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How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

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Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#31
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comics need a full "image" for the page, so this is unlikely to work. Can you inspect the requests and see what you get? Or to the author: what happens to images in the ebook?

If all you need is an image, can't you just use browser automation tools to screenshot each page? After all, much of the content is in images so it's not like you need it OCRed for accessibility purposes.

If you can live with lower quality image. Most people probably will be ok with that though.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#32

I don't know what state it's in (haven't used it in years), but do apprenticealf's DeDRM tools, which has been forked to nodrm/DeDRM_tools, still handle kindle PC app downloads? Tinkering with old versions of the PC app might work even if the current version doesn't, and there's a registry hack to disable kfx downloading and get azw3 instead, which worked at some point... it's outlined in apprenticealf's DeDRM repo,…

It will handle downloads for older versions of the PC app, but the supported version won't download any books released after April 2025.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#33
Me too. When they removed the option to download books I liberated everything I had ever bought, moved to Kavita+koreader and will never buy a kindle book again.

I jailbroke both kindles. And use koreader on them which now supports progress sync with Kavita which is amazing! So I don't really lose functionality.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#34
post #6

I personally have bought many fewer books over the last couple of years, from amazon, as they've made it harder and harder to, you know, read the books I've paid for. Pirating books is not hard. They're probably the smallest possible thing that people are interested in copying with the broadest variation in acceptable formats. I know I'm screaming into the void, but if I'm paying real money why is the experience from…

In general, if I don’t have to pay someone to produce something I can provide a better experience to my customers than those who do.

It’s why archive.is is so much better to read on than a news site.

Might as well ask “when I engage with GPL projects it’s so much worse of an experience than if I just bundle the code and distribute it without a license, why?” It’s often cheaper to not comply than to comply.

But my kindle has definitely been “good enough” for me with Libby.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#35
I have the same problem with O'Reilly / Safari ... I don't enjoy using the apps and find they get in the way of the reading experience, plus it's a very expensive subscription. Initially, its hard to tell if rendering problems are just a bad conversion or if the text rendering engine is just buggy / borked.

But there were plenty of other bugs like bookshelf management getting corrupted.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#36
post #27

My main peeve with rendering in the Kindle app is that formula-type content (often even minor stuff like x ²) is rendered as images that (a) are low-resolution and (b) don’t invert in dark mode. A second peeve is that in dark mode you can only have gray on black, not white on black.

Do the ebooks you're referring to use an image for the ² symbol, rather than css, unicode, or mathjax-generated mathml? A lot of old math books that have been converted from scans do that, for instance, because their OCR was okay at regular text but not good at superscripts, subscripts, or other mathematical symbols.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#37
post #6

I personally have bought many fewer books over the last couple of years, from amazon, as they've made it harder and harder to, you know, read the books I've paid for. Pirating books is not hard. They're probably the smallest possible thing that people are interested in copying with the broadest variation in acceptable formats. I know I'm screaming into the void, but if I'm paying real money why is the experience from…

Genuinely curious to hear why you think they make it harder and harder to read books? I've been using my Kindle daily since 2017. I read on both the Kindle device (Paperwhite and vanilla), the iPad and iPhone app, and occasionally the web reader. I've never experienced issues with them that break the reading experience. The one issue I occasionally run into is that the book progress doesn't sync when I open the app a…

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Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#38
post #6

I personally have bought many fewer books over the last couple of years, from amazon, as they've made it harder and harder to, you know, read the books I've paid for. Pirating books is not hard. They're probably the smallest possible thing that people are interested in copying with the broadest variation in acceptable formats. I know I'm screaming into the void, but if I'm paying real money why is the experience from…

Genuinely curious to hear why you think they make it harder and harder to read books? I've been using my Kindle daily since 2017. I read on both the Kindle device (Paperwhite and vanilla), the iPad and iPhone app, and occasionally the web reader. I've never experienced issues with them that break the reading experience. The one issue I occasionally run into is that the book progress doesn't sync when I open the app a…

I've had decent success with a Kindle device, but when I try to use the Kindle app on my iPhone, which is rare now, it's almost always a hassle. Their iPhone app updates completely replace the app, so everything gets reset and books have to be downloaded again.

But the main problem is that they don't sync the "last read" bookmarks until you open a book. But since that book didn't have a bookmark, it's reset to the beginning and then synced, so my "last read" bookmark is now at the beginning.

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