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How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

• krbaccord94f 1y 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.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• AdmiralAsshat 1y ago
  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.
  • Forgeties79 1y 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
    • AdmiralAsshat 1y 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.
      • Forgeties79 1y ago
        My bad I should’ve clarified this wasn’t meant to be a specific solution to the Kindle problem so much as an available option for the future!
    • makeitdouble 1y 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.
      • tripzilch 1y ago
        > the Amazon kindle store is currently the absolute best way to grab foreign ebooks wherever you live on the globe No, piracy is.
        • makeitdouble 1y ago
          As much as I also want that narrative to be true, the amount of books that will never be pirated for whatever reason is just massive.
  • boldlybold 1y 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?
    • gruez 1y 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.
      • rs186 1y ago
        If you can live with lower quality image. Most people probably will be ok with that though.
        • makeitdouble 1y ago
          It will depend on the books, but the images aren't that high resolution in general. I've had some slightly blurry on 2.8x1.9k screens, especially the older ones.
        • nicman23 1y ago
          you just tell puppeteer to change resolution
  • pixelmelt 1y ago
    I haven't gotten images working yet, they have some weird obfuscation applied to them as well
• brendang_sd 1y ago
  I always love a story of anger based (reverse)engineering.
  • javchz 1y ago
    Spite is an underated productivity tool.
    • Teknomadix 1y ago
      My new T-shirt
    • WD-42 1y 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 1y ago
    aka "Hate driven development"
    • josfredo 1y ago
      The best kind there is!
• ZebusJesus 1y ago
  Well done!
• wredcoll 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
    • ath3nd 1y ago
      [dead]
    • radley 1y 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.
• sointeresting 1y ago
  I bypassed it by buying a Kobo.
  • EA-3167 1y 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 1y 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.
  • bix6 1y ago
    Does Kobo work with the Libby app?
    • sointeresting 1y ago
      I believe so, haven't tried it myself.
    • shortrounddev2 1y ago
      Yes, my wife uses it all the time
    • rufo 1y ago
      Even better than a Kindle - library browsing is built-in to the device.
      • bix6 1y ago
        O wow I love that! So tired of Jeff I think I’ll switch.
• Retr0id 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • ethmarks 1y ago
    It's extra distracting because it doesn't even read like normal LLM prose, but it's close enough to feel off. The frequent use of bold emphasis, lists, and subject-only rhetorical questions ("Those tiny m3,1 m1,6 m-4,-7 commands? They're micro-MoveTo operations.") are classic LLM-speak, but they're used in such a way that makes me doubt that OP actually used an LLM to write this. I think that OP's natural prose just happens to be stylistically pretty similar to that of an LLM. It's kind of sad that what were once signs of high effort and dedication (e.g. em-dashes) are now signs of low effort and dishonesty, despite the fact that people still use them in human writing.
    • Wowfunhappy 1y ago
      Fwiw I do think this was written by an LLM. It may have been cleaned up manually afterwards (but not that much).
    • blharr 1y ago
      I really doubt they just happen to sound like an LLM. My guess is that they wrote in combination with LLM output, so they didn't copy/paste from a single prompt step, and did a good job of putting their own motive and ideas in the blog, but ultimately the AI tone still penetrates through
• boldlybold 1y ago
  This is a beautiful solution to a tedious problem that shouldn't exist in the first place! Great work.
• harshreality 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
      • wffurr 1y ago
        Then I have a physical book to deal with.
        • supportengineer 1y ago
          The horror!
          • Hackbraten 1y ago
• 3abiton 1y ago
  I could feel the anger of the author oozing through the writing. Great work!
• layer8 1y 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.
  • harshreality 1y 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.
    • layer8 1y 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 1y 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.
• wkat4242 1y 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 1y 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.
  • mikkupikku 1y 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.
    • wkat4242 1y 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.
  • aidenn0 1y ago
    I will have to look into kavita; I already use koreader for my reading.
    • wkat4242 1y 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.
  • 1y ago
• clumsysmurf 1y 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 1y ago
  Your intention doesn’t matter to the shareholders. Straight to jail.
  • jojobas 1y ago
    Yeah I hope his opsec is good.
• lloydjones 1y ago
  I’ve been using https://readest.com https://readest.com and very much enjoying it. I just wish there were a “lifetime purchase” option.
  • mr_sturd 1y 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 1y 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...
    • lloydjones 1y 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.
    • lloydjones 1y ago
      To be clear: I am currently _not_ paying for it; I can just foresee a day where I'd have to.
• emptybits 1y 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."
  • bityard 1y 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 1y 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.
      • sojournerc 1y ago
        More than that, I know every bolt is tight, every piece is inspected, and it connects me to the machine. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, if you haven't read it
    • jakogut 1y 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 1y ago
      I hate not understanding things. I hate pricing that I do not understand.
• chmod775 1y 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.
  • pmarreck 1y ago
    Followed the same path. At least Steve Jobs understood how DRM should work.
  • leshenka 1y 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
    • benregenspan 1y ago
      Bookshop.org is supposed to implement Kobo support sometime this year, getting a Kobo if that happens.
      • askvictor 1y ago
        What does 'Kobo support' mean? Anyone can publish an epub, which a Kobo can read. Are you talking integration into the Kobo store?
        • ldavison 1y ago
          The DRM free books they sell work just fine. Ones with DRM must currently be read using their mobile or web apps. Their FAQ mentions their plans to support Kobo in the future. https://bookshop.org/info/ebooks#EBOOKFAQ https://bookshop.org/info/ebooks#EBOOKFAQ
      • fletchowns 1y ago
        I liked the idea of Bookshop.org but I was surprised when I ordered something from it, it shipped from somewhere 2,000 miles away from me. I had the misunderstanding it was going to ship from a local bookshop that was actually local to me.
• semiquaver 1y 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 1y 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.
  • professorseth 1y 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 1y ago
      Still a DMCA violation to break, though.
      • MarsIronPI 1y ago
        This is why the DMCA needs to die. It's absolutely ridiculous.
    • ash_091 1y 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.
      • professorseth 1y ago
• SeanAnderson 1y ago
  @op there's a typo: "You can now download the books you own books with my code" second books seems erroneous
  • pixelmelt 1y ago
    Fixed!
• rkagerer 1y 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_ 1y 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.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• Night_Thastus 1y 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 1y 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.
• hamonrye 1y ago
  [dead]
• soorya3 1y 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.
  • martin82 1y 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.
• professorseth 1y 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!
  • pixelmelt 1y ago
    That's amazing! Well done, it was a fun challenge
  • fguerraz 1y 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 1y ago
  How do you actually use the code? There is no readme.
• lifter3101 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
    I think a lot of it is due to people just not liking Amazon.
  • pipe01 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
• ggm 1y 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.
• anonymousiam 1y 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-set-for-march-2002 https://linuxsecurity.com/news/government/sklyarov-hearing-s... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd.
• sohkamyung 1y ago
  For reference, Libreture maintains a list of non-DRM bookshops [1]. [1] https://libreture.com/bookshops/ https://libreture.com/bookshops/
  • martin82 1y 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.
• dannyobrien 1y 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-uses-and-other-speech-violates-first-amendment-eff-argues https://www.eff.org/press/releases/licensing-scheme-fair-use...
  • semiquaver 1y 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 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_rider 1y 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.
      • 1y ago
• kwar13 1y 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.
• bariumbitmap 1y 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#post4516384 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/2395 https://github.com/apprenticeharper/DeDRM_tools/discussions/...
  • professorseth 1y 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)
    • torton 1y 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.
      • sjw987 1y ago
        Dropping in popularity, but not relevance. Reading is still a completely different thing from a book, a stream of consciousness between a writer and a reader, than it is reading in almost any other format. The way we read online from websites and apps is changing how our brains work and how we process text for information (not for the better). We're slowly becoming like the look-up tools that we use in Google and other search engines and LLM agents. The best way for many chronically online dopamine fried people today to revert their brain back to some normality would be for them to read books and to fight through the distractions as they read.
• paulcole 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
  The Github repo (which was working for me until 5 mins ago) just 404'ed. https://github.com/PixelMelt/amazon_book_downloader https://github.com/PixelMelt/amazon_book_downloader Kind of expected, but I was surprised at how quick that was.
  • rkagerer 1y ago
    Amazon engineers [who are in a senior enough position to care] read HN too.
  • jonas21 1y 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 1y 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.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • alcide 1y ago
    Does a GitHub archive exist? It sure is something to see code ebb and flow at the whims of the few.
    • pabs3 1y ago
      Software Heritage attempts to archive all of GitHub (not there yet) and various other code sites: https://archive.softwareheritage.org/ https://archive.softwareheritage.org/ https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Software_Heritage https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Software_Heritage
• ebb_earl_co 1y ago
  Did anyone clone this? It’s 404 on GitHub now
  • Fnoord 1y ago
    Possibly https://github.com/gudvardur/amazon_book_downloader https://github.com/gudvardur/amazon_book_downloader I did not verify.
• WalterBright 1y 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 1y 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!
  • sphars 1y 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/ https://kindlemodding.org/
    • WalterBright 1y 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.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• october8140 1y ago
  Buy a Kobo and you no longer have to deal with Amazon.
• nchmy 1y ago
  Off to the gulag with you!
• jerrygoyal 1y ago
  or you can extract book (kfx) from the Android kindle app location and run DeDRM via Calibre.
• notpushkin 1y ago
  Wait, does this (absolutely ridiculous) DRM completely fuck up screen readers?
  • professorseth 1y 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.
    • notpushkin 1y 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!
      • professorseth 1y ago
        Ya, your reasoning about why the text-only version was ok is what I heard as well. As far as people being on board with this--I did not have to push it through, it was a task that management wanted done that I happily did, because I could see the value of it. Amazon actually does a really good job with accessibility across all their products. When I was there, they had at least 2 full time employees (1 Product manager and 1 Quality assurance engineer) whose full time job was just accessibility, across all Kindle platforms and I heard the intention was to grow that team as I was leaving. They had an entire team working on accessibility for the retail website, from what I heard (though I only met one or two of those people). However, there still was a sentiment among certain engineers that worrying about accessibility was a waste of time because it only helps a small section of the population. Thankfully Web accessibility (both in standards and in culture) has come a long way in the last 8-10 years, and I think a lot more people believe in its importance now that they did back in 2017 when I started working on this.
• AnonC 1y 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 1y 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.
• UltraSane 1y ago
  Any book DRM is easy to defeat now that OCR is so good. Just automate screenshotting and OCRing every page.
  • aidenn0 1y ago
    Have you tried this? I think you'll find OCR (at least free OCR) isn't as good as you think it is.
    • UltraSane 1y 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.
• thayne 1y 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 1y 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.
  • latexr 1y 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_blind 1y 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.
      • latexr 1y ago
        > 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. Good luck proving that in court without reasonable doubt. Look at the image again. It’s extremely vague about what you are in fact buying. https://blog.pixelmelt.dev/content/images/2025/10/image.png https://blog.pixelmelt.dev/content/images/2025/10/image.png
        • reassess_blind 1y ago
          Whether it’s correct, and whether you can argue it in court against a multi-trillion dollar company’s legal team are indeed two very different things. I wouldn’t be confident in court, but I would be confident that most users expect that ebooks they “bought” in the past could be viewed on their new Kobo eBook reader.
• FloatArtifact 1y ago
  Amazon modifies books without authors consent. https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Amazon_altering_the_content_of_purchased_ebooks https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Amazon_altering_the_content_of...
  • boobsbr 1y ago
    Very scummy.
• polar_1911 1y ago
  If anyone cloned the code from github before it got taken down, please preserve it forever by publishing it in a crypto blockchain.
  • SanjayMehta 1y 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/ https://github.com/gudvardur/
• rana762 1y ago
  [dead]
• transitivebs 1y ago
  an alternate to exporting kindle ebooks: https://github.com/transitive-bullshit/kindle-ai-export https://github.com/transitive-bullshit/kindle-ai-export
  • Hackbraten 1y ago
    Not sure I want to trust an LLM with a bulk transcription task that I want to be 100% faithful.
• SamDc73 1y 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?
  • criddell 1y ago
    Some of us here avoid BOOX devices because of their history of GPL violations.
• classified 1y ago
  Holy fuck. The depravity of enshittification knows no bounds. I consider myself warned and will never buy anything Kindle.
• mcv 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
  I can't wait for Kovid Goyal to figure this out and get Calibre back to fucking with Amazon.
• necovek 1y 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?
  • edent 1y ago
    You can copy and paste text from it. But you get no formatting, paragraph breaks, etc.
    • necovek 1y ago
      That means it could be used to extract some text to map to glyphs, right?
      • edent 1y ago
        Possibly. But given that the font is known, I think plain OCR might be a better bet.
• teekert 1y 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-TK 1y ago
    Adobe DRM is relatively easy to strip. It's my go-to fallback when I can't find a DRM-free purchase somewhere.
  • bityard 1y 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 1y 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.
• nlitsme 1y 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 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 https://github.com/github/dmca
  • mikevm 1y ago
    [dead]
• yard2010 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
  Based, bamf'd and extremely goat'd
• molszanski 1y ago
  I’ve stopped buying any books that have that kind of a DRM. Kindle / audible apps are horrible
• arnejenssen 1y 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 1y ago
  Love what people do out of spite sometimes. Well done.
• wosined 1y ago
  Based glyph wizard.
• edent 1y 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.
• nlitsme 1y ago
  Did anyone note that there is no cryptography involved in this way of extracting book contents?
• zahirbmirza 1y ago
  Does any one else remember when they remotely deleted 1984 from people's devices due to... 'copyright issues'
• PostOnce 1y 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 1y 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.
  • basilikum 1y 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 1y 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.
      • Random09 1y ago
        An alternative is to go a library, rent a book, scan it and read on a reader. You are getting the book for free without supporting greedy drm shops. Btw, in Poland where I live, every ebook shop sells drm free books. Every single one. Why? Amazon don't sell polish books, yet kindles for the long time were the only readers available, so people had to use a cable to transfer the books. And kindle can't read any other drm than their own. So shops had no choice and it stayed that way. So maybe a third option (not really but maybe?) is to buy polish version and use Ai to translate it?
• Arch-TK 1y 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 1y ago
    How do you get the feeling this is AI-generated? Because of the many bullet points?
    • Arch-TK 1y 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.
• anentropic 1y 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 1y 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.
    • sphars 1y 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-and-transfer-on-the-kindle-feb-26th https://goodereader.com/blog/kindle/amazon-removing-download...
    • anentropic 1y 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.
  • squigz 1y 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://koreader.rocks/ https://github.com/joshuacant/ProjectTitle https://github.com/joshuacant/ProjectTitle
• worldsavior 1y 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 1y 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-t 1y 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.
    • worldsavior 1y 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.
  • forinti 1y 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.
• the_af 1y 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.
• fguerraz 1y 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 1y ago
  Nice writing. Pay for the book, then pirate it. Problem solved. Same with series and movies.
• neuroelectron 1y 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 1y ago
  DRM should be illegal. This shit sucks so much.
  • pixelmelt 1y ago
    Using it against consumers should be anyway, but it sure is fun to make and break it, its the ultimate brain teaser!
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• 123sereusername 1y ago
  [dead]
• hackcasual 1y 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 https://patents.google.com/patent/US8700991B1
  • pixelmelt 1y ago
    Interesting, hadent seen this before, thanks!
• jama211 1y ago
  This was brilliant and entertaining!
• sojournerc 1y ago
  All this to keep people from owning what they bought. Smh
• raudette 1y 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/ 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 https://github.com/raudette/kindleOCRer In action: https://youtu.be/3-07wMCKlkw https://youtu.be/3-07wMCKlkw
• simpaticoder 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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_boy 1y 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 1y 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.
• johanyc 1y 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 1y ago
  Does anyone have a clone of the GH repo shared in the original article? It seems to have disappeared from GH.
• yencabulator 1y 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 1y ago
  and that is one of the reasons why I switched to Kobo.
• sjw987 1y 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.