five centimetres on a given screen is a separate test, and this chapter stops at the file arriving. His record now says: PDF delivery confirmed by cable on every platform, wireless delivery wanted, PDFs kept fixed, never converted.

Beatrix needs one route only, for now. Her documents come by email, often as Word files and PDFs. Send to Kindle's email address fits that habit directly. She forwards an attachment and it appears on the device. A Word file is converted to Amazon's format along the way. A PDF stays a fixed page. Her handwritten notes, and how they get back out, are a different workflow with its own tests.

All of this sits behind one column of the comparison table at ocdevel dot com slash ereaders. The column is called document transfer, and it asks a single question: how painful is it to load your own documents? A device rated Easy is one where a compatible file can be pushed from a phone or browser through an app, a QR handoff, a web upload or cloud sync. The services just described are the kind of thing that earns it. OCDevel names Android sharing, Send to Kindle, BOOX Tiles, Xteink's companion app, PocketBook Cloud, reMarkable Connect and Supernote Cloud, each counted only when verified for that model. Ratings below Easy mark devices where loading files takes more effort. Read this column as OCDevel's judgment about effort, not as a verdict on your files. It counts toward the total score, because the table treats getting your own documents on as part of everyday reading quality. A device rated Easy can still be wrong for you. Send to Kindle rates easily, and it still rejects MOBI files and has a fifty-megabyte email limit. A device rated lower can be fine if a cable once a month suits you. Check the rating, then check your own file types against the route behind it.

So here is the check to run before buying anything. It takes three steps.

1. Pick the one book you would be most upset to lose access to, and find out whether it is a DRM-free file, a store licence, or a library loan.
2. Pick one personal file you actually read, such as a PDF, a Word file or an EPUB, and note its format and size.
3. For each device you are considering, confirm the route for both items with your own account, your own library and your own country, using the device maker's current help pages.

If both items have a working route, that device stays on the list. If either one fails, that tells you something no specification sheet would.

A library pilot that shortens the Kobo route

One update this month touches the route Nadia just mapped. Rakuten Kobo began a trial on the twentieth of September with CloudLibrary. CloudLibrary is a second library lending service, separate from OverDrive. Some public libraries use it in place of OverDrive, and others use both. In the trial, select city libraries in the United States and Canada show a new Send to Kobo button. A reader who borrows an EPUB through CloudLibrary at one of those libraries can press it, and the book goes over Wi-Fi straight to a Clara BW, a Clara Colour or a Libra Colour.

Before this, a CloudLibrary loan on a Kobo meant the long route: a computer, Adobe Digital Editions and a USB cable. That is the same detour the OverDrive route needs for a second library card. The pilot removes the computer for those libraries and those three models.

Who does it affect? Someone whose library lends through CloudLibrary, in the United States or Canada, with one of those three readers or planning to buy one. It is a pilot. It is live, but only at select libraries, so a Kobo owner elsewhere should not expect the button yet.

It also shows why step three of the check uses your own library and not the brand. Ask Nadia's library which lending services it uses. If it uses CloudLibrary, ask whether it is part of this trial.

Amazon also announced new Kindles on the first of October. Only the base sixteen-gigabyte Kindle ships now, at a hundred and forty-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents. The new Paperwhite and Colorsoft are announced, not shipping, with deliveries scheduled from late October to mid-November. None of the reported changes touch the library or document routes covered here, so nothing in Nadia's or Owen's routes moves.

If you own a Kobo and use a library in the United States or Canada, the action for today is small. Look up your library's ebook page and find out whether it lends through OverDrive, CloudLibrary or both. That one fact tells you which route your next borrowed book will take.