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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

#151

Post by wombatpm »

Aurornis wrote: post #110
chmod775 wrote: post #47

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.

> so now I just pirate those books. I know someone who wrote a (technical) book and how hard it is to get sales in the age of easy internet piracy. I understand the desire to use the books as you please, but please remember that buying the book and downloading a pirated copy for your own use are not mutually exclusive choices. You can still purchase the book to support the author even if you're not using the exact sa…

Publishing is a dying industry. It use to be that publishers had limited press capacity, so if wanted to print and sell your book you needed a publisher to handle the production and distribution. Now it’s electronic. What value is a publisher bringing?

There was a time I could go to Borders, Barnes and Noble, Crown Books, and a couple of independent bookstores. Now I can go to Barnes and Noble and the remaining independent store.

Seems like there should be some sort of new coop structure where a writer can engage with editors, graphics people, and marketers on a fee for service or sales percentage basis. Without the agent/publisher gatekeepers.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#152

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #141
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That law should be changed. If you distribute your intellectual property with DRM, that work should forever be exempt from copyright protection. You get to choose one or the other, but never both, because DRM effectively removes the work from the public domain in perpetuity. Even accidentally releasing a demo or preview with DRM should invalidate copyright on that software/movie/book/whatever.

Not extreme enough. Copyright itself should be abolished straight up. It's the information age, the AI age. Artificial limitations nonsense like copyright does nothing but hold us back. Even the corporations think so: they violate copyright at massive scales on a daily basis just to train their AI models. Why rules for us but not for them? That particular hipocrisy should have caused the elimination of copyright worl…

> Copyright itself should be abolished straight up.

I wouldn't go that far. 18 months is long enough though.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#154

Post by Nicholas_C »

neilv wrote: post #90

All the people mentioning Kobo favorably in these comments... is the main selling point that the DRM is easily breakable, or is it a superior reader or marketplace in other ways?

I switched to kobo for a while but I thought the hardware itself was inferior. Maybe they fixed it but I couldn’t dim the screen low enough to not annoy my wife while she tried to sleep. It felt cheaper too. I begrudgingly switched back to my old kindle.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#155

Post by gruez »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #130
dannyobrien wrote: post #98

Fun fact: this is one of the few situations in the US where a prosecutor could claim that this is criminal speech (though I hope and trust they would not, and if it did it would get thrown out by any court respecting the First Amendment). Not a civil issue, like libel or fraud, but the sort of talk that can get a policeman to come and drag you off to jail. If you've ever wondered why DRM is so roundly hated by engine…

That law should be changed. If you distribute your intellectual property with DRM, that work should forever be exempt from copyright protection. You get to choose one or the other, but never both, because DRM effectively removes the work from the public domain in perpetuity. Even accidentally releasing a demo or preview with DRM should invalidate copyright on that software/movie/book/whatever.

> because DRM effectively removes the work from the public domain in perpetuity.

This doesn't make for a good anti-DRM argument because the concern can simply be addressed by requiring a DRM-free copy to be deposited at the library of congress (or similar[1]) so it can be released in 150 years (or whatever) it actually becomes public domain.

Moreover how would you even define what "DRM" is? Is spotify refusing to provide a .mp3 file download for their streaming service a "DRM"? What if they implement streaming via webrtc, to make it extra-annoying to manually download? For games, is it "DRM" to add mandatory online requirements even for single player? What if there's an ostensible reason for the online requirement, like if the gameplay is computed server-side a-la world of warcraft?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#156

Post by Meleagris »

tcoff91 wrote: post #100
leshenka wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's a little less user friendly but I really like my Boox tablet because it's a full android device. I run Storyteller app on it and have my ebooks & audiobooks synced up perfectly like whispersync but better.

+1 for Storyteller. It is beyond fantastic to have my progress seamlessly synced between my ebooks and audiobooks.

I’m paying for BookFusion, to have synced cross-platform reading. It’s expensive, but seems to be one of the few cross-platform synced readers that supports the EPUB Media Overlays from Storyteller.

Have you experienced ghosting with your Boox tablet? I’d like to get one, but I know that ghosting would bother me.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#157

Post by torton »

professorseth wrote: post #124
bariumbitmap wrote: post #120

The Kindle DRM situation is really bad right now. It used to be possible to install the DeDRM plugin in Calibre and get decrypted KFX files from the Kindle for PC application. That hasn't been possible since early 2025. The pros can still break it but they aren't sharing with the rest of the class anymore. > Even the maintainer of the DeDRM plugin has gone underground, refraining from issuing an official new release…

While Amazon does some shady stuff, at least _some_ of the blame here belongs on the big publishing companies. One of the big publishers put heavy pressure on Amazon to patch DRM exploits or else they would pull all their content from the platform (or so I was told). (I worked at Kindle 2017-2019, and was on the team that wrote the code that OP reversed engineered)

Books are rapidly dropping in relevance. It could certainly be that that's exactly how this went down a decade ago, but I'd be willing to bet on Amazon stipulating "no DRM to be on Amazon" (not just Kindle; bundle all the first party distribution together) now and at least some of the big houses folding.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#159

Post by sroussey »

semiquaver wrote: post #108
dannyobrien wrote: post #98

Fun fact: this is one of the few situations in the US where a prosecutor could claim that this is criminal speech (though I hope and trust they would not, and if it did it would get thrown out by any court respecting the First Amendment). Not a civil issue, like libel or fraud, but the sort of talk that can get a policeman to come and drag you off to jail. If you've ever wondered why DRM is so roundly hated by engine…

> they made it against the law to even tell anyone. I’m no fan of the DMCA, but I am pretty skeptical of your apparent claim that this post itself is a potential violation of 17 USC § 1201. Obviously the act of circumvention itself qualifies, as does the code in the GitHub repository the post links to, but can you point to any prosecution of someone for a _prose description_ of circumvention (as opposed to actually m…

It does prevent linking to code though.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#160

Post by thrdbndndn »

bariumbitmap wrote: post #120

The Kindle DRM situation is really bad right now. It used to be possible to install the DeDRM plugin in Calibre and get decrypted KFX files from the Kindle for PC application. That hasn't been possible since early 2025. The pros can still break it but they aren't sharing with the rest of the class anymore. > Even the maintainer of the DeDRM plugin has gone underground, refraining from issuing an official new release…

The new crack is still shared publicly if you're willing to make some minimal effort to look for it.
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