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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

#21

Post by cyberax »

Insanity wrote: post #10
wredcoll wrote: post #6

I personally have bought many fewer books over the last couple of years, from amazon, as they've made it harder and harder to, you know, read the books I've paid for. Pirating books is not hard. They're probably the smallest possible thing that people are interested in copying with the broadest variation in acceptable formats. I know I'm screaming into the void, but if I'm paying real money why is the experience from…

Genuinely curious to hear why you think they make it harder and harder to read books? I've been using my Kindle daily since 2017. I read on both the Kindle device (Paperwhite and vanilla), the iPad and iPhone app, and occasionally the web reader. I've never experienced issues with them that break the reading experience. The one issue I occasionally run into is that the book progress doesn't sync when I open the app a…

Their devices get steadily worse. Kindle Oasis was the best device ever. It also had cellular connectivity so you could read it on a train, then put it in the backpack and switch to listening to the same book on your phone.

All seamlessly, because Kindle used the cellular network for reading progress. Really a magical experience.

Then they removed cellular and _buttons_ from the devices. And now their app is actively crashing on my Kindle when I try to use it to buy a book.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#22

Post by Timshel »

wredcoll wrote: post #6

I personally have bought many fewer books over the last couple of years, from amazon, as they've made it harder and harder to, you know, read the books I've paid for. Pirating books is not hard. They're probably the smallest possible thing that people are interested in copying with the broadest variation in acceptable formats. I know I'm screaming into the void, but if I'm paying real money why is the experience from…

To create a moat and make Kobo and others less interesting.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#23

Post by harshreality »

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, at the wiki link provided at the top of the repo's README, in the short section saying it's no longer maintained.

That would provide a closer-to-original version of the ebook, rather than just a visually similar one.

That any of this is necessary at all is absurd. Hats off to anyone with the patience to bypass Amazon's DRM rather than giving up on the Amazon ebook ecosystem entirely.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#27

Post by layer8 »

My main peeve with rendering in the Kindle app is that formula-type content (often even minor stuff like x²) is rendered as images that (a) are low-resolution and (b) don’t invert in dark mode.

A second peeve is that in dark mode you can only have gray on black, not white on black.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#29

Post by ashton314 »

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,…

The thing that killed the download -> crack DRM workflow is that Amazon removed the "download and transfer via USB" option. I haven't bought an ebook from Amazon since.

The only viable option would be to buy the book and then pirate a de-DRM'd copy.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#30

Post by GauntletWizard »

At one point I did the same for a comic app which was getting the earliest releases of a manga I wanted to read; I still don't read Japanese but was the buyer for my translation circle. They had similar forms of obscure obfuscation; They scrambled the image into chunks, then you got a metadata that remapped it into a finished image. Raw, it looked like one of those slide puzzles.

Over the course of a couple years they updated their scrambling; First to randomize the size of the regions, then to make them triangular instead of rectangular. It was an interesting if tedious challenge to reverse engineer.

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