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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

#531

Post by wffurr »

mikkupikku wrote: post #518
wffurr wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or like I have a hoarding problem. In the old days, we used to cart boxes of books down to the used book store in exchange for credit, and then load back up with more reading to bring home.

I mostly meant that suggestion as a joke, but to be real I can't imagine reading so many books that you run out of room for enough bookshelves. I have several boxes of books and it's a huge pain when moving to a new apartment, but otherwise I just get more shelves when I need more. I don't think having a lot of full bookshelves would ever be perceived by others as a hoarder scenario if the apartment is kept clean and…

>> to be real I can't imagine reading so many books that you run out of room for enough bookshelves

I don't have anywhere close to enough bookshelf space for the number of books I've read over the years.

I moved my book boxes many times before I gave up on most of them. Now I don't even have space to put them all out. 88 square meters for a family of four with toys etc. doesn't go very far.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#532

Post by cirelli94 »

wkat4242 wrote: post #33

Me too. When they removed the option to download books I liberated everything I had ever bought, moved to Kavita+koreader and will never buy a kindle book again. I jailbroke both kindles. And use koreader on them which now supports progress sync with Kavita which is amazing! So I don't really lose functionality.

Okay, but where do you buy your epubs? IF you buy them?!

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#534

Post by sjw987 »

I feel so glad I retrospectively moved all of my ebooks away from Amazon at the beginning of the year. It was weird to hear just days after I exported it all that Amazon had announced they would no longer allow downloading for USB transfer.

Now I have all of my epubs, unlocked, DRM-free, backed up, and I place them on whatever my ereader of the time is (currently Kobo), or read them on my own self hosted web reader.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#535

Post by sjw987 »

torton wrote: post #157
professorseth wrote: post #124

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 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)

Books are rapidly dropping in relevance. It could certainly be that that's exactly how this went down a decade ago, but I'd be willing to bet on Amazon stipulating "no DRM to be on Amazon" (not just Kindle; bundle all the first party distribution together) now and at least some of the big houses folding.

Dropping in popularity, but not relevance.

Reading is still a completely different thing from a book, a stream of consciousness between a writer and a reader, than it is reading in almost any other format. The way we read online from websites and apps is changing how our brains work and how we process text for information (not for the better). We're slowly becoming like the look-up tools that we use in Google and other search engines and LLM agents.

The best way for many chronically online dopamine fried people today to revert their brain back to some normality would be for them to read books and to fight through the distractions as they read.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#536

Post by sjw987 »

cirelli94 wrote: post #532
wkat4242 wrote: post #33

Me too. When they removed the option to download books I liberated everything I had ever bought, moved to Kavita+koreader and will never buy a kindle book again. I jailbroke both kindles. And use koreader on them which now supports progress sync with Kavita which is amazing! So I don't really lose functionality.

Okay, but where do you buy your epubs? IF you buy them?!

For now, if you buy from Kobo store, you can use Adobe Digital Editions to extract the epub in a format ready for Calibre.

Many websites sell epubs, with or without protection. The DRM is never usually that hard to break with Calibre. If you're into that sort of thing.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#537

Post by tad_tough_anne »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #357
gambiting wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but as confirmed over and over and over again, non-citizens also have the right to 1st amendment, same as citizens.

This is the general problem with having a bunch of laws sitting around that allow the government to punish people for things ordinary people regularly do, but then exercise the "discretion" not to punish them until they do something the government doesn't like . Because then you don't really have any rights. They can't formally punish you for speech but they can punish you for breaking the same unrelated law a millio…

But see Gonzalez v. Trevino, No. 22-1025 (U.S. June 20, 2024) (per curiam), https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-1025_1a72.pdf>.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#538

Post by torton »

sjw987 wrote: post #535
torton wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Books are rapidly dropping in relevance. It could certainly be that that's exactly how this went down a decade ago, but I'd be willing to bet on Amazon stipulating "no DRM to be on Amazon" (not just Kindle; bundle all the first party distribution together) now and at least some of the big houses folding.

Dropping in popularity, but not relevance. Reading is still a completely different thing from a book, a stream of consciousness between a writer and a reader, than it is reading in almost any other format. The way we read online from websites and apps is changing how our brains work and how we process text for information (not for the better). We're slowly becoming like the look-up tools that we use in Google and oth…

Dropping in popularity equals dropping in relevance.

When more people get their information calories from sources that are not books, what the books say becomes less relevant.

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