How To Strip DRM from Kindle E-Books and Others

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/01/how-to-strip-drm-from-kindle-e-books-and-others/

by DanielRibeiro • 14 years ago

317 94 14 years ago

wired.com

cadab• 14 years ago

I found this link to be more helpful, in regards to what plugins to use. (Note for Windows + Kindle)

http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2012/06/15/how-add-kindle-...

zokier• 14 years ago

At least that is 18 months more recent, that should help a bit.

edufernandez• 14 years ago

Any good command line tool for doing this?

atopuzov• 14 years ago

They are included in the tools zip

DanielBMarkham• 14 years ago

I have started going back to real books for any book I might want to keep, loan, or give to a friend when I'm finished. It would be nice not to be screwed over by DRM yet again. I like my Kindle, but it doesn't help me read. It helps Amazon make money. The only thing it does is for me is to help me carry lots of books around easily.

bo10245• 14 years ago

If your books have no DRM, how will DRM screw you over? Isn't that the point of this posting?

DanBC4• 14 years ago

Some people are refusing to pay Amazon (or other providers) for DRMd content - a boycott of anything with DRM.

Some people are not going to break any laws, even if those laws are mostly technical and not going to be enforced. And providing means to remove DRM is more problematic because the law is enforced a bit more rigorously there.

dredmorbius3• 14 years ago

It's not just the books, but the reader.

This is straight Stallman: if you don't fundamentally control your computing environment, you don't own it, and you have no freedoms within it save those granted by the entity that does control that environment.

A Lessig might modify that slightly and say that your freedoms are actually balanced between four influences: Law, Norms, Market, Architecture. In the case of DRMd works on proprietary hardware, law and architecture are both opposed to the rights of the individual. Presumably Amazon responded to social norms and market pressures.

I prefer having more power on my side. It's a key reason I've avoided the e-reader game to date, despite some interest in going there.

travisp• 14 years ago

I somewhat agree. But, I personally vastly prefer the experience of reading on the Kindle to a physical book (instant dictionary definitions, easier on the subway because I can hold on in the subway and still turn pages, the ability to choose my preferred font size and text width which allows me to read faster, and so on). I would pay more to read a book on a Kindle and frequently do (one can often find good quality used paper books for less).

The one thing I don't buy on Kindle are the rare books I expect to want to keep a long time. For everything else, I'm willing to accept that I might somehow lose access or be unable to read it in several years.

doesnt_know2• 14 years ago

Not buying eBooks from suppliers that infest them with DRM doesn't mean not buying eBooks. I love my Kobo reader with all my heart and it has massively increased my consumption of fiction. Just don't support and buy eBooks from suppliers that use DRM.

Baen Books is my favorite for science fiction. (www.baenebooks.com) O'Reilly Media for technical books. (http://shop.oreilly.com/category/ebooks.do) Calibre eBook store. (http://drmfree.calibre-ebook.com/) Project Gutenberg for the classics. (http://www.gutenberg.org/)

There are quite a few more, but I don't want to link them because I haven't personally used them. I'm also hoping DRM-Free eBook bundles catch on (https://www.humblebundle.com/).

If there are books that I "desperately" want to read and can't find them in DRM-Free form, I visit the local library. If the library doesn't have it, I will buy a print version. As long as it isn't a technical reference manual I will use frequently, I then donate it to the library when I'm done with it.

mverwijs• 14 years ago

For all fans of fantasy and science fiction, the dragonmount.com is also a DRM free webshop for ebooks. (I have no affiliation with said site, btw. Just a happy customer).

Samuel3407• 14 years ago

I think you need a good way to resolve this problem. So I recomended you this article.

http://www.epubsoft.com/how-to-remove-drm-from-azw-on-kindle...

ansible2• 14 years ago

Sadly, I would be glad to pay a reasonable price for books without DRM, but my options are still quite limited. I've been waiting patiently for Tor's ebook store to open (promised "by the end of summer 2012"). Baen is fine for a couple genres, but I don't trust Smashwords because of sockpuppet reviews. I don't want to pirate, I am glad to give authors their fair share.

acabal2• 14 years ago

Baen also has a problem with OCR'd text. I downloaded a Greg Bear book from them a few weeks ago and it was clearly OCR'd without a second look towards quality. It had so many typos and spelling errors that it was practically unreadable. I returned it for a refund.

To be fair Amazon also has this problem. It's hard being an ebook consumer when 90% of books either have DRM or are unreadably OCR'd.

ansible2• 14 years ago

I've seen that with a couple books from Smashwords, but I'd expect better from Baen. I think I've only bought books by their regular authors (Weber, Flint, Drake) and I've not had that problem.

bruceboughton• 14 years ago

I've never experienced this with Amazon. Presumably it is a publisher problem, not a retailer problem. What publishers have you experienced this with?

honestcoyote• 14 years ago

I've seen this problem too with Amazon, though only when I first got the Kindle a couple of years ago. I suspect those books date back to when publishers didn't take ebooks seriously. Now that they do, the formatting / spelling errors have mostly vanished.

bduerst6• 14 years ago

I tried doing this with some case studies in graduate school - any open sourced OCR is very difficult to deal with.

Of course, this was a couple years ago. Can anyone recommend a library or API that offers a decent OCR?

vsl• 14 years ago

iBookstore allows publishers to sell books as DRM-free, so Tor books should be OK from it. Subterranean Press' books are DRM-free in iBookstore too.

Unfortunately, other's aren't (I only bought a few books there and it's a 50/50 split so far) and you don't have any way of knowing before buying.

oneandoneis24• 14 years ago

Since I disapprove of Amazon's DRM policy, the only books on my kindle are tech books from O'Reilly (DRM-free) and fiction from Project Gutenburg (DRM-free)

I know I could download ebooks from Amazon and just remove their DRM, but I think it's better to vote with my wallet.

After all, they sell the Kindle at cost and rely on you buying books from them to make any profit. So don't buy their books and maybe they'll learn..

RexRollman2• 14 years ago

Some books on Amazon are DRM free. The publisher is the one who decides if they want to use it.

listic3• 14 years ago

How do you see which books are DRM-free before purchase?

oneandoneis24• 14 years ago

Yeah, but even if they're DRM-free Amazon can still take them away - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4682392

Until they offer a cast-iron, legally-binding guarantee that any ebook I buy from them cannot be taken away from me, they don't get my money.

If I buy a book, it's my book: If the bookshop I bought it from takes it back, then that's theft.

As far as I'm concerned, the same holds true for ebooks. I buy it, it's mine. Period. Until Amazon agrees with me, I don't buy their ebooks. It's that simple.

listic3• 14 years ago

How do you buy DRM-free tech books from O'Reilly?

oneandoneis24• 14 years ago

All O'Reilly ebooks are DRM-free.

http://shop.oreilly.com/category/ebooks.do

DanBC4• 14 years ago

The Wired link adds nothing. They link to (http://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/ebooks-formats...)

stuff4ben• 14 years ago

I wouldn't say that. Wired offered a good synopsis to what apprenticealf's site contains which is all a lot of people want, including me.

bandy• 14 years ago

It add nothing other than exposing Apprentice Alf's blog posting to their large readership - which is more than nothing.

cynwoody2• 14 years ago

I disagree.

Wired's nice little introduction will make more people aware that they don't have to put up with DRM.

Wired's attention will also make it easier to find definitive info on DRM removal. When I'm not looking for anything in particular, I look at sites like Wired. But when I want to know how to do something specific, I go straight to Google. And Wired's story will boost Apprentice Alf's search ranking, making the solution that much easier to find for folks tired of DRM.

DanBC4• 14 years ago

"The Wired link adds no value for the readers of HN, apart from a tl;dr".

RexRollman2• 14 years ago

The real problem is there is nothing that requires companies to provide continued access to DRM-encumbered media; they can turn it off whenever they want.

In my opinion, if a company can't or won't provide a way for a customer to access their purchased files, then they should be required by law to provide a way for the customer to un-DRM those files.

jiggy2011• 14 years ago

I would think that the problem is that one of the reasons people like Amazon want to use DRM is to ensure that no DRM free copies of the media exist. One DRM-free copy can multiply into 1 million DRM free copies very quickly.

Of course in reality this is laughably unworkable unless they release a future version of the kindle which requires DRMd media.

dredmorbius3• 14 years ago

And that's happened. Several times. One that comes to mind was a Microsoft product, though I know there've been others.

Does anyone know of an "orphaned DRM systems" list somewhere?

Another, from Yahoo: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07...

danso2• 14 years ago

Does removing the DRM also remove the highlight tracking/syncing provided by Amazon? If so, that'd be a deal breaker for me to use this other than as last resort backups

fab13n• 14 years ago

No it doesn't. You reload DRM-stripped books on the device, as if it had never been bought from Amazon.

Don't forget that DRMs aren't here to save Amazon from piracy. Today and for the next couple of years, what they really care about is securing a dominant position. So the DRM security only needs to be good enough to reassure clueless edition managers, who believe that DRM will help their business rather than hurt it. So they have no incentive to get out of their way to bug DRM-stripping customers (in light of which, I'd guess some of the morons who handled Linn Nygaard's case will be fired, and deservedly so).

Same as iTunes DRM actually, which Apple ended up discarding once they were in a position to tell the music editor to just shut up.

danso2• 14 years ago

> No it doesn't. You reload DRM-stripped books on the device, as if it had never been bought from Amazon.

Yeah that's the issue...From what I can tell, Amazon differentiates between both and I imagine that would affect how its central database of highlights/bookmarkings keeps track of each individual book. I suppose this would affect you only if you were highlighting a DRM book and then stripped the DRM...which I guess is mostly an edge case.

Kadin• 14 years ago

My expectation has always been that if I loaded a book back onto the device after stripping the DRM, it would appear as a different book to the Kindle than the original. I doubt that highlighting and page synchronization will work.

So, yes, the main purpose of DRM stripping -- at least for me -- is as part of backing the books up into my Calibre collection. I don't bother to copy the stripped copies back onto my Kindle, there's just not any compelling reason to.

2mur• 14 years ago

No.

You need to have a unique ID set in the header. You can do this in calibre.

Specifically, a unique 4 byte character sequence at the 32 byte offset in the header (MOBI header). See: http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/MOBI

If that's set (easy in calibre), you will sync across your devices.

extesy• 14 years ago

Can you provide more details? Assuming I have some random AZW3 book and calibre - how to correctly upload it back to Kindle and not lose that unique ID along the way?

CookWithMe• 14 years ago

He publicly admitted that he cracks his ebooks. IANAL, but his missteps would be much easier to proof in court, compared to the case of the Norwegian kindle user.

But for some reason, I strongly doubt Amazon will ban him...

tspiteri• 14 years ago

But for some reason, I strongly doubt Amazon will ban him...

And the point is that even if they ban him and try to delete his library, they will fail because he has backups without DRM.

zurn2• 14 years ago

Why would he end up in court?

Derbasti• 14 years ago

Frankly, I don't care about DRM for fiction. I generally only read fiction once, anyway (and donate the paper book afterwards).

For technical books it's a different story, but then the Kindle is not a medium that works well for diagrams and special formatting that you would expect in technical writing.

So in the end, Kindle DRM does not hurt me much. Then again, it is so easy to strip that I think Amazon does not care, either. It's just a pacifier for publishers.

aik• 14 years ago

There's a 3rd category: non-fiction that doesn't necessarily require diagrams. For this category, ebooks are great in the sense that I can add highlighting and notes very easily. For me this is the largest category of books and so DRM scares me. It also scares me that the highlights and notes are not owned by me. I wonder if I can somehow retrieve all of them?

makmanalp• 14 years ago

All you lawyers: Is removing / tampering with Kindle DRM legal in this case? Considering we bought the material?

bduerst6• 14 years ago

It all comes down to the end user agreement you agree to when purchasing the ebook. Content providers are within their right to define how they want their copyrighted works to be used - though a judge could potentially throw out the end user agreement in court.

So, if Amazon stipulates that you should not tamper with or remove the DRM from the ebook, it's a violation of your purchase agreement if you do.

Basically, you agree to not remove the DRM when you pay them for their content. The only legal alternative is to not buy from them.

shmerl3• 14 years ago

EULAs can't override laws. Even if you break the EULA for legitimate purpose - you aren't necessarily breaking any laws.

shmerl3• 14 years ago

It should be legal per fair use. But this is gray area. Logic wise - it should be 100% legal. But laws are often broken and stuff like DMCA is really messy.

rammark• 14 years ago

I am not a lawyer, but I do know a little bit about DRM. I believe the DMCA makes cracking all forms of DRM illegal except in certain cases which are outlined by the Library of Congress every three years. The last time the exceptions were updated was July 2010 [1], so they will be up for review again in 2013. If I'm interpreting the current guidelines correctly, you can only crack ebook DRM if it is preventing you from using text-to-speech (presumably for blind people or people with poor eyesight).

incision• 14 years ago

I've always just sort of tolerated the Kindle.

Lately I've been doing most of my reading via Safari. I pay for the "library" level plan and feel it's worth every penny, in spite of the horrendous mobile app. Every few months, I spend Safari token on an ePub copy of something particularly good.

I'd like to see all publishers offer the option to purchase a print + DRM-free digital copy for not much more than print alone just as O'Reilly and Pearson do today.

runjake• 14 years ago

This is from 2011 and hugely outdated. As far as I'm aware, the newer Topaz Kindle format hasn't been cracked and thus the DRM cannot be stripped. It's been a long time since I've bought a book that wasn't Topaz-imprisoned.

zzzmarcus• 14 years ago

It still works. I can verify that from having seen it done first hand as recently as yesterday.

lemming• 14 years ago

This is not true. Topaz is a scanned, PDF like format that Amazon uses for older books where for whatever reason they can't get a digital copy. While it's true that Topaz books can't have the DRM easily removed, only around 5% of Amazon's books are in this format.

ixacto• 14 years ago

http://thepiratebay.se/browse/601 + a spiral binder + a laser printer.

Knowledge should be free.

gizmo6863• 14 years ago

With respect to the conversations about the legality of stripping the DRM from e-books (in the USA). I just looked up the Librian of Congress's 2010 DMCA statement, where it is stated that one of the classes works which qualify for exception from the no disabling DRM clause of the DMCA is:

"Literary works distributed in ebook format when all existing ebook editions of the work (including digital text editions made available by authorized entities) contain access controls that prevent the enabling either of the book’s read-aloud function or of screen readers that render the text into a specialized format."

I suspect that it is in error, but this excemption does not specify that the reason for disabling DRM is to use it for one of the mentioned purposes, only that stripping DRM would be nessasary for the mentioned purposes. The lack of enforcement probably makes this a moot point, but if all of a e-book's versions have DRM, and you get in trouble for stripping the DRM off, this would probably hold up as a solid technicality.

Granted, it is still illegal to distribute software designed to aid people in lawfully stripping DRM from e-books.

How To Strip DRM from Kindle E-Books and Others

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