Not my use-case. I have roughly 250 legitimately purchased graphic novels and manga purchased from Amazon over the years that I&#x27;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.

Slightly off-topic, but while we&#x27;re at it: for all it&#x27;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&#x2F;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&#x27;s digital goods so you can also fill in any random address if needed.

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

If all you need is an image, can&#x27;t you just use browser automation tools to screenshot each page? After all, much of the content is in images so it&#x27;s not like you need it OCRed for accessibility purposes.

Comics need a full &quot;image&quot; 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?

I haven&#x27;t gotten images working yet, they have some weird obfuscation applied to them as well

I don&#x27;t suppose this is going to work well with their comics&#x2F;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&#x27;s acquisition of Comixology means they&#x27;ve still got by far the best collection of digital comics on the market.

I&#x27;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.

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

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.

I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t sync the &quot;last read&quot; bookmarks until you open a book. But since that book didn&#x27;t have a bookmark, it&#x27;s reset to the beginning and then synced, so my &quot;last read&quot; bookmark is now at the beginning.

The reading experience is fine on Kindle. Or at least it was the last time I used it. My main problem is how they&#x27;ve locked down the DRM. I was on Kindle for a very long time and didn&#x27;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&#x27;s all changed now. I&#x27;d love to know why it&#x27;s changed. My first thought was publisher pressure. But Kobo hasn&#x27;t implemented harsh measures. Just Amazon has.At any rate, I&#x27;m now using Kobo for my reading. Easy to break DRM. And they don&#x27;t assume the same level of control over Kobo ereaders the way Amazon does with Kindle. I have over a thousand ebooks. I&#x27;m able to tag books in Calibre, and those tags automatically show up as Collections on the Kobo. It&#x27;s a simple thing, but Amazon never gave me such flexibility. Makes a huge difference for me.It&#x27;s also possible to alter Kobo&#x27;s UI&#x2F;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&#x27;s such a breath of fresh air compared to how Kindle is locked down.

Because I don&#x27;t own a kindle nor am I willing to use their app.I&#x27;m either old and stubborn or principled, but I want to use my current phone and &quot;system&quot; I&#x27;ve been using to read ebooks for the last 15 years.(It&#x27;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)

Genuinely curious to hear why you think they make it harder and harder to read books? I&#x27;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&#x27;ve never experienced issues with them that break the reading experience. The one issue I occasionally run into is that the book progress doesn&#x27;t sync when I open the app and I have to click &quot;sync now&quot; which sometimes is blazingly fast and sometimes takes like a minute.I can&#x27;t imagine migrating away from Kindle now, it&#x27;s probably one of my favourite devices and the Kindle is my favourite way to read.

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

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

&gt; In general, if I don’t have to pay someone to produce something I can provide a better experience to my customersAmazon theoretically makes money with which they pay people to make the user experience good.Pirates have... a few nerds with some spare time?

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.

I personally have bought many fewer books over the last couple of years, from amazon, as they&#x27;ve made it harder and harder to, you know, read the books I&#x27;ve paid for.Pirating books is not hard. They&#x27;re probably the smallest possible thing that people are interested in copying with the broadest variation in acceptable formats.I know I&#x27;m screaming into the void, but if I&#x27;m paying real money why is the experience from piracy sites better?

I appreciate the author&#x27;s work, and they&#x27;re absolutely right about the Kindle app. I&#x27;m with you though, I don&#x27;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&#x27;t want to reward Amazon for being aggressively anti-consumer by spending money on their site, at least not for this.

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.

I believe so, haven&#x27;t tried it myself.

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

When I said &quot;bypass&quot;, 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&#x27;ve been on a classics kick and I pirate them tbh. Dumas doesn&#x27;t mind.

I&#x27;m an owner of a Kobo, how did you do that?When I tried, the only options from Amazon were &#x27;transfer to my device&#x27; 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.

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&#x27;s very convenient.  Prior to choosing an e-reader, I took one glance at Amazon&#x27;s DRM-laden offerings and noped out from that ecosystem completely.

This is a beautiful solution to a tedious problem that shouldn&#x27;t exist in the first place! Great work.

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.

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.

For those with an old Kindle, couldn&#x27;t you download it onto the Kindle and then pull it off of there via USB?

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&#x27;t need the money.

The thing that killed the download -&gt; crack DRM workflow is that Amazon removed the &quot;download and transfer via USB&quot; option. I haven&#x27;t bought an ebook from Amazon since.The only viable option would be to buy the book and then pirate a de-DRM&#x27;d copy.

That&#x27;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.

Apparently this method bypasses that issue:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techy-notes.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;dedrm-v10-0-14-tutorial" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techy-notes.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;dedrm-v10-0-14-tutorial</a>

It will handle downloads for older versions of the PC app, but the supported version won&#x27;t download any books released after April 2025.

I just paid for it, downloaded the kindle app, and dragged the .awz8 file and it says it doesn&#x27;t support the format!

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

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&#x27;s the world we live in.

I don&#x27;t know what state it&#x27;s in (haven&#x27;t used it in years), but do apprenticealf&#x27;s DeDRM tools, which has been forked to nodrm&#x2F;DeDRM_tools, still handle kindle PC app downloads? Tinkering with old versions of the PC app might work even if the current version doesn&#x27;t, and there&#x27;s a registry hack to disable kfx downloading and get azw3 instead, which worked at some point... it&#x27;s outlined in apprenticealf&#x27;s DeDRM repo, at the wiki link provided at the top of the repo&#x27;s README, in the short section saying it&#x27;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&#x27;s DRM rather than giving up on the Amazon ebook ecosystem entirely.

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

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.

Do the ebooks you&#x27;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.

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.

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&#x27;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.

Since the last major jailbreak for Kindle devices was released, I&#x27;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&#x27;t seem to be well geared to my interests at this point, but hopefully that&#x27;ll change in the future as more use the service.

Yeah I&#x27;m not saying to buy a kindle to use KOReader. I just had the kindles and didn&#x27;t really want to get rid of them, it saved me having to buy new hardware.

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.

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.

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

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&#x27;re into that sort of thing.

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

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&#x27;t really lose functionality.

I have the same problem with O&#x27;Reilly &#x2F; Safari ... I don&#x27;t enjoy using the apps and find they get in the way of the reading experience, plus it&#x27;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 &#x2F; borked.But there were plenty of other bugs like bookshelf management getting corrupted.

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

Looks nice.  Shame it doesn&#x27;t have OPDS support, but it&#x27;s nice to see that it&#x27;s a planned feature in their GitHub README!

There&#x27;s a cloud-based sync service (500mb of books; 10k translation chars). I&#x27;m currently storing 24 books (as I haven&#x27;t moved them all across from the Kindle app yet) and I&#x27;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&#x27;s monetisation model, you could.

To be clear: I am currently _not_ paying for it; I can just foresee a day where I&#x27;d have to.

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&#x27;t entirely free, this send pretty misleading...

I’ve been using <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;readest.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;readest.com</a> and very much enjoying it. I just wish there were a “lifetime purchase” option.

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

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&#x27;s not to say professionals can&#x27;t or won&#x27;t do the job better, or that they don&#x27;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.

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

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.

This is essentially how I find myself defending a lot of my DIY stuff.&quot;Wait, you work in tech, why would you ever work on your own car when you can clearly pay someone else to do it???&quot;Because I like to learn things.

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.

I hope they don&#x27;t get in trouble for publicising how to defeat the DRM...

Well, it would be nice to be able to use my Kindle 4 again... Thanks to KOReader, it&#x27;s no longer a brick, but most of my ebooks are kept hostages at Amazon.

Hell hath no fury like an engineer angered! This was such a good read and epitomizes hacking:&quot;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.&quot;

Followed the same path.At least Steve Jobs understood how DRM should work.

Kobo&#x27;s pretty good. Anything to avoid Kindle books.

Calibre handles kindle too (if you already have that). You &quot;obtain&quot; 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.

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

Most Kobo books have DRM. There are a few publishers (TOR) and authors that are DRM free, but most of books I&#x27;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.

It&#x27;s a little less user friendly but I really like my Boox tablet because it&#x27;s a full android device.I run Storyteller app on it and have my ebooks &amp; audiobooks synced up perfectly like whispersync but better.

that&#x27;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&#x27;m buying a kobo

There has been a 50% proof of concept, 50% art project by an Austrian university professor to a similar extent:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;DIY_Kindle_Scanner" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;DIY_Kindle_Scanner</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;73675285" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;73675285</a>

Eventually those physical book scanning cameras are going to be used to read&#x2F;scan DRM locked ebooks.

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

I have more than 100 books that I bought with actual money on Apple&#x27;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&#x27;t. I&#x27;m all for supporting authors and the various editors, etc., but I feel like I&#x27;ve already done that in this case.

&gt;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&#x27;ve been downloading every book whose title I see mentioned anywhere. I&#x27;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?

The issue wasn&#x27;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.

&gt; 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.

&gt; 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.

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.

The stormlight archive isn&#x27;t a representative example because:- Brandon Sanderson&#x27;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.

If you read GP&#x27;s post closely, they&#x27;re saying that the value to cost ratio is 0 due to Amazon&#x27;s new DRM. Did you mean to reply to some other thread?

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.

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

i&#x27;m gonna argue that video games can be better cost to value ratio.

&gt; 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&#x27;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$&#x2F;month expenses.

I&#x27;m more than happy to pay for DRM free epubs.  I won&#x27;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&#x27;t be answerable for it.

&gt; 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.

I buy a lot of books from used book stores. Fundamentally I&#x27;m only paying for the paper it&#x27;s printed on as none of those fat proceeds($3.99 paperback) ever reach the publisher. Totally cool and legal.When I&#x27;m following a new book that&#x27;s coming out, I&#x27;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&#x27;t do that with an ebook. And if I can&#x27;t comfortably read the oversized print copy, I&#x27;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&#x27;re just uncomfortable to read. I took a copy of &quot;Death&#x27;s End&quot; and a copy of &quot;Thinking in Jazz&quot; 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&#x27;re so important as to take up two seats on the plane? Bring back smaller mass market formfactors ffs and I&#x27;ll pay full price for their bullshit.Publishing companies are making their products worse and worse to consume. As Gabe Newel says, it&#x27;s a distribution problem.

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&#x27;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.

If at all possible, find a local independent book store and buy from there. If they don&#x27;t have it in stock, often they&#x27;ll order it for you.I have one that&#x27;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&#x27;ve got a good sized family), but these days that&#x27;s about what it would cost to go to a movie. And since you have a physical book, you can swap when you&#x27;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&#x27;s a great excuse to hit the book store.

The issue is that you usually aren&#x27;t buying the ebook. You are buying a license to access that ebook and they can revoke that license at any time. Maybe you&#x27;re okay with that, but many people want to permanently have access to the things they purchased.

If you&#x27;re going to just borrow it from a library, then why not just pirate it? The author&#x2F;publisher isn&#x27;t getting paid in either case, and libraries are 1000x less convenient than pirating.

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&#x27;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&#x27;s over 100 hours of entertainment. It&#x27;s literally a ratio of 10 CENTS per hour of entertainment.

I&#x27;d rather donate money directly to the author. I will not under any circumstance still reward Amazon for what they&#x27;re doing.

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&#x2F;publisher gatekeepers.

&gt; 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&#x27;re not using the exact same file to read it. As the other commenter said, books are extremely cheap relative to the value and&#x2F;or entertainment time they provide.

Unfortunately they did close that loophole recently. :(

You could still use an older version of the app to force getting a book with the older DRM.I haven&#x27;t done that in a while though, so I&#x27;m not sure if they closed that loophole.

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.

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)

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&#x27;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.

Some books are available to buy DRM-free if you search a little - sometimes from the publisher or the Kobo store. It&#x27;s also just possible to buy a book and also download a pirated copy. You&#x27;re not just hurting Amazon, you&#x27;re hurting the author and I don&#x27;t think we want to encourage a world where no one writes books because its impossible to get paid for them.

You may not like a product or service, or think it&#x27;s too expensive, but that doesn&#x27;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.

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&#x27;s for titles April 2025 or later

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.

&gt; 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.

&gt; we just didn&#x27;t care. Upper management seemed happy enoughThis 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.

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

It kind of makes sense. It&#x27;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

But you still did it. With awful consequences discussed in this thread. Couldn&#x27;t you have done less about it ?Do you tell yourself &quot;well if I hadn&#x27;t, the next person would&#x27;ve&quot; ?Did they force you to do it, then ? Was it worth it ?

I was on the team that wrote this code.We knew it was reverse-engineerable, we just didn&#x27;t care.Upper management seemed happy enough that it was pretty obfuscated, and we were happy that they didn&#x27;t force us to do more about it.

What are you talking about? Rotating glyphs is like... the ORIGINAL encryption.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cryptii.com&#x2F;pipes&#x2F;caesar-cipher" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cryptii.com&#x2F;pipes&#x2F;caesar-cipher</a>

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.

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.

@op there&#x27;s a typo: &quot;You can now download the books you own books with my code&quot;second books seems erroneous

Don&#x27;t stop there!  If Amazon sues you, demand a jury trial and win a carve-out making it legal to unlock DRM you own.

&gt;I paid money for this book
&gt;I can only read it in Amazon&#x27;s broken app
&gt;I can&#x27;t download it
&gt;I can&#x27;t back it up
&gt;I don&#x27;t actually own it
&gt;Amazon can delete it whenever they wantgood that you didn&#x27;t read the terms of amazon&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x2F;drm&#x2F;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.

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.

I hate Amazon&#x27;s decision to do this. It doesn&#x27;t even make business sense. You can&#x27;t tell me they&#x27;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.

I live in unbelievably hot and humid Singapore and buying physical books is essentially &quot;not possible&quot;. Unless I blast the AC in my house 24&#x2F;7, all books will eventually succumb to mould.

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.

That&#x27;s amazing! Well done, it was a fun challenge

I don&#x27;t think its dumb from a business point of view. You&#x27;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.

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!

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

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&#x2F;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.

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

It&#x27;s a much more open reader, you can literally drag a file into the SD card and install whatever software you want

When I bought mine, Amazon didn&#x27;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!

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&#x2F;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&#x2F;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 &#x27;broken&#x27; rather than just &#x27;annoying&#x27; so I assumed it was normal. 
I dislike the kindle ecosystem as much as the next person, but I&#x27;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.

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.

You can sideload books on Kobo over USB they parse the expected formats epub&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;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 &amp; comics.
My reader Elipsa 2e is also great for taking notes and supports notes in book pages, though that specific model isn&#x27;t supported by the custom firmware.

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?

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&#x27;s one of the algorithms in a decent OCR package anyway?You&#x27;d only have to do a few hint&#x2F;confirmations.

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.

For reference, Libreture maintains a list of non-DRM bookshops [1].[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;libreture.com&#x2F;bookshops&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;libreture.com&#x2F;bookshops&#x2F;</a>

The DMCA can bite. Hopefully the author has taken steps to protect his identity, or there likely will be consequences.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linuxsecurity.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;government&#x2F;sklyarov-hearing-set-for-march-2002" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linuxsecurity.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;government&#x2F;sklyarov-hearing-s...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd</a>.

I wonder how that will if&#x2F;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.

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

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

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd</a>.Found not guilty, but he was charged and tried.

&gt; but can you point to any prosecution of someone for a _prose description_ of circumvention (as opposed to actually making code available)?I&#x27;ll do you one better: 2600 Magazine was prohibited from saying which website hosted DRM-circumvention code:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Universal_City_Studios,_Inc._v._Corley" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Universal_City_Studios,_Inc._v...</a>They were legally prohibited from saying, on their own website, words like &quot;You can get DeCSS from <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lemuria.org&#x2F;~tom&#x2F;DeCSS&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lemuria.org&#x2F;~tom&#x2F;DeCSS&#x2F;</a>&quot; and nothing else. Criminalised speech.

&gt; 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&#x27;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.

<pre><code> &gt; they made it against the law to even tell anyone.
</code></pre>
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)?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.law.cornell.edu&#x2F;uscode&#x2F;text&#x2F;17&#x2F;1201" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.law.cornell.edu&#x2F;uscode&#x2F;text&#x2F;17&#x2F;1201</a>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.

Not extreme enough. Copyright itself should be abolished straight up. It&#x27;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.

&gt; because DRM effectively removes the work from the public domain in perpetuity.This doesn&#x27;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 &quot;DRM&quot; is? Is spotify refusing to provide a .mp3 file download for their streaming service a &quot;DRM&quot;? What if they implement streaming via webrtc, to make it extra-annoying to manually download? For games, is it &quot;DRM&quot; to add mandatory online requirements even for single player? What if there&#x27;s an ostensible reason for the online requirement, like if the gameplay is computed server-side a-la world of warcraft?[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Legal_deposit" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Legal_deposit</a>

Analogously to the choice between trade secret and patent.

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.

Potential issue: what EXACTLY DRM is?
Is &quot;you can only read this book&#x2F;view this video on tivoized device which have it&#x27;s own cellular connection to mothership and no USB&#x2F;Ethernet&#x2F;WiFi&quot; counts as DRM for this purposes?
What about &quot;you can only buy this book at some obscure store which have it&#x27;s own obscure reader which only work on specific versions of specific OS&quot;? What if said OS is out-of-date?
What about &quot;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&quot;?(btw,I did buy some books protected this way in 00s)

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&#x2F;movie&#x2F;book&#x2F;whatever.

Content Scrambling System vs Cascading Style SheetsI do remember trying to learn CSS for web definitely made me feel like it was a Cascading Style Scrambling

Tangentially related to the question of legality of prose describing otherwise illegal instructions, I&#x27;m reminded of the epic DeCSS haiku [1]. (CSS here being 90&#x27;s era DVD DRM).[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.cmu.edu&#x2F;~dst&#x2F;DeCSS&#x2F;Gallery&#x2F;decss-haiku.txt" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.cmu.edu&#x2F;~dst&#x2F;DeCSS&#x2F;Gallery&#x2F;decss-haiku.txt</a>

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

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

Eh, I wouldn&#x27;t be so sure. Reading the DMCA, their code does seem to do what the law says you can&#x27;t do[1]:<pre><code> &quot;No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title [...]&quot;
</code></pre>
with these definitions[2]:<pre><code> (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.
</code></pre>
I think (A) pretty clearly applies: the glyphs being randomized in each request obviously counts as being &quot;scrambled&quot;, 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&#x27;s font.I&#x27;m less sure about (B), not being a lawyer, but I think it&#x27;s so generic that it does apply: the &quot;ordinary course of [...] operation&quot; of reading the book requires running the apps provided by Amazon. This seems to fit &quot;requires the application of [...] a process [...] with the authority of the copyright owner&quot;.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.law.cornell.edu&#x2F;uscode&#x2F;text&#x2F;17&#x2F;1201" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.law.cornell.edu&#x2F;uscode&#x2F;text&#x2F;17&#x2F;1201</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.law.cornell.edu&#x2F;definitions&#x2F;uscode.php?width=840&amp;height=800&amp;iframe=true&amp;def_id=17-USC-1838631189-2041315756&amp;term_occur=999&amp;term_src=title:17:chapter:12:section:1201" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.law.cornell.edu&#x2F;definitions&#x2F;uscode.php?width=840...</a>

DRM is obfuscation that it&#x27;s illegal to mess with.

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

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

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.

Not that I agree with it, but I do see the logic. The word &quot;munitions&quot; can be replaced with &quot;materials,&quot; since it literally refers to materials used for warfare. That isn&#x27;t necessarily limited to things that shoot or explode. It&#x27;s a brilliant bit of pedantry if you step back and think about it.

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.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;pgpsourcecodeint0000zimm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;pgpsourcecodeint0000zimm</a>

&gt; There was no law to restrict that, so they just made something up.That&#x27;s a rather facetious interpretation. You&#x27;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&#x27;s hardly surprising, isn&#x27;t it?You also seem surprised that including cryptography software in existing lists designed to prevent export of military and&#x2F;or dual-use technology is also surprising, unexpected, or outlandish. If you actually think about it, is it really?

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&#x27;t make cryptography exports (software exports) illegal-&gt; what actually IS illegal to export?-&gt; munitions!-&gt; let&#x27;s just declare that cryptography is &quot;munitions&quot;-&gt; problem solved<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Export_of_cryptography_from_the_United_States" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Export_of_cryptography_from_th...</a>

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] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Serial_Copy_Management_System" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Serial_Copy_Management_System</a>

I wonder when&#x2F;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 :<pre><code> !copy !save
</code></pre>
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&#x27;ve noticed that I recently started to use &quot;I remember&quot; more and more on the hackernews. I&#x27;m getting old.

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&#x27;ve ever wondered why DRM is so roundly hated by engineers of a certain age, it&#x27;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.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;press&#x2F;releases&#x2F;licensing-scheme-fair-uses-and-other-speech-violates-first-amendment-eff-argues" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;press&#x2F;releases&#x2F;licensing-scheme-fair-use...</a>

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.

Books are rapidly dropping in relevance. It could certainly be that that&#x27;s exactly how this went down a decade ago, but I&#x27;d be willing to bet on Amazon stipulating &quot;no DRM to be on Amazon&quot; (not just Kindle; bundle all the first party distribution together) now and at least some of the big houses folding.

There&#x27;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.

One argument I heard was that this was actually due to &quot;kindle unlimited&quot;. I think publishers didn&#x27;t really care that people were removing drm after purchasing a book, but with amazon&#x27;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.

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?

So... It&#x27;s your fault? I mean, you wrote it. You had the option to say no. You didn&#x27;t. Tired of programmers making the world worse and trying to blame everyone but themselves for why the world got shittier.

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)

The new crack is still shared publicly if you&#x27;re willing to make some minimal effort to look for it.

A proper epub consists of multiple html and css, not to mention the correct font files (ttf or otf). OCR can&#x27;t recover those. I&#x27;ve found other books like that, you know, where someone didn&#x27;t even bother to remove the page numbers from the OCRed text, and it&#x27;s just a subpar reading experience.

Automatic screenshots and OCR still work well enough.

Like the hn commenting guidelines you apparently didn&#x27;t read :p

The solution is being shared in the very forum thread you linked, but apparently didn&#x27;t read.

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&#x27;t been possible since early 2025. The pros can still break it but they aren&#x27;t sharing with the rest of the class anymore.&gt; 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.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mobileread.com&#x2F;forums&#x2F;showthread.php?p=4516384#post4516384" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mobileread.com&#x2F;forums&#x2F;showthread.php?p=4516384#p...</a>&gt; 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.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;apprenticeharper&#x2F;DeDRM_tools&#x2F;discussions&#x2F;2395" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;apprenticeharper&#x2F;DeDRM_tools&#x2F;discussions&#x2F;...</a>

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.

Removing DRM from ebooks is the standard. Otherwise I cannot read them in my Kobo  because I didn&#x27;t (and I will never) register my reader into Adobe, and neither I&#x27;ve created a Kobo account (I bypassed the initial setup).

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

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

Another reminder that you should always instantly download everything you ever find interesting or valuable. The internet is temporal because it&#x27;s backed by people and infrastructure which are fallible and fragile in the face of law and talk.

Software Heritage attempts to archive all of GitHub (not there yet) and various other code sites:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.softwareheritage.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.softwareheritage.org&#x2F;</a>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.archiveteam.org&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;Software_Heritage" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.archiveteam.org&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;Software_Heritage</a>

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

The Github repo (which was working for me until 5 mins ago) just 404&#x27;ed.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;PixelMelt&#x2F;amazon_book_downloader" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;PixelMelt&#x2F;amazon_book_downloader</a>Kind of expected, but I was surprised at how quick that was.

Possibly <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gudvardur&#x2F;amazon_book_downloader" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gudvardur&#x2F;amazon_book_downloader</a> I did not verify.

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

I&#x27;ve always wanted it to work this way. However it&#x27;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!

Thank you for the instructions. But it&#x27;s really something that Amazon should do. Their power off screen is quite useless and gets really really old after a while.

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 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kindlemodding.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kindlemodding.org&#x2F;</a>

EARTH TO AMAZON EARTH TO AMAZONPLEASE MAKE THE LAST PAGE READ BE THE KINDLE SCREEN DISPLAY WHEN POWERED OFFEND OF TRANSMISSION

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

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

Ohhhhh. Wow! Did you have to push this through, or was everybody on board from the start?&gt; For whatever reason, upper management was ok with the plaintext being scrapable, as long as the formatted version couldn&#x27;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!

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&#x27;t be scraped.

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

How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM