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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

#131

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

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!

I've been downloading every book whose title I see mentioned anywhere. I've got the last 20 years or so of the NYT Book Review Notable Books (100 per calendar year), the Book of the Month Club list, etc. Why go to the library, when I can have one of my own?

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#132

Post by mapontosevenths »

harshreality wrote: post #23

I don't know what state it's in (haven't used it in years), but do apprenticealf's DeDRM tools, which has been forked to nodrm/DeDRM_tools, still handle kindle PC app downloads? Tinkering with old versions of the PC app might work even if the current version doesn't, and there's a registry hack to disable kfx downloading and get azw3 instead, which worked at some point... it's outlined in apprenticealf's DeDRM repo,…

I pay for a tool called epubor that strips DRM from kindle, kobo, Adobe, etc and converts it epub. It works with the current version if the app. It gets updates when it stops working.

Feels jank to pay for the book AND pay to free it, but that's the world we live in.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#133

Post by Wowfunhappy »

professorseth wrote: post #126
semiquaver wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replies like this are why I love HN (assuming it’s true)

It is, I promise :) Email in bio if you have other questions about it you care to ask.

Uh, just so you know, your bio is empty as of this writing.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#134

Post by limagnolia »

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 .

Its possible that the local bookshop didn't have the book, so they had their supplier drop ship it to you, but they still got the margin from the sale? I don't really know anything about how Bookshop.org really works.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#135

Post by limagnolia »

professorseth wrote: post #121
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.

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 this exploit 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)

Amazon has exercised substantial market power to get publishers to do what they want. If they really wanted to, they could have pushed back just like they have in other areas.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#136

Post by timpieces »

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?

As a counterpoint, I bought a kobo (clara?) two years ago, and ended up hating it. It was a lot of minor things that added up. Spuriously turning on in my pocket/bag constantly and ruining progress (the power-on button was poorly placed and very sensitive). Forcing a single font for every book. Page turns were often noticeably slow. Libby/Overdrive integration often spuriously re-downloaded books and lost my progress. It was never clear to me whether I got unlucky with a bad device or not. But none of my issues screamed 'broken' rather than just 'annoying' so I assumed it was normal. I dislike the kindle ecosystem as much as the next person, but I've found the hardware so much better and more reliable that I ended up going back to kindle. The positive vibes in these comments are leading me to reevaluate and think that maybe something was indeed wrong with my device.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#137

Post by Wowfunhappy »

ethmarks wrote: post #41
Retr0id wrote: post #11

[flagged]

It's extra distracting because it doesn't even read like normal LLM prose, but it's close enough to feel off. The frequent use of bold emphasis, lists, and subject-only rhetorical questions ("Those tiny m3,1 m1,6 m-4,-7 commands? They're micro-MoveTo operations.") are classic LLM-speak, but they're used in such a way that makes me doubt that OP actually used an LLM to write this. I think that OP's natural prose just…

Fwiw I do think this was written by an LLM. It may have been cleaned up manually afterwards (but not that much).

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#139

Post by blharr »

ethmarks wrote: post #41
Retr0id wrote: post #11

[flagged]

It's extra distracting because it doesn't even read like normal LLM prose, but it's close enough to feel off. The frequent use of bold emphasis, lists, and subject-only rhetorical questions ("Those tiny m3,1 m1,6 m-4,-7 commands? They're micro-MoveTo operations.") are classic LLM-speak, but they're used in such a way that makes me doubt that OP actually used an LLM to write this. I think that OP's natural prose just…

I really doubt they just happen to sound like an LLM.

My guess is that they wrote in combination with LLM output, so they didn't copy/paste from a single prompt step, and did a good job of putting their own motive and ideas in the blog, but ultimately the AI tone still penetrates through

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#140

Post by awesome_dude »

limagnolia wrote: post #135
professorseth wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 this exploit 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)

Amazon has exercised substantial market power to get publishers to do what they want. If they really wanted to, they could have pushed back just like they have in other areas.

No.

For one thing, DRM also works in Amazon's favour (reselling multiple copies)

For another, DRM is a pretty big sticking point for copyright holders, music, text, whatever. It's the one big thing that publishers all think that their business model depends on

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