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How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

blog.pixelmelt.dev

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Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#251
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Books have got to be the least expensive form of entertainment out there. The value to cost ratio is incredible. Consider buying books to support authors and publishers. If you can't afford it, then libraries are nice too. I personally know people who pirate books, but pay hundreds of dollars a year for streaming services or battle pass type video games. It blows my mind. Books are so cheap people! I recently bought…

The stormlight archive isn't a representative example because: - Brandon Sanderson's books are actually relatively inexpensive, despite their popularity - Brandon sanderson ebooks are available without DRM. Interestingly, this is actually more common for fantasy and SF than other genres. Other books are more expensive and more likely to be locked behind DRM for digital books.

> Interestingly, this is actually more common for fantasy and SF than other genres.

Because it's a Tor policy? Brandon Sanderson's ebooks are DRM-free because his publisher is Tor.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#252
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then I have a physical book to deal with.

The horror!

Many people live in small apartments. The footprint of a single physical book may be negligible but five hundred books can become a logistical nightmare.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#253

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…

OTOH this is not DRM nor copy protection. It is just obfuscation.

Indeed. If DRM had the technical merits to protect against copying, why would we need a (law like DMCA) against tinkering with that technology?

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#254
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And while you’re at it, do you expect to sue Steam, and the App Stores, and most other digital marketplaces owned by billionaire corporations? You’re not going to win those lawsuits with such a flimsy argument. They could just as well argue that you are not buying the book, but a license to access it under certain conditions. A movie theatre is a comparable example: You say you bought a ticket, not that you rented ac…

A movie theatre is a bad comparison. Nowhere does it say “Buy the movie” and it’s clear to the purchaser that they’re purchasing a one time viewing. That’s not the case with an Amazon eBook where the marketing and reasonable expectation of the average consumer is they’re buying the eBook itself. Not that I necessarily agree with the other comment either.

> That’s not the case with an Amazon eBook where the marketing and reasonable expectation of the average consumer is they’re buying the eBook itself.

Good luck proving that in court without reasonable doubt.

Look at the image again. It’s extremely vague about what you are in fact buying.

https://blog.pixelmelt.dev/content/images/2025/10/image.png

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Books have got to be the least expensive form of entertainment out there. The value to cost ratio is incredible. Consider buying books to support authors and publishers. If you can't afford it, then libraries are nice too. I personally know people who pirate books, but pay hundreds of dollars a year for streaming services or battle pass type video games. It blows my mind. Books are so cheap people! I recently bought…

Videogames could give them a run for their money, I guess, but only certain genres.

Most genres really.

Even a 60 euros for a 6 hour experience comes at 10 euro per hour, cheaper than music and on par with movies.

Add replayability, multiplayer, longer games, cheaper games, ... and many many games are under 1 euro per hour, sometimes far under. Even someone playing fifa or call of duty has a price to hour ratio thats absurdly good.

And the range available is insane, used to be if you liked some genre you had maybe a game once every two years, now there are so many that not only you can't play all your games, even a seasonned gigantic fan of gaming cannot know all good games released anymore.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

Storyteller can sync your progress between devices, although there’s occasionally a bit of a bug with it (will be fixed soon). I sync between my iPhone and boox.

Once you get all the e-ink settings dialed in to make black text more readable on the color e-ink screen, it’s pretty damned good. I never notice ghosting. It’s not very easy to get the settings dialed in though. If you are purely reading on it get a black and white screen if it’s in stock so you aren’t fiddling with it to get text to really be boldly black instead of grey.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Why rules for us but not for them? Fair use exists for both people and corporations. Just because a corporation copies something in a way that is fre use, that doesn't mean that people should be able to freely copy it.

How could training of AI models possibly be considered fair use?

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bookshop.org is supposed to implement Kobo support sometime this year, getting a Kobo if that happens.

What does 'Kobo support' mean? Anyone can publish an epub, which a Kobo can read. Are you talking integration into the Kobo store?

The DRM free books they sell work just fine. Ones with DRM must currently be read using their mobile or web apps. Their FAQ mentions their plans to support Kobo in the future.

https://bookshop.org/info/ebooks#EBOOKFAQ

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