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How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

blog.pixelmelt.dev

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Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#461

Post by asveikau »

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.

How recently did they break that? Did they break it only for new titles?

Because I did that on two books maybe 1-2 weeks ago without issue. I might be on an old version of the desktop app.

Edit: apparently it's for titles April 2025 or later

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#462

Post by hacknewslogin »

gregwtmtno wrote: post #374
amiga386 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but can you point to any prosecution of someone for a _prose description_ of circumvention (as opposed to actually making code available)? I'll do you one better: 2600 Magazine was prohibited from saying which website hosted DRM-circumvention code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_City_Studios,_Inc._v... They were legally prohibited from saying, on their own website, words like "You can get DeCSS from http:/…

This is going to date me, but I had a t-shirt with basically a code-golf version of DeCSS printed on it and it said "This shirt is illegal" on it or something like that. I never actually wore it in public.

There's a site somewhere that has various ASCII art renditions of that code. It's on my project list to print some of those on some shirts :P

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#464

Post by bmacho »

darkwater wrote: post #453
bmacho wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You have probably misunderstood. There are 4 parties here: A) the content creator, owner of the IP B) the people that copy the content made by A and publish it (i.e. the "release groups"). They can distirbute the content over bittorrent, sharing sites etc C) people that run platforms that share copies made by B, and they offer access to those copies (sometimes even just a hash to a torrent) with some kind of paid sub…

I answered the Hollywood/Netflix part. Distributors, most prominently Apple and Amazon are shitty companies, and paying them is arguably much more unethical than paying "C", even if the latter is illegal.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#465

Post by bityard »

emptybits wrote: post #44

Hell hath no fury like an engineer angered! This was such a good read and epitomizes hacking: "Was it worth it? To read one book? No. To prove a point? Absolutely. To learn about SVG rendering, perceptual hashing, and font metrics? Probably yes."

This is essentially how I find myself defending a lot of my DIY stuff.

"Wait, you work in tech, why would you ever work on your own car when you can clearly pay someone else to do it???"

Because I like to learn things.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#466

Post by bityard »

teekert wrote: post #275

I have to say that I usually only download ebooks illegally when the DRM stops me reading them! I only have Linux machines at my disposal and I have a PocketBook. The device is nice, but the store is truly abysmal. Often there is some adobe based DRM on books I want to buy and I never got it to work with my ereader. I just gave up and pirate them now, unless there is a DRM free version (authors like Ruther Bregman an…

I have a Kobo... I don't remember the model name. But the thing I like best about it, is that I never had to sign into anything to use it. (There is a sign-in/create account screen, but this is easily bypassed if you know how to edit an sqlite file.) Once I have an ebook in DRM-free ePub, I just plug it into my computer, copy it over in the file manager, and then just start reading. No Calibre or any other special software needed.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#467

Post by pixelmelt »

hackcasual wrote: post #460

Interesting stuff. My first thought was "this is topaz" but if the font is bookerly, that makes less sense. There's this old patent for earlier kindle web obfuscation, which used CSS layout to scramble text https://patents.google.com/patent/US8700991B1

Interesting, hadent seen this before, thanks!

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#468

Post by smithza »

felixhammerl wrote: post #271
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.

For those with an old Kindle, couldn't you download it onto the Kindle and then pull it off of there via USB?

I tried to do this recently but discovered that the DRM algorithm changed and I couldn't use the standard de-DRM tools.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#469

Post by mimimi31 »

bityard wrote: post #466
teekert wrote: post #275

I have to say that I usually only download ebooks illegally when the DRM stops me reading them! I only have Linux machines at my disposal and I have a PocketBook. The device is nice, but the store is truly abysmal. Often there is some adobe based DRM on books I want to buy and I never got it to work with my ereader. I just gave up and pirate them now, unless there is a DRM free version (authors like Ruther Bregman an…

I have a Kobo... I don't remember the model name. But the thing I like best about it, is that I never had to sign into anything to use it. (There is a sign-in/create account screen, but this is easily bypassed if you know how to edit an sqlite file.) Once I have an ebook in DRM-free ePub, I just plug it into my computer, copy it over in the file manager, and then just start reading. No Calibre or any other special so…

>There is a sign-in/create account screen, but this is easily bypassed if you know how to edit an sqlite file.

You can also just add "SideloadedMode=true" to your "Kobo eReader.conf" to achieve that. This removes the "Home" and "Discover" tabs as well, defaulting to the clean "My Books" tab instead.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#470

Post by sib »

sroussey wrote: post #161
sib wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have more than 100 books that I bought with actual money on Apple's iBooks (or whatever it was called back in 2010-2012). I no longer use an iPad and would like to be able to read them on my Kindle. Because of DRM, I can't. I'm all for supporting authors and the various editors, etc., but I feel like I've already done that in this case.

Yes, there should have been a law that required interoperable DRM. At least you can transfer movies around different services. It’s a shame you can’t with books.

Ironically I worked on the project to enable that cross-provider interop for movies...
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