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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

#391

Post by benregenspan »

fletchowns wrote: post #106
benregenspan wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I liked the idea of Bookshop.org but I was surprised when I ordered something from it, it shipped from somewhere 2,000 miles away from me. I had the misunderstanding it was going to ship from a local bookshop that was actually local to me .

At the end of the day it's an affiliate marketing setup, I think all fulfillment is through Ingram, not local bookstores. But it's a B Corp mandated to give 80% or more of profits to independent booksellers.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#392

Post by [deleted] »

darkwater wrote: post #320
pmx wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't about the price. The level of service and the quality of the product you get by pirating is simply better. Streaming services break up shows and have s1-3 on one platform, 4-5 on another, and the rest on another still. You'll "buy" a movie on amazon prime video only for them to remove it so you can't watch it anymore. Prime video, a service you have to pay for now has ad breaks while watching shows. Even jus…

I know and - cough cough - I might be embracing that as well. But still paying someone that basically leeches on someone else (and I don't mean Hollywood/Netflix etc, I mean the ripper themselves) unethical.

[deleted]

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#393

Post by bariumbitmap »

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)

There's plenty of blame to go around. Tech companies like Amazon blame publishers or other tech companies, publishers blame tech companies or other publishers. My point is that DRM has gone from bad to worse.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#394

Post by Goronmon »

babblingfish wrote: post #107
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.

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…

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!

Games that sell a battlepass or have ongoing MTX are an minority of the video games available.

There are plenty of games available that are priced similarly to books and there really isn't a question as far as which will provide more entertainment.

For instance, I recently purchased the Mass Effect series for $6. I should be able to easily get 100+ hours out of that set of games.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#395

Post by tveyben »

lostlogin wrote: post #310
fainpul wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember when it was illegal to export strong cryptography from the US? There was no law to restrict that, so they just made something up. It basically went like this: Problem: we can't make cryptography exports (software exports) illegal -> what actually IS illegal to export? -> munitions! -> let's just declare that cryptography is "munitions" -> problem solved https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_fr…

On the upside, when my Dad bought a G4 Mac, the brief block on exporting it due to its dangerous power was maximum nerd points.

They had a great add then (I also had a lot of G4’s ;-)

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#396

Post by bmacho »

darkwater wrote: post #320
pmx wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't about the price. The level of service and the quality of the product you get by pirating is simply better. Streaming services break up shows and have s1-3 on one platform, 4-5 on another, and the rest on another still. You'll "buy" a movie on amazon prime video only for them to remove it so you can't watch it anymore. Prime video, a service you have to pay for now has ad breaks while watching shows. Even jus…

I know and - cough cough - I might be embracing that as well. But still paying someone that basically leeches on someone else (and I don't mean Hollywood/Netflix etc, I mean the ripper themselves) unethical.

A lot of the time the distributor (or legal IP owner) is like a billion times more immoral than the ripper (or IP violator), and they are the ones leeching. You can choose legality over morality, but then don't claim moral high ground.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#397

Post by cheapsteak »

ash_091 wrote: post #80
professorseth wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was on the team that wrote this code. We knew it was reverse-engineerable, we just didn't care. Upper management seemed happy enough that it was pretty obfuscated, and we were happy that they didn't force us to do more about it.

> we just didn't care. Upper management seemed happy enough This is very relatable. Management want X, engineers recognise X is dumb and deliver something that sorta looks like X, management see something that looks like X and are happy.

I wonder if the start of the causal chain (or at least the intended audience) might be book publishers rather than people in Amazon

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#398

Post by paufernandez »

pjmlp wrote: post #350
tmoertel wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you also remember the researcher Philip Zimmerman’s hack to get around the cryptography-is-munitions edict? The source code to PGP was published by MIT Press as a book that just happened to be in a format suitable for OCR. That framing made it into a First Amendment issue, one the researchers were confident they’d win in court. https://archive.org/details/pgpsourcecodeint0000zimm

My university had that book, I think it can be used as a weapon actually, given its weight.

I wonder what kind of gun uses books as munition.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#399

Post by criddell »

babblingfish wrote: post #122
chmod775 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather donate money directly to the author. I will not under any circumstance still reward Amazon for what they're doing.

You could support your local bookstore. Bookstores are closing down all over the world. Most authors do not support a way to pay them directly. For example, traditionally published authors have all of their royalties handled via their agents. For a non-trivial amount of sales, direct donation would be an accounting headache for individual writers.

I've read reports that, thanks to TikTok, the number of bookstores is now increasing rather than decreasing. At least in the US.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#400

Post by Arch-TK »

cl3misch wrote: post #344
Arch-TK wrote: post #333

Please don't write your blog post with AI. Don't force me to either get another AI to remove all the fluff, or to skim read. There's an interesting article here, covered in a layer of AI slop.

How do you get the feeling this is AI-generated? Because of the many bullet points?

I think if you just look at the titles, they sound exactly like the cheesy nonsense these things like to generate when you ask them to structure something.

A lot of the writing also has this feeling to a lesser extent.

My advice is always to write something first and then (if you insist) get AI to proofread and make editorial suggestions. This seems like it was written by AI from some prompt and notes, and then modified in a few places.

It just adds a bunch of weird fluff.

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