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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

#61

For books only available through Amazon my workflow used to be buying it, downloading it with their desktop app, importing into Calibre, converting to epub and stripping DRM, then pushing it onto my Kobo. They broke that a while ago by making their DRM even worse, so now I just pirate those books.

that's so weird. First I decide to buy my wife an ebook reader for the new years and then Louis Rossman makes a video on Kindle DRM bait and switch. Now this and people praising Kobo. Guess I'm buying a kobo

Kobo's pretty good. Anything to avoid Kindle books.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#63

For books only available through Amazon my workflow used to be buying it, downloading it with their desktop app, importing into Calibre, converting to epub and stripping DRM, then pushing it onto my Kobo. They broke that a while ago by making their DRM even worse, so now I just pirate those books.

that's so weird. First I decide to buy my wife an ebook reader for the new years and then Louis Rossman makes a video on Kindle DRM bait and switch. Now this and people praising Kobo. Guess I'm buying a kobo

Calibre handles kindle too (if you already have that). You "obtain" the books one way or another, and calibre converts them to a proper format and copies them directly to your kindle (via the usb cable).

Pirated books have no DRM, usually come in an open .epub format, which can be converted to whatever your reader requires, and you end up actually owning them, even if amazon decides to abandon the kindle ecosystem.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#64
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

that last-read bug sounds exactly like something that doesn't have test coverage

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#65
I hate Amazon's decision to do this. It doesn't even make business sense. You can't tell me they're making that much profit off of Kindles that it makes sense. The book sales have got to be worth more than that in the long run.

A lot of authors only ever offer on Amazon now, which leaves those of us without Kindles (I love my Kobo) in a difficult spot.

Frankly I would write it as anti-competitive. How are other e-reader companies supposed to survive when Amazon owns all the e-books and can just decide that only their e-readers are allowed? No one else has even a fraction of the market.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#67
post #31
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It will depend on the books, but the images aren't that high resolution in general.

I've had some slightly blurry on 2.8x1.9k screens, especially the older ones.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#69

I bypassed it by buying a Kobo.

I'm an owner of a Kobo, how did you do that?

When I tried, the only options from Amazon were 'transfer to my device' and that only works if you have a Kindle. There was 0 way to just download the stupid file and let me copy it myself.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#70

For books only available through Amazon my workflow used to be buying it, downloading it with their desktop app, importing into Calibre, converting to epub and stripping DRM, then pushing it onto my Kobo. They broke that a while ago by making their DRM even worse, so now I just pirate those books.

Eventually those physical book scanning cameras are going to be used to read/scan DRM locked ebooks.
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