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Amazon is making it impossible to remove the DRM from Kindle Books (goodereader.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 235 points 1 year ago (11 children)

Don't buy Amazon products. Fairly simple concept.

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  • [–] 66 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    The problem is some authors signing exclusivity deal with Amazon, which means breaking the DRM and converting it is the only way to read it on a different e-reader.

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  • [–] 106 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Too bad. Then theres no sale unless I can crack the DRM ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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  • [–] 43 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    This. All of these problems are solved by people not giving money. But often it seems difficult for people to actually stand behind principle when the time comes -- convenience is a helluva drug.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    It's only takes one person to crack those books and spread them across the high seas and the only way to force authors to abandon Amazon.

    There are always people who extra motivated by these challenges. The fact that these are written texts and shown on a screen means there will always be away to scrap the content off even if that involves a camera on a second device.

    DRM only hurts customers who want to pay for content.

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  • [–] [S] 15 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Yep, I had a Kindle library of a few dozen books, when they started their shenanigans locking down the desktop client earlier this year I downloaded all of them, de-drmed and converted to epub with Calibre. Hosting them on Calibre-web and accessing with KOreader on a Kobo. I continue to buy books on Kobo and Google Books, which let me download copies (albeit with DRM).

    Makes me wonder after all these years why Amazon is locking down ability to move books around. I wonder if they're starting to feel some real competition and feel threatened! The market of cheap e-ink Android ereaders seems to be growing more and more

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I started that process and hit a road block after getting all the books downloaded to my pc. Can you recommend any tutorials or guides that might help get everything converted?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    I wonder if they're starting to feel some real competition and feel threatened!

    Probably the opposite. They're confident they won't lose sales over this because they're too firmly established as a monopoly. And they know that with Trump in office they're not going to face any pushback from the FTC.

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    • [–] 166 points 1 year ago (15 children)
    1. https://www.gutenberg.org/
    2. https://openlibrary.org/
    3. https://www.planetebook.com/
    4. https://archive.org/
    5. https://www.smashwords.com/
    6. https://books.google.com/
    7. https://www.freetechbooks.com/
    8. https://www.getfreebooks.com/
    9. https://www.openculture.com/free_ebooks
    10. https://www.goodreads.com/
    11. https://www.oreilly.com/ (trial)
    12. https://annas-archive.org/
    13. https://pdfcoffee.com/
    14. https://singlelogin.re/
    15. https://www.ereaderiq.com/freebies/
    16. https://www.bookbub.com/ebook-deals/free-ebooks
    17. https://digilibraries.com/
    18. https://www.overdrive.com/
    19. https://manybooks.net/

    there’s so many others and of course torrents

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  • [–] [S] 41 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    It is remarkable how many books available for free on Gutenberg are sold in the same format on Amazon (it'd be one thing if they were special editions, new translations etc, but they're the same!)

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  • [–] 20 points 1 year ago

    People out to make a quick buck are banking on suckers not knowing about Project Gutenberg, or failing to check it, or not wanting to do a couple of extra steps to get something onto their Kindle.

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  • [–] 20 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Check out standard ebooks. They take public domain books and "clean" them up with really good typesetting, spelling fixes, and other things. All free too

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    Standard is fantastic! The books are better quality than what they charge for on “marketplaces” and can be read for free or downloaded wholesale for a song. Add to that they host an opds catologue that fbreader can browse and you have incredibly convenient public domain books right to the ereader.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Shoutout to Anna.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    You can also use Book Bounty to integrate LibGen support into Readarr. It’s a workaround for one of Readarr’s biggest weaknesses, as torrents historically aren’t great for ebooks.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    https://libbyapp.com/

    Assuming you have a card from a participating library.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Every time I go to checkout a book on Libby it's like 6-10 weeks' wait. If I put a hold on it then I'm just not in a place to read/listen at that time and then I feel bad for hogging it instead.

    Better to just pirate or buy from a non-DRM distributor.

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    • [–] 157 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I'm shocked at this unforeseeable turn of events.

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    • [–] 118 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    I will never, ever purchase a book I can't remove the DRM from.

    And there are people out there who are absolutely fanatical about book preservation. They will photograph every single page and run it through OCR and recreate an ebook just so it gets preserved. DRM is absolutely pointless and stupid.

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  • [–] 31 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    Exactly this. As an idiot I purchase DRM music when Microsoft had its own music store. Some years later they closed it and there was no way to validate music keys.

    But thankfully I still have an old Roxio9( I think) CD, and back then Roxio didn't know what DRM was and would take the mp3 and burn it to DVD anyway, bypassing the key check, then I would just rip it back off the DVD...DRM is useless

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  • [–] 33 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

    For real.

    When I still had Netflix and Disney+ I'd want to watch a show on my PC, but I'd just get black screen with only audio, because something about my setup the DRM didn't like. (Possibly that I have USB displaylink monitors.)

    So I had to watch on another device.

    DRM isn't stopping content being ripped. It's just making life a pain for paying customers.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Offering a clean, ad free, usable storefront to purchase media would do more to prevent piracy than anything.

    But corpos dont like that.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    That could've been iTunes if their interface didn't suck ass and if they didn't go for the subscription-only model in Apple Music.

    I swear for years it was THE place to buy music. I mean I never did, I didn't have access to a card with online payments enabled as a teen, so I just pirated everything anyway. But it seemed like the default place.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Of course. It's all about control. They see users as property, an object to be sold and traded.

    Do not ever allow yourselves to be disrespected like this.

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    • [–] 65 points 1 year ago

    Why not just remove the Amazon from the ebooks?

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    [–] 55 points 1 year ago

    amazon: finally we defeated piracy

    one kid with a computer: snickers

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    [+] 52 points 1 year ago (13 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Just wait until you can only stream books, not download them, with random words replaced with synonyms using an algorithm that lets them track down who the originator of any scanned copies is.

    That might sound ridiculous, but streaming-only to prevent perfect copies and hiding purchaser identifiers in the data are both DRM techniques that have been explored in other media already. There's no limit to how anti-consumer publishers can get when they think there's slightly more money to be had.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Log2(8.2billion) is about 33. That means if each word only had 1 synonym, you only need to change 33 words to uniquely identify who was responsible.

    21 words need to change if each has 3 options. 17 words for 4 options.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    There's no impossible because if you can see it, it can be captured and digitized, but there is a level of complication that can make it unreasonable. They could make it unreasonable to crack the drm outright and require you to screenshot/OCR it. Then they can limit the OS to make to difficult to automate capture.

    Bottom line, they're just kicking payers off their network when it's easier to pirate it than to buy it through their service.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    but there is a level of complication that can make it unreasonable.

    Lol, just read the Arch Wiki about Bluray playing. Unreasonable only takes a bit longer.

    Especially engineering people get creative out of interest if they're denied access. And that's a beautiful thing.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    require you to screenshot/OCR it

    So just like what people do with paper books.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    What GOOGLE did WITHOUT PERMISSION to paper books. ;)

    I've imaged a few short books with a cellphone and page correction software.

    It takes dedication to make a pleasant final product. But those vacuum book scanners are freaking amazing.

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    • [–] 51 points 1 year ago (12 children)

    I've been slowly filling my wife's Kindle Oasis full of pirated books over the last 2 years. I got it initially because it had internet service everywhere and I could just email her the epubs to simplify loading things.

    A couple of weeks ago, even though airplane mode is always on for this thing, (so no wifi either) -- this thing wipes something like 400 books from her library overnight. Granted, they were all pirated, but they're doing some nasty stuff there. It looks like there's renewed effort to combat this.

    Sooooo, I sold it and bought her a Kobo Libra Color. Now, I just have her open up https://send.djazz.se/ -- give me the 4 digit code, and I can upload books to her that way. Goodbye Amazon. Don't let the door hit you.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    Cannot recommend Kobo enough. You can jailbreak it if you like, but I didn't get much benefit from that personally. I'm partial to the overdrive integration, but if you're loading epubs you probably aren't using that. If in the US, I'd recommend at least setting it up, since it's pretty easy and maybe more immediate for some books, but obviously she won't get to keep the epub after.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Not that I would know from experience, but I hear there are Calibre plugins that will allow a user to pull the DRM'd book (downloaded via Overdrive) to a computer and remove the DRM.

    I've read that it's a polite thing to do because you're able to return borrowed books much more quickly so other users can check them out.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I originally had planned on doing that, but honestly I've not plugged my kobo into my computer since I in earnest set it up. Out of the box I jailbroke it, then I realized I liked it a lot and didn't want to get confused as to what I was recommending to friends/family vs what was actually jailbreak stuff, so I decided I'd reset it and use it the standard way for a bit to get the hang of it. Once I did that I've never had a need to plug it into a computer and figured it wasn't worth the effort.

    I hope I'm not considered impolite for using it as intended, though I totally understand people who would want to do as you suggested. Anything to decrease hold times lol. Also not that I would know from experience, but I imagine others greatly respect and appreciate the people who do that, provide the means to do that, or the end results of that.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Bonus points for no jailbreak required : D I didn't even realize there was a jailbreak for it (or what benefits there are to jailbreaking it... I should do some research but I haven't found anything I couldn't do with the stock firmware and it sounds like you generally came to the same conclusion).

    Mine is using the stock firmware, wifi off unless using Overdrive, but I plug it into my computer to charge and load it with books. It just shows up as a mass storage device like a USB thumb drive and you can copy/paste books onto it (or use Calibre). After disconnecting it will scan for new/changed files and auto-import any recognized formats into the reader application.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    The benefits to jailbreaking it are that you can change the layout of the device, remove store icons, and just in-general tidy up the UI a bit. I haven't seen anything game-changing from the jailbreak; like adding apps or something.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Kobo is on my Xmas list. I still have a gen 2? Kindle and it’s still pretty workable.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    The white one with a keyboard?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    That's weird and sounds like some kind of software problem. I can't see how that would happen otherwise. I have a Voyage and don't have wifi configured on it at all, just add books with calibre and it's been fine for a decade.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    It's not a software problem, the Oasis has free cellular service for life.

    If you turn your Wifi off on an Android phone for example - it still scans and uses the wifi to keep track of your location, for instance. It's an anti-consumer pattern that companies are using. Airplane mode? -- Sure, for YOU. But Amazon probably still allows cell service to connect every couple of hours for exactly this kind of thing.

    The error message she received wasn't sly about it either. It said something very direct along the lines of "We have determined that you are not eligible to read this book so we have removed it from your device"

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Free cellular for life, except Amazon has basically limited it down to nothing

    I loved my oasis, but the whispersync was, for all intents, busted, for the last few years.

    Finally moved to a boox go color, installed calibre, and couldn't be happier

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    • [+] 30 points 1 year ago (3 children)
    [deleted]
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    • [–] 29 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    I have five published books, all without drm. Amazon better not put that shit ON my books. It's not there for a reason; I want people to share.

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    • [–] 29 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Fuck you Jeff!

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Whaaat? There's Android for jailbroken Kindles? Back in my day the only thing you could do with a jailbreak was installing a slow version of KOReader that didn't really work very well.

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    • [–] 29 points 1 year ago

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    [–] 27 points 1 year ago

    I would recommend people buy their books off ZLibrary instead, where they come with no DRM.

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    [–] 26 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Why are people "buying" DRM infested books? They don't own anything. "Their" books can be taken away at the whim of the seller. Their rights can change with a change to the EULA. There are other legal ways to use e-readers (not Kindles) that let you keep and back up what you buy.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Why are people doing X stupid thing that makes rich people richer at their own expense?

    It's the herding and conditioning. The sheeple have not woken up.

    So many things make so much more sense when we realize this.

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    • [–] 25 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    Switched to kobo.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    I bought my first ereader this summer and got a Kindle and hated it. Returned it and got a Kobo. Its fantastic, I can just load my ebooks like it's an external drive. I dont have to email all my ebooks to Amazon just to get them on my own device.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

    I'll be switching to kobo next time round, but I've never not been able to dump books onto my kindle by usb. I do it with my phone over USB sometimes. Since when has not doing that been a thing?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    Since at some point recently. You can still email files (epub not mobi now) to your kindle, but usb transfer doesn't work any more.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    Have you got a link to more info about it? I can't find details anywhere.

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    • [–] 24 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Amazon can go suck a fuck!

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    How exactly does one suck a fuck?

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