All you lawyers: Is removing / tampering with Kindle DRM legal in this case? Considering we bought the material?
How To Strip DRM from Kindle E-Books and Others
41–50 of 111 posts
Re: How To Strip DRM from Kindle E-Books and Others
#42Does removing the DRM also remove the highlight tracking/syncing provided by Amazon? If so, that'd be a deal breaker for me to use this other than as last resort backups
My expectation has always been that if I loaded a book back onto the device after stripping the DRM, it would appear as a different book to the Kindle than the original. I doubt that highlighting and page synchronization will work.
So, yes, the main purpose of DRM stripping -- at least for me -- is as part of backing the books up into my Calibre collection. I don't bother to copy the stripped copies back onto my Kindle, there's just not any compelling reason to.
Re: How To Strip DRM from Kindle E-Books and Others
#43Does removing the DRM also remove the highlight tracking/syncing provided by Amazon? If so, that'd be a deal breaker for me to use this other than as last resort backups
No it doesn't. You reload DRM-stripped books on the device, as if it had never been bought from Amazon. Don't forget that DRMs aren't here to save Amazon from piracy. Today and for the next couple of years, what they really care about is securing a dominant position. So the DRM security only needs to be good enough to reassure clueless edition managers, who believe that DRM will help their business rather than hurt i…
> No it doesn't. You reload DRM-stripped books on the device, as if it had never been bought from Amazon.
Yeah that's the issue...From what I can tell, Amazon differentiates between both and I imagine that would affect how its central database of highlights/bookmarkings keeps track of each individual book. I suppose this would affect you only if you were highlighting a DRM book and then stripped the DRM...which I guess is mostly an edge case.
Re: How To Strip DRM from Kindle E-Books and Others
#44Does removing the DRM also remove the highlight tracking/syncing provided by Amazon? If so, that'd be a deal breaker for me to use this other than as last resort backups
No it doesn't. You reload DRM-stripped books on the device, as if it had never been bought from Amazon. Don't forget that DRMs aren't here to save Amazon from piracy. Today and for the next couple of years, what they really care about is securing a dominant position. So the DRM security only needs to be good enough to reassure clueless edition managers, who believe that DRM will help their business rather than hurt i…
> No it doesn't. You reload DRM-stripped books on the device, as if it had never been bought from Amazon.
Yeah that's the issue...From what I can tell, Amazon differentiates between both and I imagine that would affect how its central database of highlights/bookmarkings keeps track of each individual book. I suppose this would affect you only if you were highlighting a DRM book and then stripped the DRM...which I guess is mostly an edge case.
Re: How To Strip DRM from Kindle E-Books and Others
#45Re: How To Strip DRM from Kindle E-Books and Others
#46Sadly, I would be glad to pay a reasonable price for books without DRM, but my options are still quite limited. I've been waiting patiently for Tor's ebook store to open (promised "by the end of summer 2012"). Baen is fine for a couple genres, but I don't trust Smashwords because of sockpuppet reviews. I don't want to pirate, I am glad to give authors their fair share.
Baen also has a problem with OCR'd text. I downloaded a Greg Bear book from them a few weeks ago and it was clearly OCR'd without a second look towards quality. It had so many typos and spelling errors that it was practically unreadable. I returned it for a refund. To be fair Amazon also has this problem. It's hard being an ebook consumer when 90% of books either have DRM or are unreadably OCR'd.
I've seen this problem too with Amazon, though only when I first got the Kindle a couple of years ago. I suspect those books date back to when publishers didn't take ebooks seriously. Now that they do, the formatting / spelling errors have mostly vanished.
Re: How To Strip DRM from Kindle E-Books and Others
#47The Wired link adds nothing. They link to ( http://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/ebooks-formats... )
I wouldn't say that. Wired offered a good synopsis to what apprenticealf's site contains which is all a lot of people want, including me.
Re: How To Strip DRM from Kindle E-Books and Others
#48Does removing the DRM also remove the highlight tracking/syncing provided by Amazon? If so, that'd be a deal breaker for me to use this other than as last resort backups
No.
You need to have a unique ID set in the header. You can do this in calibre.
Specifically, a unique 4 byte character sequence at the 32 byte offset in the header (MOBI header). See: http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/MOBI
If that's set (easy in calibre), you will sync across your devices.
Re: How To Strip DRM from Kindle E-Books and Others
#49The Wired link adds nothing. They link to ( http://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/ebooks-formats... )
It add nothing other than exposing Apprentice Alf's blog posting to their large readership - which is more than nothing.
Re: How To Strip DRM from Kindle E-Books and Others
#50I found this link to be more helpful, in regards to what plugins to use. (Note for Windows + Kindle) http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2012/06/15/how-add-kindle-...
At least that is 18 months more recent, that should help a bit.