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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

#381

Post by debazel »

carlosjobim wrote: post #367
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 would never do that, and nobody is falling for it.

It's not that uncommon for people to pay small donations to free releases on Bandcamp and similar sites where you can set your own amount. Most won't do it, but there's clearly a subset of consumers who do, or this business strategy wouldn't exist.

Personally I have no issue paying for books and other media as it's not the price keeping me away. My issue is that any amount of that money going to providers that are pushing this DRM locked content, which I will absolutely under no circumstances support, no matter how cheap.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#382

Post by mapontosevenths »

thunkle wrote: post #208
mapontosevenths wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I just paid for it, downloaded the kindle app, and dragged the .awz8 file and it says it doesn't support the format!

I think you might be doing something wrong then? Maybe you have the wrong file? The Kindle For PC app should always give you azw files, not azw8 (even if it does use the newer format they're all just named azw).

It should show up in the epubor app on the Kindle tab after you install the kindle app and used it to download your books. No need to drag and drop from the file system it's all right there in the app. It finds Kindle, Kobo, etc and lists them.

EDIT - Make sure you leave the Kindle app running. I think it needs to be able to read the keys from memory or something.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#383

Post by latexr »

reassess_blind wrote: post #321
latexr wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whether it’s correct, and whether you can argue it in court against a multi-trillion dollar company’s legal team are indeed two very different things. Exactly. And because this conversation started because someone was asking about suing them, what you can argue in court is what matters for this thread. I don’t agree with what Amazon is doing and thus don’t buy DRM ebooks from them, but that’s beside the point of th…

You’re right. The answer to whether they could be sued for this is obviously yes, because they have been, and Amazon won. I got sidetracked. Really, my only argument is that that your theatre comparison is flawed.

Most comparisons are flawed, analogies are seldom perfect. The point is that it’s the type of argument they could use.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#384

Post by chmod775 »

carlosjobim wrote: post #367
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 would never do that, and nobody is falling for it.

You're projecting. On my PayPal account alone there's ~1k worth of various donations to things I support just in the past year. Maybe half is individuals.

Giving money so a good thing you enjoy can continue existing really isn't a concept that's completely out there for most people. There's a thriving ecosystem of platforms for funding/tipping/donating.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#385

Post by mapontosevenths »

boredhedgehog wrote: post #298
mapontosevenths wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Epubor is merely plagiarism. They take open-source code and sell it without crediting the author. You can have all the functionality for free.

I'm sure you're right, but I'm not sure I care. I mean obviously I would prefer they give credit where it's due, but even writing those tools in the first place is a felony in some countries. It's not like they're robbing someone of their livelihood and the value they add by putting Kobo, Kindle, Nook, and Adobe all in one place with a built-in format convertor is really high.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#386

Post by the_af »

Off-topic: was this article at least partly generated using an LLM?

I ask not as a snark, since the content is genuinely interesting, but out of curiosity. The style seems very LLM: lots of bullet points, titles with sections typical of LLMs, sentences like "Why this is perfect for ", "Why this doesn't work", etc. It matches the tone and style of everything that an LLM spits out at me.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#387

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

UltraSane wrote: post #190
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…

Automatic screenshots and OCR still work well enough.

A proper epub consists of multiple html and css, not to mention the correct font files (ttf or otf). OCR can't recover those. I've found other books like that, you know, where someone didn't even bother to remove the page numbers from the OCRed text, and it's just a subpar reading experience.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#388

Post by AshleyGrant »

nekusar wrote: post #59
ashton314 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why buy an ebook then? Just buy the physical if you want, and pirate it. Dont pay for your own hope that you can pick the lock of your own paid for jail cell.

That's what they said they would do. They would buy the physical book and then pirate an ebook copy that's been de-DRMed.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#389

Post by MSFT_Edging »

themerone wrote: post #77
leshenka wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's so weird. First I decide to buy my wife an ebook reader for the new years and then Louis Rossman makes a video on Kindle DRM bait and switch. Now this and people praising Kobo. Guess I'm buying a kobo

Most Kobo books have DRM. There are a few publishers (TOR) and authors that are DRM free, but most of books I've wanted have it. This is why I have a Boox Android eInk tablet, although I only use it with burner accounts. They run Ancient versions of Android.

Kobo fully supports pointing your library at a Calibre server instance to pull books from. You can also access a bash shell by changing a setting. They're very open devices and IMO quite nice.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#390

Post by [deleted] »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #152
matheusmoreira wrote: post #141

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…

> Copyright itself should be abolished straight up. I wouldn't go that far. 18 months is long enough though.

[deleted]
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