How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

https://blog.pixelmelt.dev/kindle-web-drm/

by pixelmelt • 9 months ago

1758 510 9 months ago

blog.pixelmelt.dev

I don't suppose this is going to work well with their comics/graphic novels, will it?

I stopped buying ebooks from Amazon some time ago and switched completely to Kobo (and their much-more-easily-defeated DRM), but Amazon's acquisition of Comixology means they've still got by far the best collection of digital comics on the market.

Forgeties792• 9 months ago

I’m sure you already know this but I’ve actually had a lot of success getting comics on hoopla with my library card. Obviously this completely depends on your local library but if you haven’t it’s worth looking in to! Has what I want a solid 35% of the time. Not the newest releases but I’ve gotten stuff that’s only 6 to 12 months old without much issue

AdmiralAsshat2• 9 months ago

Not my use-case. I have roughly 250 legitimately purchased graphic novels and manga purchased from Amazon over the years that I'd want to backup.

I have about half of them already ripped, from an earlier time when the Kindle4PC application was easier to crack. But I still grab new comics from time to time.

makeitdouble3• 9 months ago

Slightly off-topic, but while we're at it: for all it's DRM hell and shenanigans, the Amazon kindle store is currently the absolute best way to grab foreign ebooks wherever you live on the globe.

Most local ebook stores will put undue barriers on who can purchase what because of generic region policies and/or their publishing contracts being country limited. Amazon will accept any valid credit card from anywhere as long as you create an account on the dedicated store. It's digital goods so you can also fill in any random address if needed.

boldlybold2• 9 months ago

Comics need a full "image" for the page, so this is unlikely to work. Can you inspect the requests and see what you get?

Or to the author: what happens to images in the ebook?

gruez2• 9 months ago

If all you need is an image, can't you just use browser automation tools to screenshot each page? After all, much of the content is in images so it's not like you need it OCRed for accessibility purposes.

pixelmelt5• 9 months ago

I haven't gotten images working yet, they have some weird obfuscation applied to them as well

brendang_sd• 9 months ago

I always love a story of anger based (reverse)engineering.

javchz• 9 months ago

Spite is an underated productivity tool.

Teknomadix• 9 months ago

My new T-shirt

WD-42• 9 months ago

I've partaken in some SDD (Spite Driven Development) myself related to the Garmin ecosystem. The problem with it is once you stop caring, the development stops too.

zdw• 9 months ago

aka "Hate driven development"

josfredo• 9 months ago

The best kind there is!

ZebusJesus• 9 months ago

Well done!

wredcoll3• 9 months ago

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 piracy sites better?

Insanity• 9 months ago

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 and I have to click "sync now" which sometimes is blazingly fast and sometimes takes like a minute.

I can't imagine migrating away from Kindle now, it's probably one of my favourite devices and the Kindle is my favourite way to read.

cyberax• 9 months ago

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.

radley• 9 months ago

I've had decent success with a Kindle device, but when I try to use the Kindle app on my iPhone, which is rare now, it's almost always a hassle. Their iPhone app updates completely replace the app, so everything gets reset and books have to be downloaded again.

But the main problem is that they don't sync the "last read" bookmarks until you open a book. But since that book didn't have a bookmark, it's reset to the beginning and then synced, so my "last read" bookmark is now at the beginning.

wishfish• 9 months ago

The reading experience is fine on Kindle. Or at least it was the last time I used it. My main problem is how they've locked down the DRM. I was on Kindle for a very long time and didn't mind the DRM because it was easily breakable. Amazon was also helpful about helping you download the book file directly. The locks they had in place were essentially bathroom door locks. And they seemed chill about it.

That's all changed now. I'd love to know why it's changed. My first thought was publisher pressure. But Kobo hasn't implemented harsh measures. Just Amazon has.

At any rate, I'm now using Kobo for my reading. Easy to break DRM. And they don't assume the same level of control over Kobo ereaders the way Amazon does with Kindle. I have over a thousand ebooks. I'm able to tag books in Calibre, and those tags automatically show up as Collections on the Kobo. It's a simple thing, but Amazon never gave me such flexibility. Makes a huge difference for me.

It's also possible to alter Kobo's UI/UX with various plugins without the need to jailbreak. Kobo (the company) is perfectly happy to let you do whatever you want with your own device. That's such a breath of fresh air compared to how Kindle is locked down.

wredcoll3• 9 months ago

Because I don't own a kindle nor am I willing to use their app.

I'm either old and stubborn or principled, but I want to use my current phone and "system" I've been using to read ebooks for the last 15 years.

(It's possible that kindle unlimited is a cheap enough system to make dealing with amazon software, but amazon is annoying enough that so far nothing has convinced me to buy into it)

yesco• 9 months ago

To stop you from pirating ofc!

Timshel• 9 months ago

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

renewiltord3• 9 months ago

In general, if I don’t have to pay someone to produce something I can provide a better experience to my customers than those who do.

It’s why archive.is is so much better to read on than a news site.

Might as well ask “when I engage with GPL projects it’s so much worse of an experience than if I just bundle the code and distribute it without a license, why?” It’s often cheaper to not comply than to comply.

But my kindle has definitely been “good enough” for me with Libby.

nxor2• 9 months ago

Regarding archive.is:

I use it too, but people work hard writing articles. How will they earn money if no one pays them?

wredcoll3• 9 months ago

In general, if I don’t have to pay someone to produce something I can provide a better experience to my customers

Amazon theoretically makes money with which they pay people to make the user experience good.

Pirates have... a few nerds with some spare time?

sointeresting3• 9 months ago

I bypassed it by buying a Kobo.

EA-3167• 9 months ago

I appreciate the author's work, and they're absolutely right about the Kindle app. I'm with you though, I don't want to fight tooth and nail with Amazon to have the ability to read a book without their lousy app, to back that book up, and otherwise legally and fairly use it. I don't want to reward Amazon for being aggressively anti-consumer by spending money on their site, at least not for this.

surgical_fire• 9 months ago

Likewise, but I went with Pocketbook.

I wish more people would understand that we empower those companies by using their products and services. Avoid when you can and they lose their power.

bix62• 9 months ago

Does Kobo work with the Libby app?

sointeresting3• 9 months ago

I believe so, haven't tried it myself.

shortrounddev2• 9 months ago

Yes, my wife uses it all the time

rufo• 9 months ago

Even better than a Kindle - library browsing is built-in to the device.

Night_Thastus3• 9 months ago

I'm an owner of a Kobo, how did you do that?

When I tried, the only options from Amazon were 'transfer to my device' and that only works if you have a Kindle. There was 0 way to just download the stupid file and let me copy it myself.

sointeresting3• 9 months ago

When I said "bypass", I meant I ditched my kindle for a kobo and stopped buying books on amazon entirely.

There is a library built into the kobo you can purchase from, which I do for newer books. However, I've been on a classics kick and I pirate them tbh. Dumas doesn't mind.

amatecha• 9 months ago

I was going to say exactly the same! Got a Kobo Clara BW a while ago -- great lil device. Took a while to figure out Calibre, but now that I understand it, it's very convenient. Prior to choosing an e-reader, I took one glance at Amazon's DRM-laden offerings and noped out from that ecosystem completely.

boldlybold2• 9 months ago

This is a beautiful solution to a tedious problem that shouldn't exist in the first place! Great work.

harshreality7• 9 months ago

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.

ashton314• 9 months ago

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.

nekusar• 9 months ago

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.

latexr5• 9 months ago

Might as well send the author the money directly, instead of spending it all on publishers and middlemen that you’re specifically trying to avoid. When you do, include a note on how their chosen method of sale is most hostile to legitimate consumers and recommend some DRM-free book stores.

felixhammerl3• 9 months ago

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

bambax2• 9 months ago

Most of the books I read are from authors long dead (current one: Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit, by Frank H. Knight, highly recommended). They don't need the money.

Uvix• 9 months ago

It will handle downloads for older versions of the PC app, but the supported version won't download any books released after April 2025.

Imustaskforhelp• 9 months ago

That's Erm not that bad actually, can you please explain more, I just want to give more attention to this since it definitely caught my attention in this thread.

kristofferR• 9 months ago

Apparently this method bypasses that issue:

https://techy-notes.com/blog/dedrm-v10-0-14-tutorial

digianarchist• 9 months ago

Also Libation for Audible books.

mapontosevenths3• 9 months ago

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.

thunkle• 9 months ago

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

boredhedgehog2• 9 months ago

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

3abiton• 9 months ago

I could feel the anger of the author oozing through the writing. Great work!

layer82• 9 months ago

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.

harshreality7• 9 months ago

Do the ebooks you're referring to use an image for the ² symbol, rather than css, unicode, or mathjax-generated mathml? A lot of old math books that have been converted from scans do that, for instance, because their OCR was okay at regular text but not good at superscripts, subscripts, or other mathematical symbols.

layer82• 9 months ago

They use an image in the Kindle version. I don’t know about other versions, but I strongly suspect that the PDF version, if any, doesn’t. These aren’t old books, they are recent nonfiction books from established publishers. They surely don’t use OCR to produce the Kindle version.

I’ve never seen a Kindle book rendering anything as vector graphics. That’s just not a thing in the Kindle world, as far as I can tell. It’s either basic text or pixel images.

One example I just checked is a book from MIT Press from 2021, where even √2 is rendered as an image, and also isn’t scaled correctly with respect to the text size. It really puts you off reading such books in Kindle.

Anyway, I guess my point is that TFA won’t help with what I find the most annoying about the Kindle experience.

GauntletWizard• 9 months ago

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.

wkat42423• 9 months ago

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.

bmlzootown• 9 months ago

Since the last major jailbreak for Kindle devices was released, I've been using Koreader as well on my Scribe. I have progress syncing setup with Hardcover (Goodreads alternative) instead, however. Only downside is their recommendations don't seem to be well geared to my interests at this point, but hopefully that'll change in the future as more use the service.

mikkupikku3• 9 months ago

Calibre loading books over wifi using KOreader made the jailbreak process worth it for me. My next will be a kobo or whatever else can run KOreader without hassle.

wkat42423• 9 months ago

Yeah I'm not saying to buy a kindle to use KOReader. I just had the kindles and didn't really want to get rid of them, it saved me having to buy new hardware.

aidenn03• 9 months ago

I will have to look into kavita; I already use koreader for my reading.

wkat42423• 9 months ago

Kavita was mainly designed as a comic reader, but it has recently invested a lot of time into epub quality of life features, I can recommend it. It already supported epub but lately it feels more like a first class citizen.

cirelli94• 9 months ago

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

sjw9873• 9 months ago

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.

clumsysmurf• 9 months ago

I have the same problem with O'Reilly / Safari ... I don't enjoy using the apps and find they get in the way of the reading experience, plus it's a very expensive subscription. Initially, its hard to tell if rendering problems are just a bad conversion or if the text rendering engine is just buggy / borked.

But there were plenty of other bugs like bookshelf management getting corrupted.

whatever1• 9 months ago

Your intention doesn’t matter to the shareholders. Straight to jail.

jojobas• 9 months ago

Yeah I hope his opsec is good.

lloydjones3• 9 months ago

I’ve been using https://readest.com and very much enjoying it. I just wish there were a “lifetime purchase” option.

mr_sturd• 9 months ago

Looks nice. Shame it doesn't have OPDS support, but it's nice to see that it's a planned feature in their GitHub README!

efreak• 9 months ago

What are you paying for? I see no mention of paid features anywhere (play store, GitHub readme, website, in-app settings). If the app isn't entirely free, this send pretty misleading...

lloydjones3• 9 months ago

There's a cloud-based sync service (500mb of books; 10k translation chars). I'm currently storing 24 books (as I haven't moved them all across from the Kindle app yet) and I'm using 12% of this storage.

I suppose if you want to implement your own cloud-based (Dropbox? Google Drive?) storage service and circumvent the author's monetisation model, you could.

lloydjones3• 9 months ago

To be clear: I am currently _not_ paying for it; I can just foresee a day where I'd have to.

emptybits• 9 months ago

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."

bityard2• 9 months ago

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.

robotnikman• 9 months ago

Agreed, that is the same way I view things. There is also the great feeling of satisfaction when you finish repairing your own stuff.

jakogut• 9 months ago

Learning things is good. I also find I care more about the outcome and timeline than many professionals do, because I have to deal with the end result. That's not to say professionals can't or won't do the job better, or that they don't have more applicable experience to do the job more efficiently, but evaluating professionals is often as much or more work as learning how to do the job myself and just doing it. On average, the end result is at least better than a poor professional, sometimes as good or better than an average professional.

brnt• 9 months ago

I hate not understanding things. I hate pricing that I do not understand.

noisy_boy2• 9 months ago

Recently I had to do some changes to a 3d rendering my contractor provided so I learned Krita to do it. Dare I say the results were not bad. But as good as a professional designer? Of course not. Was it satisfying to be able to show him exactly what I wanted? Hell yeah.

phoronixrly• 9 months ago

I hope they don't get in trouble for publicising how to defeat the DRM...

lozenge• 9 months ago

They still have to request every 5 pages separately so they could be caught for requesting pages faster than you could realistically tap through the book on an actual phone or tablet.

Frenchgeek• 9 months ago

Well, it would be nice to be able to use my Kindle 4 again... Thanks to KOReader, it's no longer a brick, but most of my ebooks are kept hostages at Amazon.

chmod7753• 9 months ago

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.

pmarreck2• 9 months ago

Followed the same path.

At least Steve Jobs understood how DRM should work.

leshenka• 9 months ago

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

themadturk• 9 months ago

Kobo's pretty good. Anything to avoid Kindle books.

ajsnigrutin• 9 months ago

Calibre handles kindle too (if you already have that). You "obtain" the books one way or another, and calibre converts them to a proper format and copies them directly to your kindle (via the usb cable).

Pirated books have no DRM, usually come in an open .epub format, which can be converted to whatever your reader requires, and you end up actually owning them, even if amazon decides to abandon the kindle ecosystem.

benregenspan2• 9 months ago

Bookshop.org is supposed to implement Kobo support sometime this year, getting a Kobo if that happens.

themerone• 9 months ago

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.

tcoff912• 9 months ago

It's a little less user friendly but I really like my Boox tablet because it's a full android device.

I run Storyteller app on it and have my ebooks & audiobooks synced up perfectly like whispersync but better.

mothballed• 9 months ago

Eventually those physical book scanning cameras are going to be used to read/scan DRM locked ebooks.

Cockbrand• 9 months ago

There has been a 50% proof of concept, 50% art project by an Austrian university professor to a similar extent:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIY_Kindle_Scanner

https://vimeo.com/73675285

babblingfish3• 9 months ago

Books have got to be the least expensive form of entertainment out there. The value to cost ratio is incredible. Consider buying books to support authors and publishers. If you can't afford it, then libraries are nice too.

I personally know people who pirate books, but pay hundreds of dollars a year for streaming services or battle pass type video games. It blows my mind. Books are so cheap people!

I recently bought the complete Storm Archives series by Brandon Sanderson on ebook for $10. That's over 100 hours of entertainment. It's literally a ratio of 10 CENTS per hour of entertainment.

bee_rider4• 9 months ago

Videogames could give them a run for their money, I guess, but only certain genres.

sib3• 9 months ago

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.

NoMoreNicksLeft6• 9 months ago

I personally know people who pirate books, but pay hundreds of dollars a year for streaming services or battle pass type video games. It blows my mind. Books are so cheap people!

I've been downloading every book whose title I see mentioned anywhere. I've got the last 20 years or so of the NYT Book Review Notable Books (100 per calendar year), the Book of the Month Club list, etc. Why go to the library, when I can have one of my own?

zamadatix• 9 months ago

The issue wasn't with the price so no amount of talking about how the price is great will make a dent in the issue.

The library ebook lending solutions tend not to avoid the DRM problem either.

pdonis• 9 months ago

Consider buying books to support authors and publishers.

Consider that maybe buying Amazon Kindle books is giving more support to DRM schemes like the one described in the article than it is to authors and publishers.

AnonC2• 9 months ago

I personally know people who pirate books, but pay hundreds of dollars a year for streaming services or battle pass type video games. It blows my mind. Books are so cheap people!

What is your definition of “cheap” and how many books do you consume compared to movies and TV shows on streaming services? You also haven’t stated which categories of books are cheap and are better value for you. Others may not have an interest in Storm Archives or something that’s interesting to you. There may be people interested in reading a lot of nonfiction alongside some fiction. Individual interests vary a lot.

Someone using only one streaming service may probably be getting thousands of hours of entertainment over one year.

Such comparisons also don’t account for regional price variations and availability.

aidenn03• 9 months ago

The post you are replying to implies that they buy books with the exception of books that are only available on Kindle.

I, too, do not buy ebooks that I cannot strip the DRM from. I would face a dilemma were I to have need of a book that I cannot get as either a physical copy or a DRM-free electronic copy, but I have not faced that situation yet.

I have spent over $2000 this year on books.

thayne2• 9 months ago

The stormlight archive isn't a representative example because:

- Brandon Sanderson's books are actually relatively inexpensive, despite their popularity

- Brandon sanderson ebooks are available without DRM. Interestingly, this is actually more common for fantasy and SF than other genres.

Other books are more expensive and more likely to be locked behind DRM for digital books.

rendaw2• 9 months ago

If you read GP's post closely, they're saying that the value to cost ratio is 0 due to Amazon's new DRM. Did you mean to reply to some other thread?

jzb• 9 months ago

I often buy a hard copy and then find an ebook online or check it out from the library on Libby. I’m all for supporting authors, but I don’t want to funnel money into books that I don’t really own.

duskdozer• 9 months ago

How much of a cut does a place like Amazon take from the purchase while providing negative value to the product? Everyone (except Amazon) would be better off if you pirated the book and mailed a check to the author for half the cost or whatever

ycombinatrix• 9 months ago

i'm gonna argue that video games can be better cost to value ratio.

darkwater3• 9 months ago

I personally know people who pirate books, but pay hundreds of dollars a year for streaming services or battle pass type video games. It blows my mind.

I personally know people that pirate everything and PAY FOR PIRATING SERVICES. This blows my mind even more! I know that globally it's probably still cheaper to pay for those services rather than paying for 4 different streaming services each month, but god, if I go pirate than I would go for 0$/month expenses.

ratherbefuddled• 9 months ago

I'm more than happy to pay for DRM free epubs. I won't pay for a crippled rental of a book that only works on amazon or adobe blessed devices and can be confiscated on the whim of a corporation who won't be answerable for it.

choo-t2• 9 months ago

Books have got to be the least expensive form of entertainment out there. The value to cost ratio is incredible.

Hard disagree, lot of video game will give you a better hours of entertainment per dollars ratio.

Lot of sport will do the same, as will board games and roleplaying games. Lot of hobbies are cheaper than books.

MSFT_Edging2• 9 months ago

I buy a lot of books from used book stores. Fundamentally I'm only paying for the paper it's printed on as none of those fat proceeds($3.99 paperback) ever reach the publisher. Totally cool and legal.

When I'm following a new book that's coming out, I'll drop the $30 on the unnecessarily large hardcover with the thick paper that fluffs it up.

I have only ever purchased one eBook though, and it was an awful experience. I had to crack the DRM so I could read it on the same app I read all my other books on.

When I buy a physical book, I can put it on my shelf and share it with anyone I want. I can't do that with an ebook. And if I can't comfortably read the oversized print copy, I'm going to just go find a copy online.

I basically refuse to buy physical modern fiction due to the publishing industry making every physical copy as large as possible. I have old mass-market paperbacks that have twice the density per page, thinner pages, and overall more portable than the massive soft-covers with giant print that they sell today. They're just uncomfortable to read. I took a copy of "Death's End" and a copy of "Thinking in Jazz" by Paul F Berliner. From the outside, the two books have nearly the same dimensions. The latter weighs almost twice as much, has nearly 300 more pages, and the page density is nearly a third tighter. Why should both these books take up the same amount of space on my shelf? Why do publishers think they're so important as to take up two seats on the plane? Bring back smaller mass market formfactors ffs and I'll pay full price for their bullshit.

Publishing companies are making their products worse and worse to consume. As Gabe Newel says, it's a distribution problem.

Goronmon• 9 months ago

I personally know people who pirate books, but pay hundreds of dollars a year for streaming services or battle pass type video games. It blows my mind. Books are so cheap people!

Games that sell a battlepass or have ongoing MTX are an minority of the video games available.

There are plenty of games available that are priced similarly to books and there really isn't a question as far as which will provide more entertainment.

For instance, I recently purchased the Mass Effect series for $6. I should be able to easily get 100+ hours out of that set of games.

deltarholamda• 9 months ago

If at all possible, find a local independent book store and buy from there. If they don't have it in stock, often they'll order it for you.

I have one that's been around since I was a kid, and I love taking the family there. Everybody picks a book, and it might cost anywhere from $80-120 (I've got a good sized family), but these days that's about what it would cost to go to a movie. And since you have a physical book, you can swap when you're done.

We also started celebrating Jolabokaflod a few years back, which is an Icelandic post-war tradition of giving books as gifts on Christmas Eve and reading them. This is a lot of fun, and it's a great excuse to hit the book store.

EliasWatson• 9 months ago

The issue is that you usually aren't buying the ebook. You are buying a license to access that ebook and they can revoke that license at any time. Maybe you're okay with that, but many people want to permanently have access to the things they purchased.

marknutter• 9 months ago

If you're going to just borrow it from a library, then why not just pirate it? The author/publisher isn't getting paid in either case, and libraries are 1000x less convenient than pirating.

Aurornis• 9 months ago

so now I just pirate those books.

I know someone who wrote a (technical) book and how hard it is to get sales in the age of easy internet piracy.

I understand the desire to use the books as you please, but please remember that buying the book and downloading a pirated copy for your own use are not mutually exclusive choices.

You can still purchase the book to support the author even if you're not using the exact same file to read it. As the other commenter said, books are extremely cheap relative to the value and/or entertainment time they provide.

chmod7753• 9 months ago

I'd rather donate money directly to the author. I will not under any circumstance still reward Amazon for what they're doing.

wombatpm• 9 months ago

Publishing is a dying industry. It use to be that publishers had limited press capacity, so if wanted to print and sell your book you needed a publisher to handle the production and distribution. Now it’s electronic. What value is a publisher bringing?

There was a time I could go to Borders, Barnes and Noble, Crown Books, and a couple of independent bookstores. Now I can go to Barnes and Noble and the remaining independent store.

Seems like there should be some sort of new coop structure where a writer can engage with editors, graphics people, and marketers on a fee for service or sales percentage basis. Without the agent/publisher gatekeepers.

cassianoleal2• 9 months ago

You could still use an older version of the app to force getting a book with the older DRM.

I haven't done that in a while though, so I'm not sure if they closed that loophole.

Ruthalas• 9 months ago

Unfortunately they did close that loophole recently. :(

professorseth10• 9 months ago

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 this exploit 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)

limagnolia3• 9 months ago

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.

boznz• 9 months ago

I feel your pain, As an author even I detest DRM and the lack of ability to move between ecosystems, best way is to start out on the right foot and ensure you get all your books, DRM free, and download them locally.

There are also plenty of good free books from indie authors like me (www.rodyne.com) that don't make it to Amazon. I also normally check out smashwords (www.smashwords.com) for their free books or sales, and download about 30 books - about 5 are usually worth keeping, which is about in line with Kindle books I pay for. Also worth signing up for your local library for the best-sellers, they often have partnerships to allow you to loan ebooks.

zaptheimpaler• 9 months ago

Some books are available to buy DRM-free if you search a little - sometimes from the publisher or the Kobo store. It's also just possible to buy a book and also download a pirated copy. You're not just hurting Amazon, you're hurting the author and I don't think we want to encourage a world where no one writes books because its impossible to get paid for them.

cubefox• 9 months ago

You may not like a product or service, or think it's too expensive, but that doesn't ethically justify just getting it for free illegally. It does justify abstinence: simply not buying the product or service, while also not illegally obtaining it otherwise.

asveikau• 9 months ago

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

semiquaver7• 9 months ago

This is great work, but I’m not clear on why this qualifies as DRM at all. It sounds like the OP reverse engineered a protocol for rendering pages from a book to the web client. Sure, rotating the glyph ids every API call is annoying but it hardly qualifies as encryption or even obfuscation, just an extra mapping step the decoder needs to handle.

Sure seems like whoever at Amazon wrote this didn’t realize that it backdoors their DRM.

palata• 9 months ago

Sure seems like whoever at Amazon wrote this didn’t realize that it backdoors their DRM.

Or maybe they did, and now they will have to fix it.

professorseth10• 9 months ago

I was on the team that wrote this code.

We knew it was reverse-engineerable, we just didn't care.

Upper management seemed happy enough that it was pretty obfuscated, and we were happy that they didn't force us to do more about it.

bitwize• 9 months ago

Still a DMCA violation to break, though.

ash_091• 9 months ago

we just didn't care. Upper management seemed happy enough

This is very relatable. Management want X, engineers recognise X is dumb and deliver something that sorta looks like X, management see something that looks like X and are happy.

semiquaver7• 9 months ago

Replies like this are why I love HN (assuming it’s true)

DevelopingElk• 9 months ago

It kind of makes sense. It's good enough to stop a non-coder. Anything in the browser can be either broken by a serious coder or has unpleasant tradeoffs.

Amazon would need to drop this feature to seriously lock down their books

tripzilch3• 9 months ago

But you still did it. With awful consequences discussed in this thread. Couldn't you have done less about it ?

Do you tell yourself "well if I hadn't, the next person would've" ?

Did they force you to do it, then ? Was it worth it ?

cheschire• 9 months ago

What are you talking about? Rotating glyphs is like... the ORIGINAL encryption.

https://cryptii.com/pipes/caesar-cipher

forinti2• 9 months ago

At some point you are going to have to show something on the screen for a person to read. No mechanism is going to be impenetrable.

SeanAnderson• 9 months ago

@op there's a typo: "You can now download the books you own books with my code"

second books seems erroneous

pixelmelt5• 9 months ago

Fixed!

rkagerer2• 9 months ago

Don't stop there! If Amazon sues you, demand a jury trial and win a carve-out making it legal to unlock DRM you own.

znort_• 9 months ago

I paid money for this book I can only read it in Amazon's broken app I can't download it I can't back it up I don't actually own it Amazon can delete it whenever they want

good that you didn't read the terms of amazon's kindle business model before buying that book; all that delicious rage and the interesting knowledge it spurred would have been lost to the world. tbh, i would have expected them to be more sophisticated. good job and kudos, enjoy your well earned book, it's yours now!

sadly i have no use for this, the only few books i ever bought on amazon were paperback, used and in good condition. good deals. but the mere fact that a provider requires me to use specific software to access content is simply unacceptable, making a detailed reading of their absurdly dystopian terms and conditions unnecessary.

i use amazon prime. for me it's very worth it just for the delivery savings as i live in a remote area. it includes access to their video streaming service. one day i decided to try it just to see what was there. i was immediately prompted with a download for some mandatory viewer/drm/codec. not going to happen, baby, so i just closed the tab, never bothered with it again and have the feeling that nothing of value was lost.

Night_Thastus3• 9 months ago

I hate Amazon's decision to do this. It doesn't even make business sense. You can't tell me they're making that much profit off of Kindles that it makes sense. The book sales have got to be worth more than that in the long run.

A lot of authors only ever offer on Amazon now, which leaves those of us without Kindles (I love my Kobo) in a difficult spot.

Frankly I would write it as anti-competitive. How are other e-reader companies supposed to survive when Amazon owns all the e-books and can just decide that only their e-readers are allowed? No one else has even a fraction of the market.

ed_mercer• 9 months ago

The fact that they did this, kind of proves that it does make business sense? This is Amazon. I don’t buy that some random person ordered this to be implemented without any data or motive.

soorya3• 9 months ago

I stopped buying kindle books and back to buying physical books. Now I own them, I can gift them to friends or pass them on to my kids.

martin822• 9 months ago

I live in unbelievably hot and humid Singapore and buying physical books is essentially "not possible". Unless I blast the AC in my house 24/7, all books will eventually succumb to mould.

professorseth10• 9 months ago

I worked on the team that implemented this, years ago! (around 2017-2018)

Upper management really enjoyed telling us (the engineers) that we needed to implement more DRM, and we liked complaining that it was dumb.

Fun to see someone reverse engineer what we implemented!

pixelmelt5• 9 months ago

That's amazing! Well done, it was a fun challenge

fguerraz2• 9 months ago

I don't think its dumb from a business point of view. You've got to make promises to the editors that the platform is going to drive the sales up, not down.

Is it hostile to customers, absolutely.

725686• 9 months ago

How do you actually use the code? There is no readme.

lifter3101• 9 months ago

Unrelated to this article. But somewhat related to parts of the discussion here.

One (niche) way to overcome not being able to download books from Amazon anymore is to get ebooks from a library that supports Overdrive/libby. (Some of?) Those support downloading DRM files directly from the app, which you then can run through Adobe + Calibre. Obviously, this is contingent on book availability and your ability to get a proper library card. But works for me for 90% of the books that I need.

neilv• 9 months ago

All the people mentioning Kobo favorably in these comments... is the main selling point that the DRM is easily breakable, or is it a superior reader or marketplace in other ways?

someNameIG• 9 months ago

I think a lot of it is due to people just not liking Amazon.

pipe01• 9 months ago

It's a much more open reader, you can literally drag a file into the SD card and install whatever software you want

sotix• 9 months ago

When I bought mine, Amazon didn't have USB C and page turning buttons on the same model. Kobo did.

It has direct integration with borrowing books from the library.

It has direct integration with Instapaper.

You can drag a file onto the device after mounting it over USB.

You can replace the endpoint for the store with a Calibre Web endpoint to directly sync your books from a personal server.

You can pretty easily modify the device however you see fit.

For me the library integration on the device itself was a major selling point. I have no complaints after switching four years ago!

timpieces• 9 months ago

As a counterpoint, I bought a kobo (clara?) two years ago, and ended up hating it. It was a lot of minor things that added up. Spuriously turning on in my pocket/bag constantly and ruining progress (the power-on button was poorly placed and very sensitive). Forcing a single font for every book. Page turns were often noticeably slow. Libby/Overdrive integration often spuriously re-downloaded books and lost my progress. It was never clear to me whether I got unlucky with a bad device or not. But none of my issues screamed 'broken' rather than just 'annoying' so I assumed it was normal. I dislike the kindle ecosystem as much as the next person, but I've found the hardware so much better and more reliable that I ended up going back to kindle. The positive vibes in these comments are leading me to reevaluate and think that maybe something was indeed wrong with my device.

Nicholas_C• 9 months ago

I switched to kobo for a while but I thought the hardware itself was inferior. Maybe they fixed it but I couldn’t dim the screen low enough to not annoy my wife while she tried to sleep. It felt cheaper too. I begrudgingly switched back to my old kindle.

trashb• 9 months ago

You can sideload books on Kobo over USB they parse the expected formats epub/pdf/html without problems. There is custom firmware available and a homebrew app community.

I find their default interface is also good and can read anything without mayor problems, books, web & comics. My reader Elipsa 2e is also great for taking notes and supports notes in book pages, though that specific model isn't supported by the custom firmware.

ggm• 9 months ago

Because its rendering to bookerly or an analogue a perceptual hash looks like an amazingly good fit. But in general, how applicable would that be to OCR because if you can declare 90% of the text is courier, then it feels like an enormously good way to get over the hump.

I wondered if he was just tuning to the best algorithm for his corner case, but it's one of the algorithms in a decent OCR package anyway?

You'd only have to do a few hint/confirmations.

sohkamyung• 9 months ago

For reference, Libreture maintains a list of non-DRM bookshops [1].

[1] https://libreture.com/bookshops/

martin822• 9 months ago

what we need is a unified search engine for non DRM bookshops so that I can just search for what I need and then be directed to whatever shop offers it at the best price or format.

anonymousiam• 9 months ago

The DMCA can bite. Hopefully the author has taken steps to protect his identity, or there likely will be consequences.

https://linuxsecurity.com/news/government/sklyarov-hearing-s...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd.

dannyobrien• 9 months ago

Fun fact: this is one of the few situations in the US where a prosecutor could claim that this is criminal speech (though I hope and trust they would not, and if it did it would get thrown out by any court respecting the First Amendment).

Not a civil issue, like libel or fraud, but the sort of talk that can get a policeman to come and drag you off to jail. If you've ever wondered why DRM is so roundly hated by engineers of a certain age, it's because not only it dumb makework that they are required to implement, not only is it extremely irritating to discover it interfering with your own computer, but if you do effectively point out how dumb, irritating, and eminently circumventable it is, they made it against the law to even tell anyone.

https://www.eff.org/press/releases/licensing-scheme-fair-use...

semiquaver7• 9 months ago

  > 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 making code available)?

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201

The law says “no person shall circumvent” DRM, and later prohibits the distribution of “technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof” to break DRM. It’s worded pretty carefully to avoid prohibiting more traditional forms of speech like this post, and as far as I’m aware has never been used in the manner you suggest.

bee_rider4• 9 months ago

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.

LoganDark2• 9 months ago

The post includes a link to a GitHub repository containing code to circumvent the DRM, which probably counts as "technology" and "component".

conception• 9 months ago

I see you don’t remember the dvd decryption key ordeal.

sroussey2• 9 months ago

It does prevent linking to code though.

Manuel_D• 9 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd.

Found not guilty, but he was charged and tried.

amiga3863• 9 months ago

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://lemuria.org/~tom/DeCSS/" and nothing else. Criminalised speech.

AnthonyMouse3• 9 months ago

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 making code available)?

There used to be some debate about whether a prose description is equivalent to computer code even though there are proofs in information theory that they are. English and C are just two different languages in which you can encode the same information.

But we don't even have to go there anymore. LLMs mean there are now machines that can execute a prose description. Code is speech and speech is code.

NoMoreNicksLeft6• 9 months ago

That law should be changed. If you distribute your intellectual property with DRM, that work should forever be exempt from copyright protection. You get to choose one or the other, but never both, because DRM effectively removes the work from the public domain in perpetuity.

Even accidentally releasing a demo or preview with DRM should invalidate copyright on that software/movie/book/whatever.

matheusmoreira3• 9 months ago

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 worldwide.

gruez2• 9 months ago

because DRM effectively removes the work from the public domain in perpetuity.

This doesn't make for a good anti-DRM argument because the concern can simply be addressed by requiring a DRM-free copy to be deposited at the library of congress (or similar[1]) so it can be released in 150 years (or whatever) it actually becomes public domain.

Moreover how would you even define what "DRM" is? Is spotify refusing to provide a .mp3 file download for their streaming service a "DRM"? What if they implement streaming via webrtc, to make it extra-annoying to manually download? For games, is it "DRM" to add mandatory online requirements even for single player? What if there's an ostensible reason for the online requirement, like if the gameplay is computed server-side a-la world of warcraft?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit

immibis5• 9 months ago

Analogously to the choice between trade secret and patent.

Thorrez• 9 months ago

The law is especially difficult to change because the law is based upon copyright treaties that the country (e.g. the US) has entered into.

vikarti3• 9 months ago

Potential issue: what EXACTLY DRM is? Is "you can only read this book/view this video on tivoized device which have it's own cellular connection to mothership and no USB/Ethernet/WiFi" counts as DRM for this purposes? What about "you can only buy this book at some obscure store which have it's own obscure reader which only work on specific versions of specific OS"? What if said OS is out-of-date? What about "you can buy only from specific store, store provides you reader app als specifically allows you to gift reader and books to friends,etc but reader app is personalized and will tell your name on start up"?(btw,I did buy some books protected this way in 00s)

mNovak• 9 months ago

Tangentially related to the question of legality of prose describing otherwise illegal instructions, I'm reminded of the epic DeCSS haiku [1]. (CSS here being 90's era DVD DRM).

[1] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/decss-haiku.txt

dylan6042• 9 months ago

Content Scrambling System vs Cascading Style Sheets

I do remember trying to learn CSS for web definitely made me feel like it was a Cascading Style Scrambling

prmoustache• 9 months ago

OTOH this is not DRM nor copy protection. It is just obfuscation.

stavros• 9 months ago

And that can be your legal argument while you await sentencing!

juvoly• 9 months ago

Indeed. If DRM had the technical merits to protect against copying, why would we need a (law like DMCA) against tinkering with that technology?

moefh• 9 months ago

Eh, I wouldn't be so sure. Reading the DMCA, their code does seem to do what the law says you can't do[1]:

    "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title [...]"

with these definitions[2]:

    (A) to “circumvent a technological measure” means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and

    (B) a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.

I think (A) pretty clearly applies: the glyphs being randomized in each request obviously counts as being "scrambled", the method used by the author with the hashes clearly descrambles them by matching the provided SVG images to the letters rendered with the book's font.

I'm less sure about (B), not being a lawyer, but I think it's so generic that it does apply: the "ordinary course of [...] operation" of reading the book requires running the apps provided by Amazon. This seems to fit "requires the application of [...] a process [...] with the authority of the copyright owner".

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/uscode.php?width=840...

immibis5• 9 months ago

DRM is obfuscation that it's illegal to mess with.

account422• 9 months ago

All DRM where the content can be played back on your own devices is just obfuscation.

fainpul• 9 months ago

Remember when it was illegal to export strong cryptography from the US? There was no law to restrict that, so they just made something up. It basically went like this:

Problem: we can't make cryptography exports (software exports) illegal

-> what actually IS illegal to export?

-> munitions!

-> let's just declare that cryptography is "munitions"

-> problem solved

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

lostlogin• 9 months ago

On the upside, when my Dad bought a G4 Mac, the brief block on exporting it due to its dangerous power was maximum nerd points.

0xEF• 9 months ago

Not that I agree with it, but I do see the logic. The word "munitions" can be replaced with "materials," since it literally refers to materials used for warfare. That isn't necessarily limited to things that shoot or explode. It's a brilliant bit of pedantry if you step back and think about it.

tmoertel• 9 months ago

Do you also remember the researcher Philip Zimmerman’s hack to get around the cryptography-is-munitions edict? The source code to PGP was published by MIT Press as a book that just happened to be in a format suitable for OCR. That framing made it into a First Amendment issue, one the researchers were confident they’d win in court.

https://archive.org/details/pgpsourcecodeint0000zimm

motorest3• 9 months ago

There was no law to restrict that, so they just made something up.

That's a rather facetious interpretation. You're complaining that there was no law preventing software being distributed, and as there was a need to prevent that then lawmakers fixed that problem. That's hardly surprising, isn't it?

You also seem surprised that including cryptography software in existing lists designed to prevent export of military and/or dual-use technology is also surprising, unexpected, or outlandish. If you actually think about it, is it really?

p0w3n3d2• 9 months ago

I wonder when/where did they make it against the law to even tell anyone. I remember(1) time when law guys made illegal (in US i believe? or EU?) creating software that circumvents certain DRMs, so I made plans to create a txt DRM that would rely on having a preambule like this :

  !copy !save

if there is a !copy the text editor would not allow you to copy the text (like the acrobat reader does), and !save would not allow saving locally (this is even stupider)

The plan was to render notepad.exe and thus whole windows an illegal software because it allows to circumvent the existing DRM. Of course this would make illegal also less and vim, therefore I got scared of the power that lay in my hands, and cease to hit the atomic button.

_____

(1) I've noticed that I recently started to use "I remember" more and more on the hackernews. I'm getting old.

acka• 9 months ago

Your idea has a precedent.

The Serial Copy Management System (SCMS)[1] is a DRM standard built into digital audio tech like DAT, MiniDisc, DCC, and consumer audio CD recorders. It works by adding just 2 bits — but no encryption or obfuscation whatsoever — to the digital audio signal that tell the recorder if further digital copying is allowed. Importantly, SCMS only ever blocked making a digital copy of a copy — you could always make a first-generation copy from an original, but not chain further digital copies. The requirement was pushed by copyright holders: in the US, consumer devices had to implement SCMS to ensure you couldn’t endlessly duplicate perfect digital recordings, but pro studio gear was exempt. SCMS doesn’t restrict analog copying, just digital serial copying. Most people found it annoying rather than effective.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Copy_Management_System

kwar13• 9 months ago

Love the reverse engineering but this is why I thought a Kobo and not a Kindle. Never had an issue to load anything on my Kobo.

bariumbitmap2• 9 months ago

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 out of concern that Amazon will simply slap it down.

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?p=4516384#p...

This works for most Kindle books currently, but Amazon is cracking down hard on the workarounds lately. So free any books you need to asap.

https://github.com/apprenticeharper/DeDRM_tools/discussions/...

professorseth10• 9 months ago

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)

torton2• 9 months ago

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.

bariumbitmap2• 9 months ago

There's plenty of blame to go around. Tech companies like Amazon blame publishers or other tech companies, publishers blame tech companies or other publishers. My point is that DRM has gone from bad to worse.

rendaw2• 9 months ago

One argument I heard was that this was actually due to "kindle unlimited". I think publishers didn't really care that people were removing drm after purchasing a book, but with amazon's push to a streaming model people started subscribing and mass downloading books to read after unsubscribing. Both unlimited and book purchases used the same drm.

Maybe streaming is inevitable, but streaming is at least partially pushed by the streaming services who make more money on streaming than they do purchases.

niutech• 9 months ago

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?

salawat• 9 months ago

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.

thrdbndndn• 9 months ago

The new crack is still shared publicly if you're willing to make some minimal effort to look for it.

UltraSane5• 9 months ago

Automatic screenshots and OCR still work well enough.

NoMoreNicksLeft6• 9 months ago

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.

boredhedgehog2• 9 months ago

The solution is being shared in the very forum thread you linked, but apparently didn't read.

cwillu• 9 months ago

Like the hn commenting guidelines you apparently didn't read :p

paulcole• 9 months ago

In the screenshot the author must’ve accidentally cropped out the text that confirms he’s buying a license to the book and not ownership of the book.

I doubt he would’ve done that intentionally to make his indignant point.

silcoon• 9 months ago

Removing DRM from ebooks is the standard. Otherwise I cannot read them in my Kobo because I didn't (and I will never) register my reader into Adobe, and neither I've created a Kobo account (I bypassed the initial setup).

nocchedure• 9 months ago

The Github repo (which was working for me until 5 mins ago) just 404'ed.

https://github.com/PixelMelt/amazon_book_downloader

Kind of expected, but I was surprised at how quick that was.

rkagerer2• 9 months ago

Amazon engineers [who are in a senior enough position to care] read HN too.

jonas21• 9 months ago

I assume the author is reading the comments here and decided it would be in their best interest to make the repo private.

shit_game• 9 months ago

Another reminder that you should always instantly download everything you ever find interesting or valuable. The internet is temporal because it's backed by people and infrastructure which are fallible and fragile in the face of law and talk.

alcide• 9 months ago

Does a GitHub archive exist? It sure is something to see code ebb and flow at the whims of the few.

pabs3• 9 months ago

Software Heritage attempts to archive all of GitHub (not there yet) and various other code sites:

https://archive.softwareheritage.org/ https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Software_Heritage

ebb_earl_co• 9 months ago

Did anyone clone this? It’s 404 on GitHub now

Fnoord2• 9 months ago

Possibly https://github.com/gudvardur/amazon_book_downloader I did not verify.

WalterBright2• 9 months ago

EARTH TO AMAZON EARTH TO AMAZON

PLEASE MAKE THE LAST PAGE READ BE THE KINDLE SCREEN DISPLAY WHEN POWERED OFF

END OF TRANSMISSION

dhooper• 9 months ago

I've always wanted it to work this way. However it'd only work if you had a case with the magnetic cover to turn on the device. Otherwise someone would pick up their un-cased kindle with the page lock screen, start reading, and then get confused when they tried to turn the page and nothing happened — the device would still be off!

sphars2• 9 months ago

Probably discussed elsewhere but you can do this if you jailbreak your Kindle, and either install one of the screensaver hacks or install KOReader and set the last page as your screensaver. A good guide to get started is at https://kindlemodding.org/

WalterBright2• 9 months ago

Thank you for the instructions. But it's really something that Amazon should do. Their power off screen is quite useless and gets really really old after a while.

october8140• 9 months ago

Buy a Kobo and you no longer have to deal with Amazon.

nchmy• 9 months ago

Off to the gulag with you!

jerrygoyal• 9 months ago

or you can extract book (kfx) from the Android kindle app location and run DeDRM via Calibre.

notpushkin2• 9 months ago

Wait, does this (absolutely ridiculous) DRM completely fuck up screen readers?

professorseth10• 9 months ago

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't be scraped.

notpushkin2• 9 months ago

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 both. Still doesn’t make a lot of sense to me though.

Thanks for sharing!

AnonC2• 9 months ago

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.

The dedication on this endeavor is admirable. I quite enjoyed reading it even though certain things were new to me (structural similarity index).”

Posting the code on some code sharing platform (not GitHub, where it could probably be taken down quickly) could be a logical next step.

gbil• 9 months ago

I've been "obtaining" ebooks for years
So let me get this straight: I paid money for this book

One can say that no DRM doesn’t bring issues but one can also say that there is a very polarized approach from the post author on what he believes he is entitled to depending on the situation they bring themselves to.

krbaccord94f• 9 months ago

.kfx text is syndicated using a reversion letter to kdb.

drm copyright arrays lie in the html/css layer, which stops the user from accessing raw text.

UltraSane5• 9 months ago

Any book DRM is easy to defeat now that OCR is so good. Just automate screenshotting and OCRing every page.

aidenn03• 9 months ago

Have you tried this? I think you'll find OCR (at least free OCR) isn't as good as you think it is.

UltraSane5• 9 months ago

It is very good in my experience. It has been very good for a long time. Adobe Acrobat has long had the ability to OCR scans and replaced the raster fonts with custom generated TruType fonts.

thayne2• 9 months ago

Amazon's Kindle Android app was really buggy and crashed a bunch

This is one of my biggest problems with DRM. It restricts what software you can consume the media on.

I bought a collection of books from Kobo without realizing it was protected by DRM, then realized I could only read them with the kobo reader, which is also really buggy. I really wanted to use a different reader app, but couldn't.

zoom6628• 9 months ago

Can't Amazon be sued for false advertising by having "buy" on the button when it is actually "rent"? #justasking genuine question on interpretation of the term in USA.

latexr5• 9 months ago

And while you’re at it, do you expect to sue Steam, and the App Stores, and most other digital marketplaces owned by billionaire corporations? You’re not going to win those lawsuits with such a flimsy argument.

They could just as well argue that you are not buying the book, but a license to access it under certain conditions. A movie theatre is a comparable example: You say you bought a ticket, not that you rented access to the movie, but it’s only valid for one specific viewing despite being a sale.

reassess_blind3• 9 months ago

A movie theatre is a bad comparison. Nowhere does it say “Buy the movie” and it’s clear to the purchaser that they’re purchasing a one time viewing. That’s not the case with an Amazon eBook where the marketing and reasonable expectation of the average consumer is they’re buying the eBook itself.

Not that I necessarily agree with the other comment either.

Andrex• 9 months ago

You're buying a license. (Was hard not to use scare quotes here.)

probably_wrong• 9 months ago

Someone is doing that right now - there's a proposed class-action lawsuit [1] that reads in part "On its website, Defendant tells consumers the option to ‘buy’ or ‘purchase’ digital copies of these audiovisual works. But when consumers ‘buy’ digital versions of audiovisual works through Amazon’s website, they do not obtain the full bundle of sticks of rights we traditionally think of as owning property. Instead, they receive ‘non-exclusive, nontransferable, non-sublicensable, limited license’ to access the digital audiovisual work, which is maintained at Defendant’s sole discretion".

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/i-like-plaintiffs-ch...

FloatArtifact• 9 months ago

Amazon modifies books without authors consent.

https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Amazon_altering_the_content_of...

boobsbr• 9 months ago

Very scummy.

polar_1911• 9 months ago

If anyone cloned the code from github before it got taken down, please preserve it forever by publishing it in a crypto blockchain.

SanjayMehta2• 9 months ago

I saw some 26 forks before it disappeared. Maybe one of them survived, but github is blocking searches at the moment (for me).

edit: https://github.com/gudvardur/

transitivebs• 9 months ago

an alternate to exporting kindle ebooks: https://github.com/transitive-bullshit/kindle-ai-export

Hackbraten2• 9 months ago

Not sure I want to trust an LLM with a bulk transcription task that I want to be 100% faithful.

SamDc73• 9 months ago

I had a jailbreaked kindle a while back, but did update it by mistake and couldn't make it work again (didn't try that much honestly) and I switched to boox (which is android based e-reader)

I use it with my self-hosted calibre-web where I can sync my books to both KOReader on my boox and phone with the OPDS protocol and I use syncthing to sync my progress and highlights too ..

it's a bit of work to set up but I know it will work for a very long time, where with your solution, I wonder how long before Amazon will make it harder yet again?

criddell6• 9 months ago

Some of us here avoid BOOX devices because of their history of GPL violations.

classified• 9 months ago

Holy fuck. The depravity of enshittification knows no bounds.

I consider myself warned and will never buy anything Kindle.

mcv• 9 months ago

Fascinating how much effort Amazon puts into screwing their customers. And impressive how people manage to circumvent that anyway.

But I still think the better option is to never give any money to Amazon.

mrweasel• 9 months ago

Just imagine if they had put the same effort into making a usable Android app, then the author wouldn't have bothered. In some sense it's negligence on Amazons part.

Years ago I dropped buying stuff on Amazon, because they can't match prices, shipping times and the site just invites scams, but I kept buying eBooks, because my old Kindle is sort of amazing. Then they started messing with the Kindle platform as well and now I just buy physical books from local retailers.

rand17• 9 months ago

Last time (couple of months ago) I could still claw the book back from my physical kindle device and then deDRM it but the whole process changes from year to year and it's always a great frustration for me (it's backup time! oh no). Looked around what alternatives are there, but I don't want to trade one DRM process for another (even if it's easier to do on a Kobo branded device).

Here in Eastern Europe the local ebooks have no DRM (just a "please don't steal this" message or something similar), but my cynical side says we have like 10 contemporary writers and maybe 20 readers, it's not a big business to begin with. Physical books are heavy, hard to store/pack/move and are quite expensive to ship here - I guess I can't have a cake and eat it as well (for cheap, low effort baking at least).

stonecharioteer• 9 months ago

I can't wait for Kovid Goyal to figure this out and get Calibre back to fucking with Amazon.

necovek3• 9 months ago

Lovely, great effort.

I wonder if Kindle Web reader supports word search, but that probably just searches server side and then returns indexed selections.

And how about copy-and-paste and accessibility, there must be some a11y support?

edent3• 9 months ago

You can copy and paste text from it. But you get no formatting, paragraph breaks, etc.

necovek3• 9 months ago

That means it could be used to extract some text to map to glyphs, right?

teekert• 9 months ago

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 and Cory Doctorow provide them.)

It used to be quite easy to strip DRM from kindle books, with my old kindle keybaord, so in the past I always bought a lot of ebooks from Amazon. But now I can't get them on my device anymore. A true shame, the Amazon ebook store really has all the books.

This whole situation p**es me off enough to not feel bad about pirating.

Arch-TK3• 9 months ago

Adobe DRM is relatively easy to strip. It's my go-to fallback when I can't find a DRM-free purchase somewhere.

bityard2• 9 months ago

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.

mimimi31• 9 months ago

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.

nlitsme2• 9 months ago

After researching the webviewer, and finding basically the same as pixelmelt, I found someone else already made the script,

I've been using https://github.com/teticio/kindle2pdf + tesseract to convert amazon books to text.

So that repo also disappeared. Neither is mentioned in https://github.com/github/dmca

yard2010• 9 months ago

Having lived through the Amazon Kindle/ebook rise and fall shit show it's safe to say I will never ever pay to buy or rent or whatever they call it for stuff I can get for free from the internet, because when doing the latter I would never need to reverse engineer bs systems just to get what I paid for.

Loeffelmaenn• 9 months ago

Ever since AI got big everybody always uses 100 million lists in their writing. It gets really annoying to read.

Here is why lists are bad for reading:

1. They break the flow.

I hate it. Cool blog article though.

cboyardee• 9 months ago

Based, bamf'd and extremely goat'd

molszanski• 9 months ago

I’ve stopped buying any books that have that kind of a DRM. Kindle / audible apps are horrible

arnejenssen• 9 months ago

Impressive. As a bootstrapping founder I live frugally. But I buy and read a loot of books on Kindle. Books give so much value compared to the cost/price. And the convenience of e-books/kindle makes the other option not worth the hassle.

otikik• 9 months ago

Love what people do out of spite sometimes. Well done.

wosined• 9 months ago

Based glyph wizard.

edent3• 9 months ago

This almost works.

It's hard-coded to the .com store, but that's trivial to change.

The main problem is that every line is treated a `<p>` element. Which means the rendering is askew. That's fine if you're reading a PDF-style document with hard-coded line breaks, but a bit annoying for a reflowable ePub.

Commas are sometimes rendered as apostrophes. Full-stops are also sometimes mid-dots.

Given that the glyph shapes never change, it might be better to "bake in" the shapes rather than manually decoding them. Didn't take too long on my laptop to do the perceptual mapping, but could speed things up for others.

Nevertheless, an excellent demonstration of how pointless DRM is.

nlitsme2• 9 months ago

Did anyone note that there is no cryptography involved in this way of extracting book contents?

zahirbmirza• 9 months ago

Does any one else remember when they remotely deleted 1984 from people's devices due to... 'copyright issues'

PostOnce• 9 months ago

I had a kindle with buttons once, and it was good.

Then, I bought a touchscreen kindle paperwhite, and found out that every time you change books it complains that it cant find the cloud, and won't let you categorize anything unless you register it and be online.

That's enough Amazon for me, no point in finding out a second time for hundreds of dollars that they still piss me off.

benterix• 9 months ago

I have 3 rules:

1. If possible, buy from the author directly (I mostly read tech books, so that's often an option).

2. Otherwise buy from elsewhere, without DRM.

3. If all other options fail, buy from Amazon but immediately download a DRM-free copy from libgen and use that.

This is both ethical and practical.

basilikum2• 9 months ago

How is paying for a DRMed book ethical? I agree that buying a DRM free book is clearly right, but if someone is only providing a book in a way that infringes on your rights, why would you give them money for that? If someone sells a book that you want to read and you have the money to pay for it, by all means, buy it. But if you are unable to buy the book because the author decided to publish it in a way so that you cannot legally gain an actual copy of the book – opposed to limited access under the terms set by a company that they can arbitrarily alter at any time, leaving you with nothing but a pinky promise – why would you give them and, out of all the things in the world, Amazon money for that when you then have to retrieve the copy of the book you were after otherwise?

lolpython• 9 months ago

If you buy the book on Amazon, then the author gets some money, but if you don’t buy it, then they don’t. And it’s not like you have zero alternatives, you could also just buy the physical copy in most cases. So when you say you’re unable to buy the book that’s not truthful. No one is forcing you to steal their work, you have the option to just not read their work if your distribution preferences are so specific. And the distribution terms of the book are likely set by the publisher for many authors, especially smaller ones. I doubt most authors even know what DRM is.

gameshot911• 9 months ago

Your right to buy a DRM-free book?

I put that in the same bucket as my "right" to buy your house for $1.

Arch-TK3• 9 months ago

Please don't write your blog post with AI.

Don't force me to either get another AI to remove all the fluff, or to skim read.

There's an interesting article here, covered in a layer of AI slop.

cl3misch• 9 months ago

How do you get the feeling this is AI-generated? Because of the many bullet points?

Arch-TK3• 9 months ago

I think if you just look at the titles, they sound exactly like the cheesy nonsense these things like to generate when you ask them to structure something.

A lot of the writing also has this feeling to a lesser extent.

My advice is always to write something first and then (if you insist) get AI to proofread and make editorial suggestions. This seems like it was written by AI from some prompt and notes, and then modified in a few places.

It just adds a bunch of weird fluff.

anentropic2• 9 months ago

TBH 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 thing

Yodel0914• 9 months ago

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.

sphars2• 9 months ago

Sideloading is still supported. But Amazon removed the ability to download your legally purchased (rented) from the Amazon website - the download and transfer via USB option [0]. So if you previously downloaded those books, you can still manually copy them onto the Kindle.

[0] https://goodereader.com/blog/kindle/amazon-removing-download...

anentropic2• 9 months ago

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.

squigz2• 9 months ago

Jailbreak it and install KOReader[0], which supports PDFs. You can also install something like Project Title[1] for a fancier UI

https://koreader.rocks/

https://github.com/joshuacant/ProjectTitle

worldsavior3• 9 months ago

Can someone tell me another effective way to combat book piracy that is not Amazon's way?

I don't understand the author complainant. If you don't like the app, don't use it! Pirate it all you want I don't care, but don't say it's because you didn't like the app. You want books? Buy them physically or find another way to obtain them digitally.

There are authors to these books on Kindle, and they don't want their books free on the internet, it's Amazon's jobs to combat this. They have no choice but to DRM.

roblabla• 9 months ago

Then amazon should make it clear you aren’t buying a book. Putting buy there is deceptive.

And also, amazon is on the hook for providing an actual, working app here.

choo-t2• 9 months ago

Can someone tell me another effective way to combat book piracy that is not Amazon's way?

There simply no effective way to lock a book from copy while being able to read it. It will simply slow the process to free the book, at worst it will result in error or information loss (some links and fancy layout)

There are authors to these books on Kindle, and they don't want their books free on the internet, it's Amazon's jobs to combat this. They have no choice but to DRM

We, as a civilisation, don't have to respect their wish. Free (as in beer) books are a necessity for a lot of people, and free (as in speak) book should be the norm, DRM introduce plenty of problem fir thé reader, with not a single added value for the customer.

worldsavior3• 9 months ago

We, as a civilisation, don't have to respect their wish. Free (as in beer) books are a necessity for a lot of people, and free (as in speak) book should be the norm, DRM introduce plenty of problem fir thé reader, with not a single added value for the customer.

Obviously you don't respect their wish, but Amazon needs to respect their wish.

forinti2• 9 months ago

From my experience, making it easier to buy books would help.

I pay money and I want to get back a PDF, mobi, epub, or whatever. That's the kind of interaction I would appreciate.

If you have to have a certain software or a certain hardware in order to read the book you've paid for, I'm going to look for alternatives.

worldsavior3• 9 months ago

If you have to have a certain software or a certain hardware in order to read the book you've paid for, I'm going to look for alternatives.

As you should. It was the author's choice to publish on Kindle, and it's completely his fault.

squigz2• 9 months ago

This argument would be more persuasive to me if publishers and stores didn't screw over authors harder than we ever do by pirating their books.

criddell6• 9 months ago

They have no choice but to DRM.

They do have choice in the DRM they choose and how it's implemented. The DRM should expire when copyright protection expires and the DRM should be standardized so that I could move my books anywhere I want and read them on most readers, just like DVD and Blu-Ray disks.

the_af• 9 months ago

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 <thing>", "Why this doesn't work", etc. It matches the tone and style of everything that an LLM spits out at me.

fguerraz2• 9 months ago

This is an excellent starting point, I have just tried it on "The Origins of Totalitarianism" by Hannah Arendt, and maybe it's because of the numerous bibliographical references, or the the occasional diacritics, but the end result is a bit messy and not really readable.

I think a motivated hacker could definitely improve it in no time.

Still amazing that it works at all, really well done.

lofaszvanitt• 9 months ago

Nice writing.

Pay for the book, then pirate it. Problem solved. Same with series and movies.

neuroelectron• 9 months ago

When Amazon sees this what do you think they'll do first, fix the crashing android app or add a new layer of protection on their DRM?

myko• 9 months ago

DRM should be illegal. This shit sucks so much.

pixelmelt5• 9 months ago

Using it against consumers should be anyway, but it sure is fun to make and break it, its the ultimate brain teaser!

hackcasual• 9 months ago

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

pixelmelt5• 9 months ago

Interesting, hadent seen this before, thanks!

jama211• 9 months ago

This was brilliant and entertaining!

sojournerc2• 9 months ago

All this to keep people from owning what they bought. Smh

raudette• 9 months ago

May be of interest to this thread - I created a script that drives the Kindle web reader, captures screenshots, runs OCR, and creates an ePub - this wouldn't be as good as the pixelmelt solution, as it requires OCR.

Overview: https://www.hotelexistence.ca/remove-drm-with-kindleocrer/ (there's a sample conversion at the bottom, so you can see if it works "good enough" for your purposes)

Script: https://github.com/raudette/kindleOCRer

In action: https://youtu.be/3-07wMCKlkw

simpaticoder• 9 months ago

A gentle reminder that physical books are still available, and quite inexpensive when purchased used from, e.g., library book stores or thrift stores. It has no DRM, has a Paper White™ interface, and even has a nice smell and feel. You can loan it, give it, or sell it to any human without hassle or legal risk to yourself or them. You can highlight, add notes ("marginalia"), fold the corner of a page for a bookmark. Over time your copy of a book will accumulate incidental stains and marks, developing an identity of it's own. What's even more remarkable is that you own your copy, and it cannot be remotely changed, deleted, or corrupted or your access revoked.

sbalough• 9 months ago

True, but DRM free books in digital form have a lot more potential utility for non-genius types like myself. Just a good search engine over the text is a huge win before even considering the standard reader features like notes and book marks. With LLMs I can imagine testing my retention of a chapter by asking it where my recollection is wrong or short and having it cite paragraphs in support of its judgement. All of this progress is impeded by the big ebook sellers, but is or will be fulfilled by inde developers at least for those of us that can go to yandex, plug in a title and get a DRM free epub.

KETpXDDzR• 9 months ago

Python SVG libraries create spurious connecting lines

That rather sounds like a bug to me.

I'd try browser automation to get the book pages, then OCR it (or just store them as images).

noisy_boy2• 9 months ago

Thats why I bought an android based e-reader that allows me to install whatever reader, copy files wherever I want and basically be in as much control of my devices as these constraining times allow. I will never be a willing hostage to Amazon's shit.

arendtio• 9 months ago

Since I discovered that sometimes the quality of Amazon ebooks is much inferior to the ebooks directly from the publisher, I don't give a damn about their poor DRM system (security as well as user experience) and just buy directly from the publisher.

johanyc2• 9 months ago

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.

virtualritz• 9 months ago

Does anyone have a clone of the GH repo shared in the original article? It seems to have disappeared from GH.

yencabulator• 9 months ago

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?

soapdog• 9 months ago

and that is one of the reasons why I switched to Kobo.

sjw9873• 9 months ago

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.

How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

Related Stories