What if you had plenty of Kindle books on your reader, but you switched to a Nook?
What if you wanted and bought Google ebooks, but you would have loved to read them on your Kindle Fire?
What if you wanted to keep a backup of all your ebooks?
I remember when DRM came out. It made me furious.
Now I could no longer make a copy of my legally purchased music CD's.
Why should I care about that, you might ask?
Not because I sold illegal copies. Not because I gave them away to friends. I did neither of these things.
But we had a CD-player in our car, and I didn't want our expensive CD's to lie around in a warm car, risking theft and getting ruined. I wanted a cheap copy for that.
Only that was no longer possible.
I fully understand why Amazon has their own .mobi format, which can be used on Kindle readers and Kindle apps.
I understand why Barnes & Nobles use a different format, and why i-what's-its-name? (the Apple tablet) wants its own closed and locked format.
They want to control their customers.
They want you, the buyer, to buy a new device from them when the old one no longer works.
I also understand why they add copy protection to their books. They want to protect copyright for their authors.
But for you, the customer, it means more than just that.
It means that you cannot easily copy the books you've bought so that you can use them wherever you please and even save a copy, should Amazon decide to block your account, or Google discontinue yet another one of their services.
Up until a short while ago, I used Calibre to help me change the format of ebooks. It worked for many Kindle books, but more and more couldn't be copied to my backup or saved in another format.
Then a friend told me about Epubor Ultimate.
I'd never heard about it, but wow, it does everything Calibre does and much more. It instantly became my main go-to tool for ebooks.
You can add books by letting Ultimate find them on your Nook or Kindle device (even on your computer), or by dragging and dropping.
It can open and save in .mobi, .epub, .azw3, .pdf or even .txt.
And it's superfast! One book or batch-converting several, you hardly notice the difference.
Epubor Ultimate is not a free ebook converter, but you can download a free trial and then decide if you will buy or not. It's the best I've seen so far.