> I've been "obtaining" ebooks for years. But this ONE time, I thought: "Let's support the author."
ugh. The right thing to do is buy and THEN download the no drm version from "other sources." You should always support the authors.
How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM
521–530 of 538 posts
Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM
#522Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
are you using a relatively new kindle?
Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM
#523Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
>No.
The point you are responding to is at least partially true. Re-read it and see. Your brutal "No" only serves to discredit your own (partially true) argument.
Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM
#524The 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…
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 DRM exploits 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)
If you worked on that code, could tou tell us something more about this technique? What do you think about the OP way of hacking the e-book contents?
Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM
#525Earlier quoted context omitted.
> they made it against the law to even tell anyone. I’m no fan of the DMCA, but I am pretty skeptical of your apparent claim that this post itself is a potential violation of 17 USC § 1201. Obviously the act of circumvention itself qualifies, as does the code in the GitHub repository the post links to, but can you point to any prosecution of someone for a _prose description_ of circumvention (as opposed to actually m…
I wonder how that will if/when LLMs get to the point where they can turn a blog post about a DRM liberation into code. (Are they there already?) These sorts of code are usually pretty short, right? It isn’t as if it needs to be maintainable or have a nice GUI.
They are there. Don't wanna say too much because of the DMCA. Worked on some ebook stuff recently. I even had some ebooks that had unknown encryption passwords on them. Claude came up with a 137-step plan to figure out the passwords and after about 50 different combinations of data it found the matching one.
Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM
#526TBH I might be inclined to put up with the DRM if the Kindle reader was also usable for other things (PDFs, ebooks purchased from other vendors) But the library management is broken/non existent So it's not just that you can't read Kindle books on other devices, but the Kindle itself is pretty much useless for reading things you purchased from other stores Even though it was cheap and 2nd hand, I regret buying this t…
Have things changed recently? Sideloading books has always been well supported in every kindle I’ve owned, though admittedly my current model is 3 or 4 years old.
It was possible to load other files on there and read them, but there didn't seem to be any way to organise them. The UI and tools seemed really crap.
Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM
#527Does anyone have a clone of the GH repo shared in the original article? It seems to have disappeared from GH.
Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM
#528The 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…
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 DRM exploits 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)
So... It's your fault? I mean, you wrote it. You had the option to say no. You didn't. Tired of programmers making the world worse and trying to blame everyone but themselves for why the world got shittier.
Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM
#529Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes and no. I actually wrote the code to make this work with screen readers, back when I worked for Kindle in 2018. I even got to test it out with a few Amazon employees who were blind, which was a really cool experience! We added some hidden divs which had the plaintext version for screenreaders. For whatever reason, upper management was ok with the plaintext being scrapable, as long as the formatted version couldn'…
Ohhhhh. Wow! Did you have to push this through, or was everybody on board from the start? > For whatever reason, upper management was ok with the plaintext being scrapable, as long as the formatted version couldn't be scraped. I guess it’s either “formatted version is slightly better and typesetting is hard to get right” or “well we’ll have plausible deniability in case publishers ask us where’s our DRM”. Probably bo…
Ya, your reasoning about why the text-only version was ok is what I heard as well.
As far as people being on board with this--I did not have to push it through, it was a task that management wanted done that I happily did, because I could see the value of it.
Amazon actually does a really good job with accessibility across all their products. When I was there, they had at least 2 full time employees (1 Product manager and 1 Quality assurance engineer) whose full time job was just accessibility, across all Kindle platforms and I heard the intention was to grow that team as I was leaving. They had an entire team working on accessibility for the retail website, from what I heard (though I only met one or two of those people).
However, there still was a sentiment among certain engineers that worrying about accessibility was a waste of time because it only helps a small section of the population. Thankfully Web accessibility (both in standards and in culture) has come a long way in the last 8-10 years, and I think a lot more people believe in its importance now that they did back in 2017 when I started working on this.
Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM
#530> Oh wait, can't download it for offline reading. What if I'm on a plane?
My primary use of a Kindle has been 15+ minutes off the nearest paved road into the woods, very definitely offline. Who decided on-demand downloading 5 pages at a time was good enough?