How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

There'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.

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

>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.

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.

https://archive.org/details/pgpsourcecodeint0000zimm

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

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.

> There was no law to restrict that, so they just made something up.

That's a rather facetious interpretation. You'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's hardly surprising, isn't it?

You also seem surprised that including cryptography software in existing lists designed to prevent export of military and/or dual-use technology is also surprising, unexpected, or outlandish. If you actually think about it, is it really?

> but can you point to any prosecution of someone for a _prose description_ of circumvention (as opposed to actually making code available)?

I'll do you one better: 2600 Magazine was prohibited from saying which website hosted DRM-circumvention code:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_City_Studios,_Inc._v...

They were legally prohibited from saying, on their own website, words like "You can get DeCSS from http://lemuria.org/~tom/DeCSS/" and nothing else. Criminalised speech.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd.

Found not guilty, but he was charged and tried.

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.

> 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'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.

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

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

It does prevent linking to code though.

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] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Copy_Management_System

Content Scrambling System vs Cascading Style Sheets

I do remember trying to learn CSS for web definitely made me feel like it was a Cascading Style Scrambling

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't be so sure. Reading the DMCA, their code does seem to do what the law says you can't do[1]:

    "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title [...]"

    (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.

I'm less sure about (B), not being a lawyer, but I think it's so generic that it does apply: the "ordinary course of [...] operation" of reading the book requires running the apps provided by Amazon. This seems to fit "requires the application of [...] a process [...] with the authority of the copyright owner".

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/uscode.php?width=840...

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

DRM is obfuscation that it's illegal to mess with.

> because DRM effectively removes the work from the public domain in perpetuity.

This doesn'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 "DRM" is? Is spotify refusing to provide a .mp3 file download for their streaming service a "DRM"? What if they implement streaming via webrtc, to make it extra-annoying to manually download? For games, is it "DRM" to add mandatory online requirements even for single player? What if there's an ostensible reason for the online requirement, like if the gameplay is computed server-side a-la world of warcraft?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit

Not extreme enough. Copyright itself should be abolished straight up. It'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.

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.

Analogously to the choice between trade secret and patent.

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.

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.

For those with an old Kindle, couldn'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't need the money.

That'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:

https://techy-notes.com/blog/dedrm-v10-0-14-tutorial

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 just paid for it, downloaded the kindle app, and dragged the .awz8 file and it says it doesn't support the format!

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.

I have more than 100 books that I bought with actual money on Apple'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't. I'm all for supporting authors and the various editors, etc., but I feel like I've already done that in this case.

The stormlight archive isn't a representative example because:

- Brandon Sanderson'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.

> 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.

I'm more than happy to pay for DRM free epubs. I won'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't be answerable for it.

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

The issue wasn'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.

The issue is that you usually aren't buying the ebook. You are buying a license to access that ebook and they can revoke that license at any time. Maybe you're okay with that, but many people want to permanently have access to the things they purchased.

If at all possible, find a local independent book store and buy from there. If they don't have it in stock, often they'll order it for you.

I have one that'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've got a good sized family), but these days that's about what it would cost to go to a movie. And since you have a physical book, you can swap when you'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's a great excuse to hit the book store.

> 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 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'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.

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 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.

> 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.

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

> 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'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$/month expenses.

I buy a lot of books from used book stores. Fundamentally I'm only paying for the paper it's printed on as none of those fat proceeds($3.99 paperback) ever reach the publisher. Totally cool and legal.

When I'm following a new book that's coming out, I'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't do that with an ebook. And if I can't comfortably read the oversized print copy, I'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're just uncomfortable to read. I took a copy of "Death's End" and a copy of "Thinking in Jazz" 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're so important as to take up two seats on the plane? Bring back smaller mass market formfactors ffs and I'll pay full price for their bullshit.

Publishing companies are making their products worse and worse to consume. As Gabe Newel says, it'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!

I've been downloading every book whose title I see mentioned anywhere. I'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?

i'm gonna argue that video games can be better cost to value ratio.

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

I'd rather donate money directly to the author. I will not under any circumstance still reward Amazon for what they'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/publisher gatekeepers.

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

Kobo's pretty good. Anything to avoid Kindle books.

It's a little less user friendly but I really like my Boox tablet because it's a full android device.

I run Storyteller app on it and have my ebooks & audiobooks synced up perfectly like whispersync but better.

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

Calibre handles kindle too (if you already have that). You "obtain" 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.

There has been a 50% proof of concept, 50% art project by an Austrian university professor to a similar extent:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIY_Kindle_Scanner

https://vimeo.com/73675285

Unfortunately they did close that loophole recently. :(

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.

Your right to buy a DRM-free book?

I put that in the same bucket as my "right" to buy your house for $1.

> 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.

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

It kind of makes sense. It'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't you have done less about it ?

Do you tell yourself "well if I hadn't, the next person would've" ?

Did they force you to do it, then ? Was it worth it ?

Still a DMCA violation to break, though.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

When I said "bypass", 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've been on a classics kick and I pirate them tbh. Dumas doesn't mind.

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

Yes, my wife uses it all the time

I believe so, haven't tried it myself.

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.

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...

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.

My new T-shirt

The best kind there is!

The reading experience is fine on Kindle. Or at least it was the last time I used it. My main problem is how they've locked down the DRM. I was on Kindle for a very long time and didn'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's all changed now. I'd love to know why it's changed. My first thought was publisher pressure. But Kobo hasn't implemented harsh measures. Just Amazon has.

At any rate, I'm now using Kobo for my reading. Easy to break DRM. And they don't assume the same level of control over Kobo ereaders the way Amazon does with Kindle. I have over a thousand ebooks. I'm able to tag books in Calibre, and those tags automatically show up as Collections on the Kobo. It's a simple thing, but Amazon never gave me such flexibility. Makes a huge difference for me.

It's also possible to alter Kobo's UI/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's such a breath of fresh air compared to how Kindle is locked down.

Because I don't own a kindle nor am I willing to use their app.

I'm either old and stubborn or principled, but I want to use my current phone and "system" I've been using to read ebooks for the last 15 years.

(It'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)

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.

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.

[dead]

> In general, if I don’t have to pay someone to produce something I can provide a better experience to my customers

Amazon theoretically makes money with which they pay people to make the user experience good.

Pirates have... a few nerds with some spare time?

Regarding archive.is:

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

> 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.

> 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.

As you should. It was the author's choice to publish on Kindle, and it's completely his fault.

That means it could be used to extract some text to map to glyphs, right?

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

Fwiw I do think this was written by an LLM. It may have been cleaned up manually afterwards (but not that much).

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.

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!

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.