3 ms·
I would at least suggest buying a copy (not from Amazon) first, the author deserves a cut IMO and books tend to be relatively cheap. Kobo's store does have DRM,
by EA-3167 2y ago
I would at least suggest buying a copy (not from Amazon) first, the author deserves a cut IMO and books tend to be relatively cheap. Kobo's store does have DRM, but it's easily bypassed by Calibre, or you can buy elsewhere (local is always good if possible) and then pirate an ebook copy.
I think there's an ethical way to both get free use of what should be yours to use, and also support the people who made it.
- lolinder 2y ago> Kobo's store does have DRM, but it's easily bypassed by Calibre See, but that's not actually the same thing as DRM-free. It's adversarial interop that's temporarily allowed to work, but if said interop becomes popular enough the publishers will force Kobo to fix it. At this point I'm really only interested in spending money on books that I can actually own—either physical copies or (where available) fully and legally DRM-free ebooks. I want my purchases to send the right message to publishers: that DRM-free can work.
- shawn_w 2y agoA fair number of the books I've bought for my Kobo are drm free.
- lolinder 2y agoYeah, and that's great! Where that's an option I'll definitely go for it. I'm just uninterested in spending money on a book that has DRM, regardless of how easy it is to bypass. I think it sends the wrong message.
- teemur 2y agoIs there a way to know beforehand if the e-book from Kobo is DRM or not? I thought they were all DRM free, but the last book I bought suddenly was DRM and haven't yet bothered to research (I have a couple of different size e-readers and just copying the file over has been handy.)
- EA-3167 2y agoIf they're DRM free it will be in the description. If you want to get rid of that DRM all you need is Calibre, a plugin called DeDRM... you open the ASCM file in the Adobe Editions program, copy the file from the root folder into Calibre, and that's it. DRM gone.
- EA-3167 2y agoSure, then you can always buy a physical copy and pirate a digital one.
- WolfeReader 2y agoKobo actually offers plenty of DRM-free books too. Google Play Books work the same way as well - either no DRM or Adobe's.
- freshchilled 2y ago> Kobo's store does have DRM, but it's easily bypassed by Calibre I'd say this is the case for Amazon as well, if you have an actual Kindle. I was able to convert my whole library to standard epubs last weekend using Calibre.
- criddell 2y agoYou’re lucky. There are now some KFX protected files that the DeDRM plugins don’t work against. I expect it to get tougher and tougher going forward.
- miki123211 2y agoI suspect it won't end up mattering too much for most people anyway. Eventually, we'll just end up in the same situation as we are now with video DRM; DRM being hard enough to bypass that the methods of doing so will be closely guarded scene secrets, but the output of those methods will hit Z-lib / LibGen / AnnasArchive / all the usual places. The thing with books is that they're small by todays bandwidth and disk capacity standards, so it's really hard to stop their proliferation.
- themadturk 2y agoThis is one of the reasons I ditched Amazon for Kobo a couple of years ago: not only was it getting harder to strip DRM (which I did regularly), but harder to get non-Kindle books onto the device. My Kobo Clara B&W is comparable to a Paperwhite, and I don't miss Amazon or Kindle at all.
- rufus_foreman 2y agoHow were you able to do that? You can still download to USB but that is going away. I'm not aware of any way to convert the files on a recent Kindle to epub, does that exist?
- mfashby 2y agoYeah I believe calibre can pull the files from the kindle as well as push to it. But I've only got an old kindle not a new one.