Hell hath no fury like an engineer angered! This was such a good read and epitomizes hacking:
"Was it worth it? To read one book? No. To prove a point? Absolutely. To learn about SVG rendering, perceptual hashing, and font metrics? Probably yes."
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.
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.
Me too. When they removed the option to download books I liberated everything I had ever bought, moved to Kavita+koreader and will never buy a kindle book again.
I jailbroke both kindles. And use koreader on them which now supports progress sync with Kavita which is amazing! So I don't really lose functionality.
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.
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.
Since the last major jailbreak for Kindle devices was released, I've been using Koreader as well on my Scribe. I have progress syncing setup with Hardcover (Goodreads alternative) instead, however. Only downside is their recommendations don't seem to be well geared to my interests at this point, but hopefully that'll change in the future as more use the service.
The Kindle DRM situation is really bad right now. It used to be possible to install the DeDRM plugin in Calibre and get decrypted KFX files from the Kindle for PC application. That hasn't been possible since early 2025. The pros can still break it but they aren't sharing with the rest of the class anymore.
> Even the maintainer of the DeDRM plugin has gone underground, refraining from issuing an official new release out of concern that Amazon will simply slap it down.
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)
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.
I can always retypeset the text... but I'm not a professional editor/typesetter. You often lose parts/phrases/words the author wanted emphasized with italic and bold. Blockquotes can be gone. Even paragraph indentations in the worst offenders. I couldn't recreate that if I tried. Lord forbid there's a list/table/figure (even in some of the fiction I've read, they'll have those... weirdo science fiction novels, after all). I've gotten pretty good at fixing epubs with Calibre's editor, some of these are salvageable. Just finished with one where they split the chapters wrong (not at the chapter headings, but in between for some reason). And I'll often go get a high-res cover image off the publisher's website; they like to use bad sized-for-favicon scans off a random google image search for some reason.
But for me, the bad OCR ebooks can be painful to read.
The best OCR tool I have ever used is Editable Text and Images in Adobe Acrobat. It can actually replace text in place with a dynamically generated vector font that matches the original font. It is actually really impressive.
May be of interest to this thread - I created a script that drives the Kindle web reader, captures screenshots, runs OCR, and creates an ePub - this wouldn't be as good as the pixelmelt solution, as it requires OCR.
I have to say that I usually only download ebooks illegally when the DRM stops me reading them!
I only have Linux machines at my disposal and I have a PocketBook. The device is nice, but the store is truly abysmal. Often there is some adobe based DRM on books I want to buy and I never got it to work with my ereader.
I just gave up and pirate them now, unless there is a DRM free version (authors like Ruther Bregman and Cory Doctorow provide them.)
It used to be quite easy to strip DRM from kindle books, with my old kindle keybaord, so in the past I always bought a lot of ebooks from Amazon. But now I can't get them on my device anymore. A true shame, the Amazon ebook store really has all the books.
This whole situation p**es me off enough to not feel bad about pirating.
I have a Kobo... I don't remember the model name. But the thing I like best about it, is that I never had to sign into anything to use it. (There is a sign-in/create account screen, but this is easily bypassed if you know how to edit an sqlite file.) Once I have an ebook in DRM-free ePub, I just plug it into my computer, copy it over in the file manager, and then just start reading. No Calibre or any other special software needed.
>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.
Fun fact: this is one of the few situations in the US where a prosecutor could claim that this is criminal speech (though I hope and trust they would not, and if it did it would get thrown out by any court respecting the First Amendment).
Not a civil issue, like libel or fraud, but the sort of talk that can get a policeman to come and drag you off to jail. If you've ever wondered why DRM is so roundly hated by engineers of a certain age, it's because not only it dumb makework that they are required to implement, not only is it extremely irritating to discover it interfering with your own computer, but if you do effectively point out how dumb, irritating, and eminently circumventable it is, they made it against the law to even tell anyone.
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't make cryptography exports (software exports) illegal
-> what actually IS illegal to export?
-> munitions!
-> let's just declare that cryptography is "munitions"
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.
If it is a munition the US government has limitations on it's actions controlling it covered under the 2nd amendment to the constitution.
In reality it nor the first amendment(freedom of speech) hack probably would not work. The limitation was on exporting strong crypto, not using or importing it. It was stupid and impossible to control. But I would guess any charges would be espionage(illegal speech) and smuggling(illegal goods). regardless of how you packaged it.
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.
If Ukraine did not retire their nuclear weapons... (Russia was surprisingly all too happy to oblige)
All I am saying is that I am not sure it's so simple: sure, if everyone had them, the risk that there is some lunatic crazy enough to actually put them to use rises; but it also potentially stops a bunch of wars, especially bigger countries going after smaller ones.
Yes kind of. The "born secret" doctrine says all knowledge related to the creation of nuclear weapons, ranging from nuclear fusion to the production of fissile material, as “born classified".
The doctrine has never been tested in court as no case involving it has gone to trail.
I've definitely figured some things out about nuclear weapons and proliferation that I've never told anyone because of that doctrine. I met a real nuclear engineer at a conference and had dinner and he told me about how he was concerned that people would nick Np237 from a fuel reprocessing system to make nuclear weapons and I pointed out that it was OK to talk about that because I'd seen it in the literature.
> 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?
The lawmakers did not have any involvement. The executive branch unilaterally abused its power to declare that encryption was a munition, to work around the fact it had no other power to restrict it without convincing the legislature to actually make a law.
If you go by the common interpretation of "munitions" and by and large the contents of that list, then it clearly does was not intended to include mathematics.
‘Lawmakers’ fixed no problems, no laws were made.
Enforcers leveraged existing laws in ways that are clearly not intended purposed for their own goals; that will always be ripe for abuse and must be discouraged.
Cryptography is not a munition.
> they made it against the law to even tell anyone.
I’m no fan of the DMCA, but I am pretty skeptical of your apparent claim that this post itself is a potential violation of 17 USC § 1201. Obviously the act of circumvention itself qualifies, as does the code in the GitHub repository the post links to, but can you point to any prosecution of someone for a _prose description_ of circumvention (as opposed to actually making code available)?
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.
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.
This is going to date me, but I had a t-shirt with basically a code-golf version of DeCSS printed on it and it said "This shirt is illegal" on it or something like that. I never actually wore it in public.
The USA has a lot of criminalised speech, despite the 1A. The most obvious historical example is "I am going to assassinate the president tomorrow at noon", but recently there have been a lot more things you can't say, such as "Fuck Donald Trump" which got someone arrested and deported.
I wouldn't be surprised if publishing circumvention code would be argued in court to be violence against earning money for political oriented books (spending money is a necessary and inseparable part of political communication).
This is the general problem with having a bunch of laws sitting around that allow the government to punish people for things ordinary people regularly do, but then exercise the "discretion" not to punish them until they do something the government doesn't like.
Because then you don't really have any rights. They can't formally punish you for speech but they can punish you for breaking the same unrelated law a million other people broke without knowing and that only you were prosecuted for, "coincidentally" right after you said something they didn't like.
They do have that right, but at the same time, a chaotic and vindictive adminstration can revoke the visa of, and then physically abduct, a non-citizen. They can then make statements that plainly make it clear they did that because of what the non-citizen wrote.
They can also contravene a number of other legal safeguards along the way, and disregard judges' orders.
It appears the US has elected an administration that wants to turn the country into a lawless shithole, where the powerful do whatever the fuck they want, and they deliberately fuck with laws and safeguards, and deliberately target their political enemies (e.g. student activists), to flex how powerful they are.
> They can then make statements that plainly make it clear they did that because of what the non-citizen wrote.
I kind of hate the thing where people want to make this the part that matters, because Trump is a massive outlier who doesn't care about that and says the thing he's not supposed to say.
But the people who still do the prosecution under the pretext and then don't admit to why are even worse, because they're doing the same thing and then lying about it on top of that. If all you do is punish people for not lying, that's not going to solve anything. You need to take away their ability to trump up charges against random people.
These two things aren't even remotely in the same category. Committing a crime, then documenting how you committed that crime and then publishing the instructions for others to repeat that crime with the clear intent to have others repeat that crime, has nothing to do with saying a bunch of words that you haven't even acted on.
Dispute that this should constitute a crime as much as you want (and please, do. Take it to court, get the laws changed, go into politics, get the US fixed, this is bullshit) but for as long as it is: being charged with a crime for "doing crime and teaching others to do the same crime" is not a first amendment violation.
There aren't many words in the first amendment, and none of them are "unless you're telling someone how to commit a crime"
The current regime (before it was a regime) got away with a lot of very bad speech because "the first amendment says all speech is allowed, no matter what" and should be made to hold everyone to the same standard they hold themselves to.
Which part of the text "You can get DeCSS from http://lemuria.org/~tom/DeCSS/" on a website constitutes distribution of "technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof" ?
Judge Kaplan very likely went beyond what the law allows, in issuing the injunction against Eric Corley for even _adding a hyperlink_ to the DeCSS code on his website.
However, we don't know this for sure, because Corley did not take this to the Supreme Court. There is a chance that the SCOTUS would have accepted the case, and found that neither a hyperlink to computer source code, nor computer source code itself, constitutes "technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof"... but at the same time, maybe they wouldn't accept it, and maybe they would but it'd cost a lot of money Corley didn't have to see the case through. So who knows? Corley seemed satisfied enough that, even though he was personally enjoined from linking to DeCSS, it nonetheless spread like wildfire all over the world, and DVDs were effectively copyable from that day forward.
Being found not guilty supports my contention. But that case was about distributing circumvention software, not traditional speech. Obviously distributing software that bypasses DRM is directly addressed by the law.
Not necessarily. A cynical modern legal strategy is to bombard people with frivolous legal actions that only the well-heeled can afford. Defendants can argue that claims are baseless or frivolous, but to make that argument, they must hire a lawyer and appear in court.
To see my point, look at the number of frivolous prosecutions now being launched by ... ah, never mind, I don't want to get political.
But individuals have been successfully prosecuted for "aiding and abetting" violations of the DMCA, where speech was a material element of the proscribed behavior. Oh, and -- IANAL.
Not necessarily. Being found not guilty just means that the facts of that specific case, as determined by the jury, did not fit a guilty verdict. It doesn't mean that someone who did a similar or analogous thing couldn't be prosecuted under the same law and found guilty.
I was thinking along the same lines. One of the many places that laws are going to have to catch up to reality. I’m 90% sure that current frontier models could turn this post into a working implementation with a good feedback loop.
> that laws are going to have to catch up to reality
Reality is moving away from states, and is now moving faster than legacy "laws" can ever hope to catch up.
That's a big part of what's fueling the wave of abandonment of DRM. I mostly play bluegrass - and given the lineal connection between traditional music and internet freedom, it probably comes as no surprise - but every serious bluegrass album is DRM-free now. Every grammy winner in the bluegrass and americana categories since at least 2020 has been DRM-free.
> 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 covered that in my comment. It’s likely the code violates § 1201 but I doubt the post does. And linking to infringing content is not legally the same thing as publishing it.
2600 got enjoined from linking to DeCSS and that got upheld on appeal, on the basis that linking violated the DMCA's anti-trafficking provisions. From the district court case:
> Defendants then linked their site to those "mirror" sites, after first checking to ensure that the mirror sites in fact were posting DeCSS or something that looked like it, and proclaimed on their own site that DeCSS could be had by clicking on the hyperlinks on defendants' site. By doing so, they offered, provided or otherwise trafficked in DeCSS.
The appeal was mostly about whether the DMCA and/or the specific injunction in question violated the First Amendment, and the court found that it didn't.
(Universal City Studios vs. Reimerdes at the district court level, Universal City Studios v. Corley at the circuit)
Yes. FWIW, as of a few minutes ago when I cloned this one, all the non-git files have the same hashes as the copy of the original I cloned when it was still up.
(to clarify, I wasn't talking about any git-specific hashes, just regular sha2/blake2b hashes of python, json, and font files. However, the two sha1 commit hashes in the git history match as well.)
Sorry, I don't comment very often and not trolling. I had GitHub open to the repo on my phone and seeing that it had been taken down grabbed a screenshot of the page
https://imgur.com/a/IzUA8mP
The HN thread began on Oct 16 at 20:22 Z. If you visited that github page instantly and took that screenshot instantly, even accounting for 21 hours due to rounding, the commit in that screenshot had to be after Oct 15 23:22.
The repo as I and many other people cloned it has the first commit ("first commit", not "initial commit") at Oct 12 23:20 Z, and the "done" commit at Oct 15 19:37 Z.
A likely explanation is that pixelmelt squashed both commits at or after they put up the blog post, but didn't force-push the rewritten history to github until it hit HN and blew up.
This is a weird thing with how GitHub forks work. All the objects within a fork network are stored within a global namespace, so you can change the repository name in the URL and find objects that appear to belong to one repository despite being unique to a fork.
I wonder when/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 :
!copy !save
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've noticed that I recently started to use "I remember" more and more on the hackernews. I'm getting old.
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.
Tangentially related to the question of legality of prose describing otherwise illegal instructions, I'm reminded of the epic DeCSS haiku [1]. (CSS here being 90's era DVD DRM).
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 [...]"
with these definitions[2]:
(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 think (A) pretty clearly applies: the glyphs being randomized in each request obviously counts as being "scrambled", 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's font.
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".
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/movie/book/whatever.
> 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?
>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
Then do that. It's not my job to try to argue your side of things. No one does that, as you well know, so my argument not only stands, but wins.
>Moreover how would you even define what "DRM" is?
Anything that interferes with copying the work in question.
>Is spotify refusing to provide a .mp3 file download for their streaming service a "DRM"?
Yes. This is an obnoxiously juvenile question. The nature of streaming services is that they send the media to the node (on demand). If that is done in a way that makes it difficult to play it a second time except to "stream" it again, you can hardly claim this is incidental. They go to great lengths to prevent it.
>For games, is it "DRM" to add mandatory online requirements even for single player?
Again, yes. There is no other purpose to such a requirement, and no one makes it a secret that this is done specifically to thwart so-called "piracy" attempts.
>What if there's an ostensible reason for the online requirement, like if the gameplay is computed server-side a-la world of warcraft?
You mean like with Blizzard, where they sued the programmers who did bnetd and prevented people from connecting to third party servers which computed gameplay? That wasn't even done to further piracy, by the way, they were just being dicks.
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.
Fair use exists for both people and corporations. Just because a corporation copies something in a way that is fre use, that doesn't mean that people should be able to freely copy it.
Then the court is either stupid or subservient to corporate interests. In both of these cases they deserve zero respect.
> Equally cynically, it's fair use because if it isn't, the entire economy collapses overnight.
Sounds about right. If they had the moral fortitude to apply the laws as they were supposed to, they'd do the right thing and if it collapses the economy then so be it. The fact they didn't reveals political calculation in their judgements.
When laws are stripped of their moral advantage, resistance to laws, courts and authorities becomes civil disobedience and a moral imperative of citizens. We cannot have mutually exclusive ideas existing simultaneously. That's how we get distortions like "you citizen must pay outta the nose for everything but the elite corporations can do whatever they want with complete impunity". The only acceptable way for them to resolve their conundrum is to either hold corporations accountable for their copyright infringement or abolish copyright for all. Anything else can and should cause civil unrest.
I don't know what state it's in (haven't used it in years), but do apprenticealf's DeDRM tools, which has been forked to nodrm/DeDRM_tools, still handle kindle PC app downloads? Tinkering with old versions of the PC app might work even if the current version doesn't, and there's a registry hack to disable kfx downloading and get azw3 instead, which worked at some point... it's outlined in apprenticealf's DeDRM repo, at the wiki link provided at the top of the repo's README, in the short section saying it's no longer maintained.
That would provide a closer-to-original version of the ebook, rather than just a visually similar one.
That any of this is necessary at all is absurd. Hats off to anyone with the patience to bypass Amazon's DRM rather than giving up on the Amazon ebook ecosystem entirely.
The thing that killed the download -> crack DRM workflow is that Amazon removed the "download and transfer via USB" option. I haven't bought an ebook from Amazon since.
The only viable option would be to buy the book and then pirate a de-DRM'd copy.
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.
When I upload the PDF on Amazon, a minimal price is automatically calculated. In the case of the DOOM, Amazon sets the minimal price at $51.35.
There is a slider which authors can use in order to add their "share" on top of Amazon price. I have added $3.88 which Amazon also takes a cut on. The result is $1.59 royalty and $0.77 profit per book sold.
He doesn't have to get 3%. He could raise the price so he gets more.
Color printed books are expensive, but I think he chose the premium color print option rather than the standard color print option. You can try it out: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/royalty-calculator { pages: 432, dimensions: 7.5"x9.25" } Roughly $18 for basic color and $36 for premium color (which probably also means heavier, higher quality paper).
Amazon takes 40%. Barnes and Noble Press takes 45% for self-published books, and their printing costs are within a couple dollars. Compare to typical retailer+distributor costs of >50% while authors get <15%.
The economics of retail print publishing and logistics don't seem to work out at higher author royalty rates. Authors who don't want to give up 40% of list price always have the option to handle printing, shipping, and accounting themselves, selling on ebay or from their own website.
Or, you might find the author online and see if they have some sort of donation mechanism set up. It's very common these days for a lot of professionals, but some authors are old school.
You are still buying a copy, that I imagine is the practical effect you want.
You don't keep proof, though, and probably isn't allowed to keep a backup after you give the book away. But most countries laws don't care about any of this (and it's not a backup).
Many people live in small apartments. The footprint of a single physical book may be negligible but five hundred books can become a logistical nightmare.
That sounds simple, but wouldn't the ebook you "pulled off" the Kindle still be in Amazon's format with DRM? I don't think this solves the original problem.
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.
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's the world we live in.
I'm sure you're right, but I'm not sure I care. I mean obviously I would prefer they give credit where it's due, but even writing those tools in the first place is a felony in some countries. It's not like they're robbing someone of their livelihood and the value they add by putting Kobo, Kindle, Nook, and Adobe all in one place with a built-in format convertor is really high.
I think you might be doing something wrong then? Maybe you have the wrong file? The Kindle For PC app should always give you azw files, not azw8 (even if it does use the newer format they're all just named azw).
It should show up in the epubor app on the Kindle tab after you install the kindle app and used it to download your books. No need to drag and drop from the file system it's all right there in the app. It finds Kindle, Kobo, etc and lists them.
EDIT - Make sure you leave the Kindle app running. I think it needs to be able to read the keys from memory or something.
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.
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)
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.
For one thing, DRM also works in Amazon's favour (reselling multiple copies)
For another, DRM is a pretty big sticking point for copyright holders, music, text, whatever. It's the one big thing that publishers all think that their business model depends on
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'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's over 100 hours of entertainment. It's literally a ratio of 10 CENTS per hour of entertainment.
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.
I don't see much of an ethical problem with downloading a pirated version of an ebook that you already paid for but can no longer access. If I did that, I'd have no problem sleeping at night.
Afaik, format shifting for convince is legal so long as you're Anthropic.
It was mostly a passing mention in the lawsuit against them where the damages are just for pirating books they didn't also buy. The fact that they bought used books and scanned them since its cheaper than ebooks was allowed by the court.
I think the key part was they scanned the books then destroyed the originals. I suppose the analog here would be to log into Amazon and delete the purchased ebooks.
I think they would've been allowed to do the scanning even without destroying the originals. AFAIK destroying the originals was just done to facilitate scanning — they needed the pages to be loose sheets, not bound.
They scanned then shredded the books so that publishers couldn't claim an unauthorized copy was made. All Anthropic did was a format shift which is allowed.
Yeah, it's a Tor policy, and Tor is one of the biggest publishers in fantasy/scifi, which does have a big impact on why DRM-free is more common in those genres than any other.
But it's also useful to point out that it isn't just Tor. Baen, best known for military scifi, has had a DRM-free policy for slightly longer than Tor. (Not just that, but the Baen Free Library is a really cool approach to ebooks as well, with DRM free copies of some of their most out-of-print/hard-to-print books and also the first book or two in nearly every series that they publish for a "try before you buy". Some of their hardcovers have even included CDs of sections of the Baen Free Library over the years.)
Baen did it first but Tor did it louder in that Tor's parent Macmillan went to bat for Tor and few other brands in a big lawsuit with Amazon that Amazon was applying their DRM whether the publisher wanted that or not because it was a lock-in moat for Amazon, which led to why there is now a required "This book is DRM free at the request of the publisher" acknowledgment on kindle copies of most Tor books (and a few other publishers).
> 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'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.
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.
Also consider buying through Bookshop.org. You designate your local book store as the one that will receive the profit from the purchase, but you get to shop through Bookshop.org's full catalog. If you don't designate a book store, the profit is distributed among participating book stores.
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 $6. I should be able to easily get 100+ hours out of that set of games.
How much of a cut does a place like Amazon take from the purchase while providing negative value to the product? Everyone (except Amazon) would be better off if you pirated the book and mailed a check to the author for half the cost or whatever
I often buy a hard copy and then find an ebook online or check it out from the library on Libby. I’m all for supporting authors, but I don’t want to funnel money into books that I don’t really own.
> Consider buying books to support authors and publishers.
Consider that maybe buying Amazon Kindle books is giving more support to DRM schemes like the one described in the article than it is to authors and publishers.
Even a 60 euros for a 6 hour experience comes at 10 euro per hour, cheaper than music and on par with movies.
Add replayability, multiplayer, longer games, cheaper games, ... and many many games are under 1 euro per hour, sometimes far under. Even someone playing fifa or call of duty has a price to hour ratio thats absurdly good.
And the range available is insane, used to be if you liked some genre you had maybe a game once every two years, now there are so many that not only you can't play all your games, even a seasonned gigantic fan of gaming cannot know all good games released anymore.
> I personally know people who pirate books, but pay hundreds of dollars a year for streaming services or battle pass type video games. It blows my mind.
I personally know people that pirate everything and PAY FOR PIRATING SERVICES. This blows my mind even more! I know that globally it's probably still cheaper to pay for those services rather than paying for 4 different streaming services each month, but god, if I go pirate than I would go for 0$/month expenses.
It isn't about the price. The level of service and the quality of the product you get by pirating is simply better. Streaming services break up shows and have s1-3 on one platform, 4-5 on another, and the rest on another still. You'll "buy" a movie on amazon prime video only for them to remove it so you can't watch it anymore. Prime video, a service you have to pay for now has ad breaks while watching shows. Even just FINDING stuff to watch is a nightmare, Netflix is the same stuff over and over again in different random made up categories.
Plus, streaming services limit what devices you are allowed to watch on and what software you can use, especially if you want to watch the highest resolution version. It's completely absurd how some people accept that and continue paying those streaming services.
I know and - cough cough - I might be embracing that as well. But still paying someone that basically leeches on someone else (and I don't mean Hollywood/Netflix etc, I mean the ripper themselves) unethical.
A lot of the time the distributor (or legal IP owner) is like a billion times more immoral than the ripper (or IP violator), and they are the ones leeching. You can choose legality over morality, but then don't claim moral high ground.
You have probably misunderstood. There are 4 parties here:
A) the content creator, owner of the IP
B) the people that copy the content made by A and publish it (i.e. the "release groups"). They can distirbute the content over bittorrent, sharing sites etc
C) people that run platforms that share copies made by B, and they offer access to those copies (sometimes even just a hash to a torrent) with some kind of paid subscription. Their added value is making it easier to access content copied by B.
D) final users, they can choose to consume content from A, B or C.
My point was that D paying for C are... weird, in my opinion.
Edit: technically there is a 5th group, like C but that do it for free, running forums etc at most hosting some banner to pay the hosting cost and not much more.
I answered the Hollywood/Netflix part. Distributors, most prominently Apple and Amazon are shitty companies, and paying them is arguably much more unethical than paying "C", even if the latter is illegal.
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?
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.
The authors and publishers are getting paid by the library for the physical book borrowed, which endures wear and tear and must ultimately be replaced. Not sure how licensing for digital books work with libraries - all the library systems I've used have a cap on the number of digital books that can be lent out.
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're not using the exact same file to read it. As the other commenter said, books are extremely cheap relative to the value and/or entertainment time they provide.
You could support your local bookstore. Bookstores are closing down all over the world. Most authors do not support a way to pay them directly. For example, traditionally published authors have all of their royalties handled via their agents. For a non-trivial amount of sales, direct donation would be an accounting headache for individual writers.
> Most authors do not support a way to pay them directly.
I think this is the problem that should be addressed.
Musicians went through a similar process in reverse order: first Napster ("piracy") then streaming services (analogous to Kindle/Amazon, where a huge 3rd party inserts themselves between content creator & consumer). Eventually some musicians twigged that they were getting screwed every way, so they set up ways for fans to pay them directly or via a less money-hungry intermediary (e.g. Bandcamp).
Not a perfect solution by any means, but if book authors feel their situation is bad enough, they could look into how musicians are dealing with it.
I'm probably not alone in thinking I'd far rather pay an author directly than Amazon or book publishers.
As with music, the final product you consume involves a lot more work/expertise/people than just “writing it“. You can see the quality differences when you compare self-published print on demand to quality publishing.
Naturally. And the editors, typesetters, designers, proof readers, etc. should get paid for their work.
It is just a question of ownership and power imbalance.
The problem with the current mainstream system (both in books and music) is that the publisher often effectively owns the work - not the author.
It's not that uncommon for people to pay small donations to free releases on Bandcamp and similar sites where you can set your own amount. Most won't do it, but there's clearly a subset of consumers who do, or this business strategy wouldn't exist.
Personally I have no issue paying for books and other media as it's not the price keeping me away. My issue is that any amount of that money going to providers that are pushing this DRM locked content, which I will absolutely under no circumstances support, no matter how cheap.
You're projecting. On my PayPal account alone there's ~1k worth of various donations to things I support just in the past year. Maybe half is individuals.
Giving money so a good thing you enjoy can continue existing really isn't a concept that's completely out there for most people. There's a thriving ecosystem of platforms for funding/tipping/donating.
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.
that's so weird.
First I decide to buy my wife an ebook reader for the new years and then Louis Rossman makes a video on Kindle DRM bait and switch. Now this and people praising Kobo. Guess I'm buying a kobo
True, but that DRM is relatively easy to handle, and is sort-of a standard (OK, I know Adobe handles it, but it's not a complete walled garden like Kindle). I can borrow an ebook from my library using my browser, download the DRM'ed file, fulfil it (using Adobe Digital Editions), copy to my ereader. I can buy books from Google and do the same. It's relatively straight forward to strip the DRM if you want to. Because it is reliant on a third-party service (Adobe) that has other clients/interests, it's not as likely to change as quickly or as onerously as Kindle's DRM.
Yes, most books you buy from Kobo do have DRM, but a Kobo handles DRM-free files you may acquire elsewhere (e.g. an author or publisher's site) better than Kindles do. Kobos support epub natively, while Kindle requires some sort of conversion that doesn't always work great.
This, my first eink reader was a Meebook M6, Boox didn't release their 6" model yet. My main selection criteria was "it runs android".
It was a really good reader, Kobo, Kindle and co can just be ewaste as they're designed to be.
Kobo fully supports pointing your library at a Calibre server instance to pull books from. You can also access a bash shell by changing a setting. They're very open devices and IMO quite nice.
I bought one to replace my aging Amazon Kindle Oasis, after the DRM move.
I've loaded it up with the epubs I have in my Calibre library (which ironically contains mostly books I've bought from Amazon before they made stripping DRM unreasonably hard).
Now I won't buy anything from Amazon because I can't strip the DRM, and hence can't read the books on my e-reader of choice.
+1 for Storyteller. It is beyond fantastic to have my progress seamlessly synced between my ebooks and audiobooks.
I’m paying for BookFusion, to have synced cross-platform reading. It’s expensive, but seems to be one of the few cross-platform synced readers that supports the EPUB Media Overlays from Storyteller.
Have you experienced ghosting with your Boox tablet? I’d like to get one, but I know that ghosting would bother me.
Storyteller can sync your progress between devices, although there’s occasionally a bit of a bug with it (will be fixed soon). I sync between my iPhone and boox.
Once you get all the e-ink settings dialed in to make black text more readable on the color e-ink screen, it’s pretty damned good. I never notice ghosting. It’s not very easy to get the settings dialed in though. If you are purely reading on it get a black and white screen if it’s in stock so you aren’t fiddling with it to get text to really be boldly black instead of grey.
The DRM free books they sell work just fine. Ones with DRM must currently be read using their mobile or web apps. Their FAQ mentions their plans to support Kobo in the future.
I liked the idea of Bookshop.org but I was surprised when I ordered something from it, it shipped from somewhere 2,000 miles away from me. I had the misunderstanding it was going to ship from a local bookshop that was actually local to me.
Its possible that the local bookshop didn't have the book, so they had their supplier drop ship it to you, but they still got the margin from the sale? I don't really know anything about how Bookshop.org really works.
At the end of the day it's an affiliate marketing setup, I think all fulfillment is through Ingram, not local bookstores. But it's a B Corp mandated to give 80% or more of profits to independent booksellers.
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.
Some books are available to buy DRM-free if you search a little - sometimes from the publisher or the Kobo store. It's also just possible to buy a book and also download a pirated copy. You're not just hurting Amazon, you're hurting the author and I don't think we want to encourage a world where no one writes books because its impossible to get paid for them.
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'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.
You may not like a product or service, or think it's too expensive, but that doesn'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 is paying for a DRMed book ethical? I agree that buying a DRM free book is clearly right, but if someone is only providing a book in a way that infringes on your rights, why would you give them money for that? If someone sells a book that you want to read and you have the money to pay for it, by all means, buy it. But if you are unable to buy the book because the author decided to publish it in a way so that you cannot legally gain an actual copy of the book – opposed to limited access under the terms set by a company that they can arbitrarily alter at any time, leaving you with nothing but a pinky promise – why would you give them and, out of all the things in the world, Amazon money for that when you then have to retrieve the copy of the book you were after otherwise?
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.
An alternative is to go a library, rent a book, scan it and read on a reader. You are getting the book for free without supporting greedy drm shops.
Btw, in Poland where I live, every ebook shop sells drm free books. Every single one.
Why? Amazon don't sell polish books, yet kindles for the long time were the only readers available, so people had to use a cable to transfer the books. And kindle can't read any other drm than their own. So shops had no choice and it stayed that way.
So maybe a third option (not really but maybe?) is to buy polish version and use Ai to translate it?
Houses are physical objects. If you take it someone else has to lose it. E-Books are digital objects. You can have infinitely many copies of them without anyone losing anything.
And yes, DRM infringes on essential rights, it not only limits what you can do with something you supposedly bought, but takes away your control over your own hardware.
And even more basic is the right not to get frauded. If someone claims to be selling something to you, but then they only give you locked down, perhaps even revokable access to it, then they are defrauding you.
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.
> 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.
Yes, but it's still amazing coming from Amazon. Everyone hates Amazon now but it's hard to argue they're not incredibly successful; how did they get where they are if they're staffed with Dilbert's boss types?
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
I definitely have regrets about my time working at Amazon. Specifically, I wish that I had pushed back more about doing certain things.
Honestly, DRM wasn't even the worst. All the unnecessary user tracking was way worse, in my opinion.
Its impossible to know for sure, because I didn't push back as much as I should have, but I really think that "well if I hadn't, the next person would've" was absolutely true in this case (knowing what I know about all the other engineers that were in the department at the same time as me). I'm not saying the other engineers were bad people, a lot of them were lovely but they definitely had different convictions than I have.
Thats why I bought an android based e-reader that allows me to install whatever reader, copy files wherever I want and basically be in as much control of my devices as these constraining times allow. I will never be a willing hostage to Amazon's shit.
I don't suppose this is going to work well with their comics/graphic novels, will it?
I stopped buying ebooks from Amazon some time ago and switched completely to Kobo (and their much-more-easily-defeated DRM), but Amazon's acquisition of Comixology means they've still got by far the best collection of digital comics on the market.
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.
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
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.
Another reminder that you should always instantly download everything you ever find interesting or valuable. The internet is temporal because it's backed by people and infrastructure which are fallible and fragile in the face of law and talk.
It's hard-coded to the .com store, but that's trivial to change.
The main problem is that every line is treated a `<p>` element. Which means the rendering is askew. That's fine if you're reading a PDF-style document with hard-coded line breaks, but a bit annoying for a reflowable ePub.
Commas are sometimes rendered as apostrophes. Full-stops are also sometimes mid-dots.
Given that the glyph shapes never change, it might be better to "bake in" the shapes rather than manually decoding them. Didn't take too long on my laptop to do the perceptual mapping, but could speed things up for others.
Nevertheless, an excellent demonstration of how pointless DRM is.
Just imagine if they had put the same effort into making a usable Android app, then the author wouldn't have bothered. In some sense it's negligence on Amazons part.
Years ago I dropped buying stuff on Amazon, because they can't match prices, shipping times and the site just invites scams, but I kept buying eBooks, because my old Kindle is sort of amazing. Then they started messing with the Kindle platform as well and now I just buy physical books from local retailers.
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.
> Amazon's Kindle Android app was really buggy and crashed a bunch
This is one of my biggest problems with DRM. It restricts what software you can consume the media on.
I bought a collection of books from Kobo without realizing it was protected by DRM, then realized I could only read them with the kobo reader, which is also really buggy. I really wanted to use a different reader app, but couldn't.
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.
Do the ebooks you're referring to use an image for the ² symbol, rather than css, unicode, or mathjax-generated mathml? A lot of old math books that have been converted from scans do that, for instance, because their OCR was okay at regular text but not good at superscripts, subscripts, or other mathematical symbols.
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.
Can't Amazon be sued for false advertising by having "buy" on the button when it is actually "rent"? #justasking genuine question on interpretation of the term in USA.
Someone is doing that right now - there's a proposed class-action lawsuit [1] that reads in part "On its website, Defendant tells consumers the option to ‘buy’ or ‘purchase’ digital copies of these audiovisual works. But when consumers ‘buy’ digital versions of audiovisual works through Amazon’s website, they do not obtain the full bundle of sticks of rights we traditionally think of as owning property. Instead, they receive ‘non-exclusive, nontransferable, non-sublicensable, limited license’ to access the digital audiovisual work, which is maintained at Defendant’s sole discretion".
And while you’re at it, do you expect to sue Steam, and the App Stores, and most other digital marketplaces owned by billionaire corporations? You’re not going to win those lawsuits with such a flimsy argument.
They could just as well argue that you are not buying the book, but a license to access it under certain conditions. A movie theatre is a comparable example: You say you bought a ticket, not that you rented access to the movie, but it’s only valid for one specific viewing despite being a sale.
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.
Whether it’s correct, and whether you can argue it in court against a multi-trillion dollar company’s legal team are indeed two very different things.
I wouldn’t be confident in court, but I would be confident that most users expect that ebooks they “bought” in the past could be viewed on their new Kobo eBook reader.
> Whether it’s correct, and whether you can argue it in court against a multi-trillion dollar company’s legal team are indeed two very different things.
Exactly. And because this conversation started because someone was asking about suing them, what you can argue in court is what matters for this thread.
I don’t agree with what Amazon is doing and thus don’t buy DRM ebooks from them, but that’s beside the point of the argument.
> I wouldn’t be confident in court
Which was my argument. Everything else you added were tangential arguments no one was refuting in the first place.
> but I would be confident that most users expect that ebooks they “bought” in the past could be viewed on their new Kobo eBook reader.
You think most people who buy books for ereaders expect that when they buy a book for Kindle, they can just load it up on their Kobo? I wouldn’t be that confident without a survey, but I would welcome seeing one.
People don’t seem to have trouble understanding that when you buy an app on iOS, that doesn’t work on Android, and vice-versa. It is plausible they might have the same intuitive understanding regarding the Kindle and Kobo stores.
What are you paying for? I see no mention of paid features anywhere (play store, GitHub readme, website, in-app settings). If the app isn't entirely free, this send pretty misleading...
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.
Unrelated to this article. But somewhat related to parts of the discussion here.
One (niche) way to overcome not being able to download books from Amazon anymore is to get ebooks from a library that supports Overdrive/libby. (Some of?) Those support downloading DRM files directly from the app, which you then can run through Adobe + Calibre. Obviously, this is contingent on book availability and your ability to get a proper library card. But works for me for 90% of the books that I need.
Removing DRM from ebooks is the standard. Otherwise I cannot read them in my Kobo because I didn't (and I will never) register my reader into Adobe, and neither I've created a Kobo account (I bypassed the initial setup).
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's very convenient. Prior to choosing an e-reader, I took one glance at Amazon's DRM-laden offerings and noped out from that ecosystem completely.
When I tried, the only options from Amazon were 'transfer to my device' 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.
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.
I hadn't given the online library much of any thought. I kind of assumed it would not have access to anything I wanted. I decided to take a look, and lo-and-behold, it has pretty much everything I've wanted to read recently. The prices are pretty good, it's like $9 for some and a few on sale for $2 which is a steal.
I appreciate the author's work, and they're absolutely right about the Kindle app. I'm with you though, I don't want to fight tooth and nail with Amazon to have the ability to read a book without their lousy app, to back that book up, and otherwise legally and fairly use it. I don't want to reward Amazon for being aggressively anti-consumer by spending money on their site, at least not for this.
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.
This is an excellent starting point, I have just tried it on "The Origins of Totalitarianism" by Hannah Arendt, and maybe it's because of the numerous bibliographical references, or the the occasional diacritics, but the end result is a bit messy and not really readable.
I think a motivated hacker could definitely improve it in no time.
Still amazing that it works at all, really well done.
Probably discussed elsewhere but you can do this if you jailbreak your Kindle, and either install one of the screensaver hacks or install KOReader and set the last page as your screensaver. A good guide to get started is at https://kindlemodding.org/
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.
I've always wanted it to work this way. However it'd only work if you had a case with the magnetic cover to turn on the device. Otherwise someone would pick up their un-cased kindle with the page lock screen, start reading, and then get confused when they tried to turn the page and nothing happened — the device would still be off!
TBH I might be inclined to put up with the DRM if the Kindle reader was also usable for other things (PDFs, ebooks purchased from other vendors)
But the library management is broken/non existent
So it's not just that you can't read Kindle books on other devices, but the Kindle itself is pretty much useless for reading things you purchased from other stores
Even though it was cheap and 2nd hand, I regret buying this thing
Have things changed recently? Sideloading books has always been well supported in every kindle I’ve owned, though admittedly my current model is 3 or 4 years old.
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.
A gentle reminder that physical books are still available, and quite inexpensive when purchased used from, e.g., library book stores or thrift stores. It has no DRM, has a Paper White™ interface, and even has a nice smell and feel. You can loan it, give it, or sell it to any human without hassle or legal risk to yourself or them. You can highlight, add notes ("marginalia"), fold the corner of a page for a bookmark. Over time your copy of a book will accumulate incidental stains and marks, developing an identity of it's own. What's even more remarkable is that you own your copy, and it cannot be remotely changed, deleted, or corrupted or your access revoked.
True, but DRM free books in digital form have a lot more potential utility for non-genius types like myself. Just a good search engine over the text is a huge win before even considering the standard reader features like notes and book marks. With LLMs I can imagine testing my retention of a chapter by asking it where my recollection is wrong or short and having it cite paragraphs in support of its judgement. All of this progress is impeded by the big ebook sellers, but is or will be fulfilled by inde developers at least for those of us that can go to yandex, plug in a title and get a DRM free epub.
I had a kindle with buttons once, and it was good.
Then, I bought a touchscreen kindle paperwhite, and found out that every time you change books it complains that it cant find the cloud, and won't let you categorize anything unless you register it and be online.
That's enough Amazon for me, no point in finding out a second time for hundreds of dollars that they still piss me off.
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.
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?
You can sideload books on Kobo over USB they parse the expected formats epub/pdf/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 & comics.
My reader Elipsa 2e is also great for taking notes and supports notes in book pages, though that specific model isn't supported by the custom firmware.
As a counterpoint, I bought a kobo (clara?) two years ago, and ended up hating it. It was a lot of minor things that added up. Spuriously turning on in my pocket/bag constantly and ruining progress (the power-on button was poorly placed and very sensitive). Forcing a single font for every book. Page turns were often noticeably slow. Libby/Overdrive integration often spuriously re-downloaded books and lost my progress.
It was never clear to me whether I got unlucky with a bad device or not. But none of my issues screamed 'broken' rather than just 'annoying' so I assumed it was normal.
I dislike the kindle ecosystem as much as the next person, but I've found the hardware so much better and more reliable that I ended up going back to kindle.
The positive vibes in these comments are leading me to reevaluate and think that maybe something was indeed wrong with my device.
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.
Last time (couple of months ago) I could still claw the book back from my physical kindle device and then deDRM it but the whole process changes from year to year and it's always a great frustration for me (it's backup time! oh no). Looked around what alternatives are there, but I don't want to trade one DRM process for another (even if it's easier to do on a Kobo branded device).
Here in Eastern Europe the local ebooks have no DRM (just a "please don't steal this" message or something similar), but my cynical side says we have like 10 contemporary writers and maybe 20 readers, it's not a big business to begin with. Physical books are heavy, hard to store/pack/move and are quite expensive to ship here - I guess I can't have a cake and eat it as well (for cheap, low effort baking at least).
> So let me get this straight:
I paid money for this book
One can say that no DRM doesn’t bring issues but one can also say that there is a very polarized approach from the post author on what he believes he is entitled to depending on the situation they bring themselves to.
I live in unbelievably hot and humid Singapore and buying physical books is essentially "not possible". Unless I blast the AC in my house 24/7, all books will eventually succumb to mould.
I don't think its dumb from a business point of view. You've got to make promises to the editors that the platform is going to drive the sales up, not down.
I personally have bought many fewer books over the last couple of years, from amazon, as they've made it harder and harder to, you know, read the books I've paid for.
Pirating books is not hard. They're probably the smallest possible thing that people are interested in copying with the broadest variation in acceptable formats.
I know I'm screaming into the void, but if I'm paying real money why is the experience from piracy sites better?
Genuinely curious to hear why you think they make it harder and harder to read books? I've been using my Kindle daily since 2017. I read on both the Kindle device (Paperwhite and vanilla), the iPad and iPhone app, and occasionally the web reader.
I've never experienced issues with them that break the reading experience. The one issue I occasionally run into is that the book progress doesn't sync when I open the app and I have to click "sync now" which sometimes is blazingly fast and sometimes takes like a minute.
I can't imagine migrating away from Kindle now, it's probably one of my favourite devices and the Kindle is my favourite way to read.
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.
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.
It doesn’t matter. A straightforward example is that no matter how much UX you do, you can’t offer a listing that the creator sold exclusively to someone else.
But fortunately, with AI content starting to become better we will be able to transform regular people into IP maximalists arguing that copyright protection schemes should be embedded even more than they are today.
Yeah it’s a classic tragedy of the commons. Any individual gains from piracy. C’est la vie. As HNers are proud to say: Your business model is not my problem.
I had a jailbreaked kindle a while back, but did update it by mistake and couldn't make it work again (didn't try that much honestly) and I switched to boox (which is android based e-reader)
I use it with my self-hosted calibre-web where I can sync my books to both KOReader on my boox and phone with the OPDS protocol and I use syncthing to sync my progress and highlights too ..
it's a bit of work to set up but I know it will work for a very long time, where with your solution, I wonder how long before Amazon will make it harder yet again?
Having lived through the Amazon Kindle/ebook rise and fall shit show it's safe to say I will never ever pay to buy or rent or whatever they call it for stuff I can get for free from the internet, because when doing the latter I would never need to reverse engineer bs systems just to get what I paid for.
Because its rendering to bookerly or an analogue a perceptual hash looks like an amazingly good fit. But in general, how applicable would that be to OCR because if you can declare 90% of the text is courier, then it feels like an enormously good way to get over the hump.
I wondered if he was just tuning to the best algorithm for his corner case, but it's one of the algorithms in a decent OCR package anyway?
Impressive. As a bootstrapping founder I live frugally. But I buy and read a loot of books on Kindle. Books give so much value compared to the cost/price. And the convenience of e-books/kindle makes the other option not worth the hassle.
Can someone tell me another effective way to combat book piracy that is not Amazon's way?
I don't understand the author complainant. If you don't like the app, don't use it! Pirate it all you want I don't care, but don't say it's because you didn't like the app. You want books? Buy them physically or find another way to obtain them digitally.
There are authors to these books on Kindle, and they don't want their books free on the internet, it's Amazon's jobs to combat this. They have no choice but to DRM.
> Can someone tell me another effective way to combat book piracy that is not Amazon's way?
There simply no effective way to lock a book from copy while being able to read it. It will simply slow the process to free the book, at worst it will result in error or information loss (some links and fancy layout)
> There are authors to these books on Kindle, and they don't want their books free on the internet, it's Amazon's jobs to combat this. They have no choice but to DRM
We, as a civilisation, don't have to respect their wish. Free (as in beer) books are a necessity for a lot of people, and free (as in speak) book should be the norm, DRM introduce plenty of problem fir thé reader, with not a single added value for the customer.
> 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.
They do have choice in the DRM they choose and how it's implemented. The DRM should expire when copyright protection expires and the DRM should be standardized so that I could move my books anywhere I want and read them on most readers, just like DVD and Blu-Ray disks.
It's extra distracting because it doesn't even read like normal LLM prose, but it's close enough to feel off.
The frequent use of bold emphasis, lists, and subject-only rhetorical questions ("Those tiny m3,1 m1,6 m-4,-7 commands? They're micro-MoveTo operations.") are classic LLM-speak, but they're used in such a way that makes me doubt that OP actually used an LLM to write this. I think that OP's natural prose just happens to be stylistically pretty similar to that of an LLM.
It's kind of sad that what were once signs of high effort and dedication (e.g. em-dashes) are now signs of low effort and dishonesty, despite the fact that people still use them in human writing.
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
At one point I did the same for a comic app which was getting the earliest releases of a manga I wanted to read; I still don't read Japanese but was the buyer for my translation circle. They had similar forms of obscure obfuscation; They scrambled the image into chunks, then you got a metadata that remapped it into a finished image. Raw, it looked like one of those slide puzzles.
Over the course of a couple years they updated their scrambling; First to randomize the size of the regions, then to make them triangular instead of rectangular. It was an interesting if tedious challenge to reverse engineer.
>I paid money for this book
>I can only read it in Amazon's broken app
>I can't download it
>I can't back it up
>I don't actually own it
>Amazon can delete it whenever they want
good that you didn't read the terms of amazon's kindle business model before buying that book; all that delicious rage and the interesting knowledge it spurred would have been lost to the world. tbh, i would have expected them to be more sophisticated. good job and kudos, enjoy your well earned book, it's yours now!
sadly i have no use for this, the only few books i ever bought on amazon were paperback, used and in good condition. good deals. but the mere fact that a provider requires me to use specific software to access content is simply unacceptable, making a detailed reading of their absurdly dystopian terms and conditions unnecessary.
i use amazon prime. for me it's very worth it just for the delivery savings as i live in a remote area. it includes access to their video streaming service. one day i decided to try it just to see what was there. i was immediately prompted with a download for some mandatory viewer/drm/codec. not going to happen, baby, so i just closed the tab, never bothered with it again and have the feeling that nothing of value was lost.
I hate Amazon's decision to do this. It doesn't even make business sense. You can't tell me they're making that much profit off of Kindles that it makes sense. The book sales have got to be worth more than that in the long run.
A lot of authors only ever offer on Amazon now, which leaves those of us without Kindles (I love my Kobo) in a difficult spot.
Frankly I would write it as anti-competitive. How are other e-reader companies supposed to survive when Amazon owns all the e-books and can just decide that only their e-readers are allowed? No one else has even a fraction of the market.
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.
Off-topic: was this article at least partly generated using an LLM?
I ask not as a snark, since the content is genuinely interesting, but out of curiosity. The style seems very LLM: lots of bullet points, titles with sections typical of LLMs, sentences like "Why this is perfect for <thing>", "Why this doesn't work", etc. It matches the tone and style of everything that an LLM spits out at me.
I have the same problem with O'Reilly / Safari ... I don't enjoy using the apps and find they get in the way of the reading experience, plus it's a very expensive subscription. Initially, its hard to tell if rendering problems are just a bad conversion or if the text rendering engine is just buggy / borked.
But there were plenty of other bugs like bookshelf management getting corrupted.
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.
I actually wrote the code to make this work with screen readers, back when I worked for Kindle in 2018.
I even got to test it out with a few Amazon employees who were blind, which was a really cool experience!
We added some hidden divs which had the plaintext version for screenreaders. For whatever reason, upper management was ok with the plaintext being scrapable, as long as the formatted version couldn't be scraped.
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.
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.
Hell hath no fury like an engineer angered! This was such a good read and epitomizes hacking:
"Was it worth it? To read one book? No. To prove a point? Absolutely. To learn about SVG rendering, perceptual hashing, and font metrics? Probably yes."
This is essentially how I find myself defending a lot of my DIY stuff.
"Wait, you work in tech, why would you ever work on your own car when you can clearly pay someone else to do it???"
Because I like to learn things.
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.
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.
Agreed, that is the same way I view things. There is also the great feeling of satisfaction when you finish repairing your own stuff.
More than that, I know every bolt is tight, every piece is inspected, and it connects me to the machine.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, if you haven't read it
I hate not understanding things. I hate pricing that I do not understand.
I hope they don't get in trouble for publicising how to defeat the DRM...
Me too. When they removed the option to download books I liberated everything I had ever bought, moved to Kavita+koreader and will never buy a kindle book again.
I jailbroke both kindles. And use koreader on them which now supports progress sync with Kavita which is amazing! So I don't really lose functionality.
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.
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.
I will have to look into kavita; I already use koreader for my reading.
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.
Since the last major jailbreak for Kindle devices was released, I've been using Koreader as well on my Scribe. I have progress syncing setup with Hardcover (Goodreads alternative) instead, however. Only downside is their recommendations don't seem to be well geared to my interests at this point, but hopefully that'll change in the future as more use the service.
The Kindle DRM situation is really bad right now. It used to be possible to install the DeDRM plugin in Calibre and get decrypted KFX files from the Kindle for PC application. That hasn't been possible since early 2025. The pros can still break it but they aren't sharing with the rest of the class anymore.
> Even the maintainer of the DeDRM plugin has gone underground, refraining from issuing an official new release out of concern that Amazon will simply slap it down.
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?p=4516384#p...
> This works for most Kindle books currently, but Amazon is cracking down hard on the workarounds lately. So free any books you need to asap.
https://github.com/apprenticeharper/DeDRM_tools/discussions/...
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)
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.
The new crack is still shared publicly if you're willing to make some minimal effort to look for it.
The solution is being shared in the very forum thread you linked, but apparently didn't read.
Automatic screenshots and OCR still work well enough.
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.
For novels where you just want the text it is fine and you can reformat the text as you like.
I can always retypeset the text... but I'm not a professional editor/typesetter. You often lose parts/phrases/words the author wanted emphasized with italic and bold. Blockquotes can be gone. Even paragraph indentations in the worst offenders. I couldn't recreate that if I tried. Lord forbid there's a list/table/figure (even in some of the fiction I've read, they'll have those... weirdo science fiction novels, after all). I've gotten pretty good at fixing epubs with Calibre's editor, some of these are salvageable. Just finished with one where they split the chapters wrong (not at the chapter headings, but in between for some reason). And I'll often go get a high-res cover image off the publisher's website; they like to use bad sized-for-favicon scans off a random google image search for some reason.
But for me, the bad OCR ebooks can be painful to read.
The best OCR tool I have ever used is Editable Text and Images in Adobe Acrobat. It can actually replace text in place with a dynamically generated vector font that matches the original font. It is actually really impressive.
May be of interest to this thread - I created a script that drives the Kindle web reader, captures screenshots, runs OCR, and creates an ePub - this wouldn't be as good as the pixelmelt solution, as it requires OCR.
Overview: https://www.hotelexistence.ca/remove-drm-with-kindleocrer/ (there's a sample conversion at the bottom, so you can see if it works "good enough" for your purposes)
Script: https://github.com/raudette/kindleOCRer
In action: https://youtu.be/3-07wMCKlkw
I have to say that I usually only download ebooks illegally when the DRM stops me reading them!
I only have Linux machines at my disposal and I have a PocketBook. The device is nice, but the store is truly abysmal. Often there is some adobe based DRM on books I want to buy and I never got it to work with my ereader.
I just gave up and pirate them now, unless there is a DRM free version (authors like Ruther Bregman and Cory Doctorow provide them.)
It used to be quite easy to strip DRM from kindle books, with my old kindle keybaord, so in the past I always bought a lot of ebooks from Amazon. But now I can't get them on my device anymore. A true shame, the Amazon ebook store really has all the books.
This whole situation p**es me off enough to not feel bad about pirating.
Adobe DRM is relatively easy to strip. It's my go-to fallback when I can't find a DRM-free purchase somewhere.
I have a Kobo... I don't remember the model name. But the thing I like best about it, is that I never had to sign into anything to use it. (There is a sign-in/create account screen, but this is easily bypassed if you know how to edit an sqlite file.) Once I have an ebook in DRM-free ePub, I just plug it into my computer, copy it over in the file manager, and then just start reading. No Calibre or any other special software needed.
>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.
Fun fact: this is one of the few situations in the US where a prosecutor could claim that this is criminal speech (though I hope and trust they would not, and if it did it would get thrown out by any court respecting the First Amendment).
Not a civil issue, like libel or fraud, but the sort of talk that can get a policeman to come and drag you off to jail. If you've ever wondered why DRM is so roundly hated by engineers of a certain age, it's because not only it dumb makework that they are required to implement, not only is it extremely irritating to discover it interfering with your own computer, but if you do effectively point out how dumb, irritating, and eminently circumventable it is, they made it against the law to even tell anyone.
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/licensing-scheme-fair-use...
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't make cryptography exports (software exports) illegal
-> what actually IS illegal to export?
-> munitions!
-> let's just declare that cryptography is "munitions"
-> problem solved
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
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
My university had that book, I think it can be used as a weapon actually, given its weight.
I wonder what kind of gun uses books as munition.
This one https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Junk_Jet_(Fallout_4)
a librarigun
Human arms, projecting it into someone's else head as hard as they can. :)
Can't you stick about anything heavy to use as munitions for a cannon?
As far as legal hacks go I always liked xkcd joke on the matter.
https://xkcd.com/504/
If it is a munition the US government has limitations on it's actions controlling it covered under the 2nd amendment to the constitution.
In reality it nor the first amendment(freedom of speech) hack probably would not work. The limitation was on exporting strong crypto, not using or importing it. It was stupid and impossible to control. But I would guess any charges would be espionage(illegal speech) and smuggling(illegal goods). regardless of how you packaged it.
Was a t shirt too. I regret not getting a hold of one back then.
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.
So it can refer to people and what is in their minds too?
Anyway I'm not surprised. This kind of pedantry is what lawyers do for a living.
Yes, it can, and I thank God because I wouldn't want more nuclear powers than what the world already has.
If Ukraine did not retire their nuclear weapons... (Russia was surprisingly all too happy to oblige)
All I am saying is that I am not sure it's so simple: sure, if everyone had them, the risk that there is some lunatic crazy enough to actually put them to use rises; but it also potentially stops a bunch of wars, especially bigger countries going after smaller ones.
Yes kind of. The "born secret" doctrine says all knowledge related to the creation of nuclear weapons, ranging from nuclear fusion to the production of fissile material, as “born classified".
The doctrine has never been tested in court as no case involving it has gone to trail.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_secret
I've definitely figured some things out about nuclear weapons and proliferation that I've never told anyone because of that doctrine. I met a real nuclear engineer at a conference and had dinner and he told me about how he was concerned that people would nick Np237 from a fuel reprocessing system to make nuclear weapons and I pointed out that it was OK to talk about that because I'd seen it in the literature.
> So it can refer to people and what is in their minds too?
You're being needlessly obtuse. If you bother to learn about the topic, you'll understand it's about distributing software.
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.
They had a great add then (I also had a lot of G4’s ;-)
https://youtu.be/l2ThMmgQdpE
> 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?
The lawmakers did not have any involvement. The executive branch unilaterally abused its power to declare that encryption was a munition, to work around the fact it had no other power to restrict it without convincing the legislature to actually make a law.
If you go by the common interpretation of "munitions" and by and large the contents of that list, then it clearly does was not intended to include mathematics.
Like net neutrality and DACA.
‘Lawmakers’ fixed no problems, no laws were made. Enforcers leveraged existing laws in ways that are clearly not intended purposed for their own goals; that will always be ripe for abuse and must be discouraged. Cryptography is not a munition.
The word "need" is doing some heavy lifting. "Desire" or "wish" seems more appropriate.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
The law says “no person shall circumvent” DRM, and later prohibits the distribution of “technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof” to break DRM. It’s worded pretty carefully to avoid prohibiting more traditional forms of speech like this post, and as far as I’m aware has never been used in the manner you suggest.
> 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.
This is going to date me, but I had a t-shirt with basically a code-golf version of DeCSS printed on it and it said "This shirt is illegal" on it or something like that. I never actually wore it in public.
Oh, I definitely wore my Perl RSA "This shirt is a munition" T-shirt.
http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/shirt/
DeCSS was also available in DNS txt records for a while circa 2000.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6283084
There's a site somewhere that has various ASCII art renditions of that code. It's on my project list to print some of those on some shirts :P
The USA has a lot of criminalised speech, despite the 1A. The most obvious historical example is "I am going to assassinate the president tomorrow at noon", but recently there have been a lot more things you can't say, such as "Fuck Donald Trump" which got someone arrested and deported.
One can have a visa revoked for any arbitrary reason, as they are a guest in the country and not a citizen.
But yes, obviously serious threats of violence are not protected speech.
The First Amendment applies to any person in the United States, not just citizens. Visas should not be able to be revoked for "any arbitrary reason".
The fact that your statement is becoming more and more true in the United States is an indictment.
I wouldn't be surprised if publishing circumvention code would be argued in court to be violence against earning money for political oriented books (spending money is a necessary and inseparable part of political communication).
relevant article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number
Right, but as confirmed over and over and over again, non-citizens also have the right to 1st amendment, same as citizens.
This is the general problem with having a bunch of laws sitting around that allow the government to punish people for things ordinary people regularly do, but then exercise the "discretion" not to punish them until they do something the government doesn't like.
Because then you don't really have any rights. They can't formally punish you for speech but they can punish you for breaking the same unrelated law a million other people broke without knowing and that only you were prosecuted for, "coincidentally" right after you said something they didn't like.
They do have that right, but at the same time, a chaotic and vindictive adminstration can revoke the visa of, and then physically abduct, a non-citizen. They can then make statements that plainly make it clear they did that because of what the non-citizen wrote.
They can also contravene a number of other legal safeguards along the way, and disregard judges' orders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_R%C3%BCmeysa_%C3%...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Rasha_Alawieh
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Mahmoud_Khalil
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Mohsen_Mahdawi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activist_deportations_in_the_s...
It appears the US has elected an administration that wants to turn the country into a lawless shithole, where the powerful do whatever the fuck they want, and they deliberately fuck with laws and safeguards, and deliberately target their political enemies (e.g. student activists), to flex how powerful they are.
> They can then make statements that plainly make it clear they did that because of what the non-citizen wrote.
I kind of hate the thing where people want to make this the part that matters, because Trump is a massive outlier who doesn't care about that and says the thing he's not supposed to say.
But the people who still do the prosecution under the pretext and then don't admit to why are even worse, because they're doing the same thing and then lying about it on top of that. If all you do is punish people for not lying, that's not going to solve anything. You need to take away their ability to trump up charges against random people.
Norm MacDonald: There's one comedian who said to me that the worst part of the Cosby thing is the hypocrisy, but I disagree.
Jerry Seinfeld: You disagree?
Norm MacDonald: Yeah, I thought it was the raping.
Which would explain why foreign tourists to the US have been decreasing recently.
These two things aren't even remotely in the same category. Committing a crime, then documenting how you committed that crime and then publishing the instructions for others to repeat that crime with the clear intent to have others repeat that crime, has nothing to do with saying a bunch of words that you haven't even acted on.
Dispute that this should constitute a crime as much as you want (and please, do. Take it to court, get the laws changed, go into politics, get the US fixed, this is bullshit) but for as long as it is: being charged with a crime for "doing crime and teaching others to do the same crime" is not a first amendment violation.
There aren't many words in the first amendment, and none of them are "unless you're telling someone how to commit a crime"
The current regime (before it was a regime) got away with a lot of very bad speech because "the first amendment says all speech is allowed, no matter what" and should be made to hold everyone to the same standard they hold themselves to.
> I'll do you one better
I think this is a weaker example.
Which part of the text "You can get DeCSS from http://lemuria.org/~tom/DeCSS/" on a website constitutes distribution of "technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof" ?
Judge Kaplan very likely went beyond what the law allows, in issuing the injunction against Eric Corley for even _adding a hyperlink_ to the DeCSS code on his website.
However, we don't know this for sure, because Corley did not take this to the Supreme Court. There is a chance that the SCOTUS would have accepted the case, and found that neither a hyperlink to computer source code, nor computer source code itself, constitutes "technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof"... but at the same time, maybe they wouldn't accept it, and maybe they would but it'd cost a lot of money Corley didn't have to see the case through. So who knows? Corley seemed satisfied enough that, even though he was personally enjoined from linking to DeCSS, it nonetheless spread like wildfire all over the world, and DVDs were effectively copyable from that day forward.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd.
Found not guilty, but he was charged and tried.
Being found not guilty supports my contention. But that case was about distributing circumvention software, not traditional speech. Obviously distributing software that bypasses DRM is directly addressed by the law.
> Being found not guilty supports my contention.
It does, but you're still bankrupt.
> Being found not guilty supports my contention.
Not necessarily. A cynical modern legal strategy is to bombard people with frivolous legal actions that only the well-heeled can afford. Defendants can argue that claims are baseless or frivolous, but to make that argument, they must hire a lawyer and appear in court.
To see my point, look at the number of frivolous prosecutions now being launched by ... ah, never mind, I don't want to get political.
But individuals have been successfully prosecuted for "aiding and abetting" violations of the DMCA, where speech was a material element of the proscribed behavior. Oh, and -- IANAL.
> A cynical modern legal strategy is to bombard people with frivolous legal actions that only the well-heeled can afford
Why only describe them and not go for the easiest example: Nintendo.
A lot of the people Nintendo goes after make money with one sort of piracy or another.
You could do the same thing DMCA or not.
You could, but having a law that is adjacent makes it dramatically harder and more expensive to defend yourself against the bogus accusations.
The Process is the Punishment
> Being found not guilty supports my contention.
Not necessarily. Being found not guilty just means that the facts of that specific case, as determined by the jury, did not fit a guilty verdict. It doesn't mean that someone who did a similar or analogous thing couldn't be prosecuted under the same law and found guilty.
In USA the trial itself is a punishment.
Kafka would be proud/horrified.
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.
I was thinking along the same lines. One of the many places that laws are going to have to catch up to reality. I’m 90% sure that current frontier models could turn this post into a working implementation with a good feedback loop.
> that laws are going to have to catch up to reality
Reality is moving away from states, and is now moving faster than legacy "laws" can ever hope to catch up.
That's a big part of what's fueling the wave of abandonment of DRM. I mostly play bluegrass - and given the lineal connection between traditional music and internet freedom, it probably comes as no surprise - but every serious bluegrass album is DRM-free now. Every grammy winner in the bluegrass and americana categories since at least 2020 has been DRM-free.
https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/DRM-free
I tried this and got plausible looking python code based on just the web page link. Can't test it as I'm travelling without my laptop.
> 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.
I remember it well. DeCSS was code, not prose. I maintain that an English description of the decryption process without the key would not be liable.
been there, done that, got the t-shirt
Downvotes from people who've never seen a DeCSS T-shirt?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 BF
REDACTED
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number
Even more obvious in decimal:
13256278887989457651018865901401704639
REDACTED
13256278887989457651018865901401704641
The post includes a link to a GitHub repository containing code to circumvent the DRM, which probably counts as "technology" and "component".
I covered that in my comment. It’s likely the code violates § 1201 but I doubt the post does. And linking to infringing content is not legally the same thing as publishing it.
2600 got enjoined from linking to DeCSS and that got upheld on appeal, on the basis that linking violated the DMCA's anti-trafficking provisions. From the district court case:
> Defendants then linked their site to those "mirror" sites, after first checking to ensure that the mirror sites in fact were posting DeCSS or something that looked like it, and proclaimed on their own site that DeCSS could be had by clicking on the hyperlinks on defendants' site. By doing so, they offered, provided or otherwise trafficked in DeCSS.
The appeal was mostly about whether the DMCA and/or the specific injunction in question violated the First Amendment, and the court found that it didn't.
(Universal City Studios vs. Reimerdes at the district court level, Universal City Studios v. Corley at the circuit)
Where’s the link? Did he remove it, or am I missing some clever obfuscation of his own? (I’m on mobile so maybe the link isn’t obvious.)
Yes, looks like it's been removed. It used to be at https://github.com/PixelMelt/amazon_book_downloader
Aww that’s disappointing. Fun project.
Is this the code? https://github.com/gudvardur/amazon_book_downloader
Yes. FWIW, as of a few minutes ago when I cloned this one, all the non-git files have the same hashes as the copy of the original I cloned when it was still up.
(to clarify, I wasn't talking about any git-specific hashes, just regular sha2/blake2b hashes of python, json, and font files. However, the two sha1 commit hashes in the git history match as well.)
These commit sha's do not match the original:
4526863 - Initial commit
Where are you getting that hex prefix from?
Sorry, I don't comment very often and not trolling. I had GitHub open to the repo on my phone and seeing that it had been taken down grabbed a screenshot of the page https://imgur.com/a/IzUA8mP
The HN thread began on Oct 16 at 20:22 Z. If you visited that github page instantly and took that screenshot instantly, even accounting for 21 hours due to rounding, the commit in that screenshot had to be after Oct 15 23:22.
The repo as I and many other people cloned it has the first commit ("first commit", not "initial commit") at Oct 12 23:20 Z, and the "done" commit at Oct 15 19:37 Z.
A likely explanation is that pixelmelt squashed both commits at or after they put up the blog post, but didn't force-push the rewritten history to github until it hit HN and blew up.
That's plausible. In the version of the repository I saw there was a GPL license file. The new repository does not have that.
This is a weird thing with how GitHub forks work. All the objects within a fork network are stored within a global namespace, so you can change the repository name in the URL and find objects that appear to belong to one repository despite being unique to a fork.
I think that the link is already gone
It does prevent linking to code though.
I wonder when/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 :
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've noticed that I recently started to use "I remember" more and more on the hackernews. I'm getting old.
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
Yeah, I think this or another similar "copy protection" was my inspiration...
Tangentially related to the question of legality of prose describing otherwise illegal instructions, I'm reminded of the epic DeCSS haiku [1]. (CSS here being 90's era DVD DRM).
[1] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/decss-haiku.txt
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
Layout engines back then were pretty bad, and often resulted in scrambled web pages.
OTOH this is not DRM nor copy protection. It is just obfuscation.
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]:
with these definitions[2]: I think (A) pretty clearly applies: the glyphs being randomized in each request obviously counts as being "scrambled", 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's font.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.
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/movie/book/whatever.
> 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
yeah, in 150 years Disney bought all rights to library of congress
Would private fan servers qualify as fair use once wow is in the public domain?
>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
Then do that. It's not my job to try to argue your side of things. No one does that, as you well know, so my argument not only stands, but wins.
>Moreover how would you even define what "DRM" is?
Anything that interferes with copying the work in question.
>Is spotify refusing to provide a .mp3 file download for their streaming service a "DRM"?
Yes. This is an obnoxiously juvenile question. The nature of streaming services is that they send the media to the node (on demand). If that is done in a way that makes it difficult to play it a second time except to "stream" it again, you can hardly claim this is incidental. They go to great lengths to prevent it.
>For games, is it "DRM" to add mandatory online requirements even for single player?
Again, yes. There is no other purpose to such a requirement, and no one makes it a secret that this is done specifically to thwart so-called "piracy" attempts.
>What if there's an ostensible reason for the online requirement, like if the gameplay is computed server-side a-la world of warcraft?
You mean like with Blizzard, where they sued the programmers who did bnetd and prevented people from connecting to third party servers which computed gameplay? That wasn't even done to further piracy, by the way, they were just being dicks.
> Moreover how would you even define what "DRM" is? Is spotify refusing to provide a .mp3 file download for their streaming service a "DRM"?
This is a nonsensical complaint, because the actually existing DMCA already conditions legal consequences on whether DRM is present.
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.
>Why rules for us but not for them?
Fair use exists for both people and corporations. Just because a corporation copies something in a way that is fre use, that doesn't mean that people should be able to freely copy it.
How could training of AI models possibly be considered fair use?
The court said it was.
Equally cynically, it's fair use because if it isn't, the entire economy collapses overnight.
Then the court is either stupid or subservient to corporate interests. In both of these cases they deserve zero respect.
> Equally cynically, it's fair use because if it isn't, the entire economy collapses overnight.
Sounds about right. If they had the moral fortitude to apply the laws as they were supposed to, they'd do the right thing and if it collapses the economy then so be it. The fact they didn't reveals political calculation in their judgements.
When laws are stripped of their moral advantage, resistance to laws, courts and authorities becomes civil disobedience and a moral imperative of citizens. We cannot have mutually exclusive ideas existing simultaneously. That's how we get distortions like "you citizen must pay outta the nose for everything but the elite corporations can do whatever they want with complete impunity". The only acceptable way for them to resolve their conundrum is to either hold corporations accountable for their copyright infringement or abolish copyright for all. Anything else can and should cause civil unrest.
> Copyright itself should be abolished straight up.
I wouldn't go that far. 18 months is long enough though.
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.
I don't know what state it's in (haven't used it in years), but do apprenticealf's DeDRM tools, which has been forked to nodrm/DeDRM_tools, still handle kindle PC app downloads? Tinkering with old versions of the PC app might work even if the current version doesn't, and there's a registry hack to disable kfx downloading and get azw3 instead, which worked at some point... it's outlined in apprenticealf's DeDRM repo, at the wiki link provided at the top of the repo's README, in the short section saying it's no longer maintained.
That would provide a closer-to-original version of the ebook, rather than just a visually similar one.
That any of this is necessary at all is absurd. Hats off to anyone with the patience to bypass Amazon's DRM rather than giving up on the Amazon ebook ecosystem entirely.
The thing that killed the download -> crack DRM workflow is that Amazon removed the "download and transfer via USB" option. I haven't bought an ebook from Amazon since.
The only viable option would be to buy the book and then pirate a de-DRM'd copy.
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.
Here is a breakdown of how much money the author gets (from Fabien Sanglard):
https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/
When I upload the PDF on Amazon, a minimal price is automatically calculated. In the case of the DOOM, Amazon sets the minimal price at $51.35.
There is a slider which authors can use in order to add their "share" on top of Amazon price. I have added $3.88 which Amazon also takes a cut on. The result is $1.59 royalty and $0.77 profit per book sold.
The hell...
Isn't he talking about the print copy?
Print copy: 57% of the price
Amazon: 40% of the price
Author: 3% of the price (half of which goes to taxes)
He doesn't have to get 3%. He could raise the price so he gets more.
Color printed books are expensive, but I think he chose the premium color print option rather than the standard color print option. You can try it out: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/royalty-calculator { pages: 432, dimensions: 7.5"x9.25" } Roughly $18 for basic color and $36 for premium color (which probably also means heavier, higher quality paper).
Amazon takes 40%. Barnes and Noble Press takes 45% for self-published books, and their printing costs are within a couple dollars. Compare to typical retailer+distributor costs of >50% while authors get <15%.
The economics of retail print publishing and logistics don't seem to work out at higher author royalty rates. Authors who don't want to give up 40% of list price always have the option to handle printing, shipping, and accounting themselves, selling on ebay or from their own website.
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.
Then I have a physical book to deal with.
Just leave it laying around somewhere. It makes you look erudite.
https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-physical-donat...
https://apps.apple.com/app/id1668658774 can be used to verify if they require a physical copy.
(usps bound printed matter is usually least expensive when shipping books)
You might just give it to the public library.
Or, you might find the author online and see if they have some sort of donation mechanism set up. It's very common these days for a lot of professionals, but some authors are old school.
Donate it to a library so other people can know about it.
Giving the physical book away kinda defeats the spirit of buy + pirate.
You are still buying a copy, that I imagine is the practical effect you want.
You don't keep proof, though, and probably isn't allowed to keep a backup after you give the book away. But most countries laws don't care about any of this (and it's not a backup).
If you pirate then re-sell the book to a friend and they do the same, only one copy ever gets bought but everyone gets access forever.
Whereas of everyone buys new, keeps the book, and pirates, the author isn't going to see much negative impact.
Hanging on to the "proof" is important. Otherwise all you really prove is that you paid money to touch a physical copy.
The horror!
Many people live in small apartments. The footprint of a single physical book may be negligible but five hundred books can become a logistical nightmare.
That's what they said they would do. They would buy the physical book and then pirate an ebook copy that's been de-DRMed.
For those with an old Kindle, couldn't you download it onto the Kindle and then pull it off of there via USB?
That sounds simple, but wouldn't the ebook you "pulled off" the Kindle still be in Amazon's format with DRM? I don't think this solves the original problem.
I tried to do this recently but discovered that the DRM algorithm changed and I couldn't use the standard de-DRM tools.
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.
It will handle downloads for older versions of the PC app, but the supported version won't download any books released after April 2025.
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
Also Libation for Audible books.
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's the world we live in.
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'm sure you're right, but I'm not sure I care. I mean obviously I would prefer they give credit where it's due, but even writing those tools in the first place is a felony in some countries. It's not like they're robbing someone of their livelihood and the value they add by putting Kobo, Kindle, Nook, and Adobe all in one place with a built-in format convertor is really high.
I just paid for it, downloaded the kindle app, and dragged the .awz8 file and it says it doesn't support the format!
I think you might be doing something wrong then? Maybe you have the wrong file? The Kindle For PC app should always give you azw files, not azw8 (even if it does use the newer format they're all just named azw).
It should show up in the epubor app on the Kindle tab after you install the kindle app and used it to download your books. No need to drag and drop from the file system it's all right there in the app. It finds Kindle, Kobo, etc and lists them.
EDIT - Make sure you leave the Kindle app running. I think it needs to be able to read the keys from memory or something.
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.
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)
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.
No.
For one thing, DRM also works in Amazon's favour (reselling multiple copies)
For another, DRM is a pretty big sticking point for copyright holders, music, text, whatever. It's the one big thing that publishers all think that their business model depends on
Arguably not so much with music anymore given the prolific nature of lossless DRM free downloads available for purchase.
Personally, I buy more music now than any other time in my life: high quality sources playable on all my devices.
Most music is sold without digital restrictions, and many video games are also sold without digital restrictions.
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'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's over 100 hours of entertainment. It's literally a ratio of 10 CENTS per hour of entertainment.
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.
I don't see much of an ethical problem with downloading a pirated version of an ebook that you already paid for but can no longer access. If I did that, I'd have no problem sleeping at night.
Afaik, format shifting for convince is legal so long as you're Anthropic.
It was mostly a passing mention in the lawsuit against them where the damages are just for pirating books they didn't also buy. The fact that they bought used books and scanned them since its cheaper than ebooks was allowed by the court.
I think the key part was they scanned the books then destroyed the originals. I suppose the analog here would be to log into Amazon and delete the purchased ebooks.
I think they would've been allowed to do the scanning even without destroying the originals. AFAIK destroying the originals was just done to facilitate scanning — they needed the pages to be loose sheets, not bound.
They scanned then shredded the books so that publishers couldn't claim an unauthorized copy was made. All Anthropic did was a format shift which is allowed.
I agree with that
Yes, there should have been a law that required interoperable DRM.
At least you can transfer movies around different services. It’s a shame you can’t with books.
Ironically I worked on the project to enable that cross-provider interop for movies...
If there was an actual market demand for this then Kindle could license the technology.
It should be put into law, that when you buy something, you have the right to do with it what you want for personal use.
In the present case, Amazon clearly states that the customer is buying a book, so it should work the same way as buying a physical book.
One solution would be to buy a DRM free digital version.
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.
> Interestingly, this is actually more common for fantasy and SF than other genres.
Because it's a Tor policy? Brandon Sanderson's ebooks are DRM-free because his publisher is Tor.
Yeah, it's a Tor policy, and Tor is one of the biggest publishers in fantasy/scifi, which does have a big impact on why DRM-free is more common in those genres than any other.
But it's also useful to point out that it isn't just Tor. Baen, best known for military scifi, has had a DRM-free policy for slightly longer than Tor. (Not just that, but the Baen Free Library is a really cool approach to ebooks as well, with DRM free copies of some of their most out-of-print/hard-to-print books and also the first book or two in nearly every series that they publish for a "try before you buy". Some of their hardcovers have even included CDs of sections of the Baen Free Library over the years.)
Baen did it first but Tor did it louder in that Tor's parent Macmillan went to bat for Tor and few other brands in a big lawsuit with Amazon that Amazon was applying their DRM whether the publisher wanted that or not because it was a lock-in moat for Amazon, which led to why there is now a required "This book is DRM free at the request of the publisher" acknowledgment on kindle copies of most Tor books (and a few other publishers).
> 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.
Buying a license if you’re pirating, supports the authors while potentially offering you legal protection on the cheap.
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.
Also consider buying through Bookshop.org. You designate your local book store as the one that will receive the profit from the purchase, but you get to shop through Bookshop.org's full catalog. If you don't designate a book store, the profit is distributed among participating book stores.
> 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.
Most genres really.
Even a 60 euros for a 6 hour experience comes at 10 euro per hour, cheaper than music and on par with movies.
Add replayability, multiplayer, longer games, cheaper games, ... and many many games are under 1 euro per hour, sometimes far under. Even someone playing fifa or call of duty has a price to hour ratio thats absurdly good.
And the range available is insane, used to be if you liked some genre you had maybe a game once every two years, now there are so many that not only you can't play all your games, even a seasonned gigantic fan of gaming cannot know all good games released anymore.
I agree in general, it is just that books also score very well in this metric.
Cheaper than music?! Not while Spotify is around. Assuming my listening stats are accurate I hover around 2¢/hr annually.
Vampire Survivors ^^^
Well that’s just not fair; cheap and endlessly replayable. And multiplayer now, which is giving it a second wind for me.
> 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.
It isn't about the price. The level of service and the quality of the product you get by pirating is simply better. Streaming services break up shows and have s1-3 on one platform, 4-5 on another, and the rest on another still. You'll "buy" a movie on amazon prime video only for them to remove it so you can't watch it anymore. Prime video, a service you have to pay for now has ad breaks while watching shows. Even just FINDING stuff to watch is a nightmare, Netflix is the same stuff over and over again in different random made up categories.
Plus, streaming services limit what devices you are allowed to watch on and what software you can use, especially if you want to watch the highest resolution version. It's completely absurd how some people accept that and continue paying those streaming services.
I know and - cough cough - I might be embracing that as well. But still paying someone that basically leeches on someone else (and I don't mean Hollywood/Netflix etc, I mean the ripper themselves) unethical.
A lot of the time the distributor (or legal IP owner) is like a billion times more immoral than the ripper (or IP violator), and they are the ones leeching. You can choose legality over morality, but then don't claim moral high ground.
You have probably misunderstood. There are 4 parties here:
A) the content creator, owner of the IP
B) the people that copy the content made by A and publish it (i.e. the "release groups"). They can distirbute the content over bittorrent, sharing sites etc
C) people that run platforms that share copies made by B, and they offer access to those copies (sometimes even just a hash to a torrent) with some kind of paid subscription. Their added value is making it easier to access content copied by B.
D) final users, they can choose to consume content from A, B or C.
My point was that D paying for C are... weird, in my opinion.
Edit: technically there is a 5th group, like C but that do it for free, running forums etc at most hosting some banner to pay the hosting cost and not much more.
I answered the Hollywood/Netflix part. Distributors, most prominently Apple and Amazon are shitty companies, and paying them is arguably much more unethical than paying "C", even if the latter is illegal.
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.
The authors and publishers are getting paid by the library for the physical book borrowed, which endures wear and tear and must ultimately be replaced. Not sure how licensing for digital books work with libraries - all the library systems I've used have a cap on the number of digital books that can be lent out.
> 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're not using the exact same file to read it. As the other commenter said, books are extremely cheap relative to the value and/or entertainment time they provide.
I'd rather donate money directly to the author. I will not under any circumstance still reward Amazon for what they're doing.
You could support your local bookstore. Bookstores are closing down all over the world. Most authors do not support a way to pay them directly. For example, traditionally published authors have all of their royalties handled via their agents. For a non-trivial amount of sales, direct donation would be an accounting headache for individual writers.
> Most authors do not support a way to pay them directly.
I think this is the problem that should be addressed.
Musicians went through a similar process in reverse order: first Napster ("piracy") then streaming services (analogous to Kindle/Amazon, where a huge 3rd party inserts themselves between content creator & consumer). Eventually some musicians twigged that they were getting screwed every way, so they set up ways for fans to pay them directly or via a less money-hungry intermediary (e.g. Bandcamp).
Not a perfect solution by any means, but if book authors feel their situation is bad enough, they could look into how musicians are dealing with it.
I'm probably not alone in thinking I'd far rather pay an author directly than Amazon or book publishers.
"Bookcamp", anyone?
As with music, the final product you consume involves a lot more work/expertise/people than just “writing it“. You can see the quality differences when you compare self-published print on demand to quality publishing.
Naturally. And the editors, typesetters, designers, proof readers, etc. should get paid for their work. It is just a question of ownership and power imbalance. The problem with the current mainstream system (both in books and music) is that the publisher often effectively owns the work - not the author.
Bandcamp is a great site
I've read reports that, thanks to TikTok, the number of bookstores is now increasing rather than decreasing. At least in the US.
You would never do that, and nobody is falling for it.
It's not that uncommon for people to pay small donations to free releases on Bandcamp and similar sites where you can set your own amount. Most won't do it, but there's clearly a subset of consumers who do, or this business strategy wouldn't exist.
Personally I have no issue paying for books and other media as it's not the price keeping me away. My issue is that any amount of that money going to providers that are pushing this DRM locked content, which I will absolutely under no circumstances support, no matter how cheap.
You're projecting. On my PayPal account alone there's ~1k worth of various donations to things I support just in the past year. Maybe half is individuals.
Giving money so a good thing you enjoy can continue existing really isn't a concept that's completely out there for most people. There's a thriving ecosystem of platforms for funding/tipping/donating.
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.
Editors are expensive, DRM and copyright is a lot of work. AI is not a good editor yet text come out too bland.
that's so weird. First I decide to buy my wife an ebook reader for the new years and then Louis Rossman makes a video on Kindle DRM bait and switch. Now this and people praising Kobo. Guess I'm buying a kobo
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.
True, but that DRM is relatively easy to handle, and is sort-of a standard (OK, I know Adobe handles it, but it's not a complete walled garden like Kindle). I can borrow an ebook from my library using my browser, download the DRM'ed file, fulfil it (using Adobe Digital Editions), copy to my ereader. I can buy books from Google and do the same. It's relatively straight forward to strip the DRM if you want to. Because it is reliant on a third-party service (Adobe) that has other clients/interests, it's not as likely to change as quickly or as onerously as Kindle's DRM.
Yes, most books you buy from Kobo do have DRM, but a Kobo handles DRM-free files you may acquire elsewhere (e.g. an author or publisher's site) better than Kindles do. Kobos support epub natively, while Kindle requires some sort of conversion that doesn't always work great.
This, my first eink reader was a Meebook M6, Boox didn't release their 6" model yet. My main selection criteria was "it runs android". It was a really good reader, Kobo, Kindle and co can just be ewaste as they're designed to be.
Kobo fully supports pointing your library at a Calibre server instance to pull books from. You can also access a bash shell by changing a setting. They're very open devices and IMO quite nice.
Kobo's pretty good. Anything to avoid Kindle books.
I bought one, but it didn't have any of the books I wanted. It seems to be nowhere near as comprehensive as the Kindle library.
I bought one to replace my aging Amazon Kindle Oasis, after the DRM move.
I've loaded it up with the epubs I have in my Calibre library (which ironically contains mostly books I've bought from Amazon before they made stripping DRM unreasonably hard).
Now I won't buy anything from Amazon because I can't strip the DRM, and hence can't read the books on my e-reader of choice.
Their loss, not mine.
Just put epubs on it.
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.
+1 for Storyteller. It is beyond fantastic to have my progress seamlessly synced between my ebooks and audiobooks.
I’m paying for BookFusion, to have synced cross-platform reading. It’s expensive, but seems to be one of the few cross-platform synced readers that supports the EPUB Media Overlays from Storyteller.
Have you experienced ghosting with your Boox tablet? I’d like to get one, but I know that ghosting would bother me.
Storyteller can sync your progress between devices, although there’s occasionally a bit of a bug with it (will be fixed soon). I sync between my iPhone and boox.
Once you get all the e-ink settings dialed in to make black text more readable on the color e-ink screen, it’s pretty damned good. I never notice ghosting. It’s not very easy to get the settings dialed in though. If you are purely reading on it get a black and white screen if it’s in stock so you aren’t fiddling with it to get text to really be boldly black instead of grey.
Bookshop.org is supposed to implement Kobo support sometime this year, getting a Kobo if that happens.
What does 'Kobo support' mean? Anyone can publish an epub, which a Kobo can read. Are you talking integration into the Kobo store?
The DRM free books they sell work just fine. Ones with DRM must currently be read using their mobile or web apps. Their FAQ mentions their plans to support Kobo in the future.
https://bookshop.org/info/ebooks#EBOOKFAQ
I liked the idea of Bookshop.org but I was surprised when I ordered something from it, it shipped from somewhere 2,000 miles away from me. I had the misunderstanding it was going to ship from a local bookshop that was actually local to me.
Its possible that the local bookshop didn't have the book, so they had their supplier drop ship it to you, but they still got the margin from the sale? I don't really know anything about how Bookshop.org really works.
At the end of the day it's an affiliate marketing setup, I think all fulfillment is through Ingram, not local bookstores. But it's a B Corp mandated to give 80% or more of profits to independent booksellers.
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.
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's for titles April 2025 or later
Some books are available to buy DRM-free if you search a little - sometimes from the publisher or the Kobo store. It's also just possible to buy a book and also download a pirated copy. You're not just hurting Amazon, you're hurting the author and I don't think we want to encourage a world where no one writes books because its impossible to get paid for them.
Eventually those physical book scanning cameras are going to be used to read/scan DRM locked ebooks.
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
You could still use an older version of the app to force getting a book with the older DRM.
I haven't done that in a while though, so I'm not sure if they closed that loophole.
Unfortunately they did close that loophole recently. :(
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'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.
Followed the same path.
At least Steve Jobs understood how DRM should work.
You may not like a product or service, or think it's too expensive, but that doesn'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.
The DMCA can bite. Hopefully the author has taken steps to protect his identity, or there likely will be consequences.
https://linuxsecurity.com/news/government/sklyarov-hearing-s...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd.
I have 3 rules:
1. If possible, buy from the author directly (I mostly read tech books, so that's often an option).
2. Otherwise buy from elsewhere, without DRM.
3. If all other options fail, buy from Amazon but immediately download a DRM-free copy from libgen and use that.
This is both ethical and practical.
How is paying for a DRMed book ethical? I agree that buying a DRM free book is clearly right, but if someone is only providing a book in a way that infringes on your rights, why would you give them money for that? If someone sells a book that you want to read and you have the money to pay for it, by all means, buy it. But if you are unable to buy the book because the author decided to publish it in a way so that you cannot legally gain an actual copy of the book – opposed to limited access under the terms set by a company that they can arbitrarily alter at any time, leaving you with nothing but a pinky promise – why would you give them and, out of all the things in the world, Amazon money for that when you then have to retrieve the copy of the book you were after otherwise?
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.
An alternative is to go a library, rent a book, scan it and read on a reader. You are getting the book for free without supporting greedy drm shops.
Btw, in Poland where I live, every ebook shop sells drm free books. Every single one. Why? Amazon don't sell polish books, yet kindles for the long time were the only readers available, so people had to use a cable to transfer the books. And kindle can't read any other drm than their own. So shops had no choice and it stayed that way.
So maybe a third option (not really but maybe?) is to buy polish version and use Ai to translate it?
Your right to buy a DRM-free book?
I put that in the same bucket as my "right" to buy your house for $1.
Houses are physical objects. If you take it someone else has to lose it. E-Books are digital objects. You can have infinitely many copies of them without anyone losing anything.
And yes, DRM infringes on essential rights, it not only limits what you can do with something you supposedly bought, but takes away your control over your own hardware.
And even more basic is the right not to get frauded. If someone claims to be selling something to you, but then they only give you locked down, perhaps even revokable access to it, then they are defrauding you.
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.
I was on the team that wrote this code.
We knew it was reverse-engineerable, we just didn't care.
Upper management seemed happy enough that it was pretty obfuscated, and we were happy that they didn't force us to do more about it.
> 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.
You are exactly correct.
Yes, but it's still amazing coming from Amazon. Everyone hates Amazon now but it's hard to argue they're not incredibly successful; how did they get where they are if they're staffed with Dilbert's boss types?
I wonder if the start of the causal chain (or at least the intended audience) might be book publishers rather than people in Amazon
Replies like this are why I love HN (assuming it’s true)
It is, I promise :)
Email in bio if you have other questions about it you care to ask.
Uh, just so you know, your bio is empty as of this writing.
I can see their email in their bio.
thanks, I think its fixed now.
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 ?
You ask great questions.
I definitely have regrets about my time working at Amazon. Specifically, I wish that I had pushed back more about doing certain things.
Honestly, DRM wasn't even the worst. All the unnecessary user tracking was way worse, in my opinion.
Its impossible to know for sure, because I didn't push back as much as I should have, but I really think that "well if I hadn't, the next person would've" was absolutely true in this case (knowing what I know about all the other engineers that were in the department at the same time as me). I'm not saying the other engineers were bad people, a lot of them were lovely but they definitely had different convictions than I have.
Still a DMCA violation to break, though.
This is why the DMCA needs to die. It's absolutely ridiculous.
> 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.
What are you talking about? Rotating glyphs is like... the ORIGINAL encryption.
https://cryptii.com/pipes/caesar-cipher
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.
Thats why I bought an android based e-reader that allows me to install whatever reader, copy files wherever I want and basically be in as much control of my devices as these constraining times allow. I will never be a willing hostage to Amazon's shit.
> Was It Worth It?
> To read one book? No.
> To prove a point? Absolutely.
> To learn about SVG rendering, perceptual hashing, and font metrics? Probably yes.
The dedication on this endeavor is admirable. I quite enjoyed reading it even though certain things were new to me (structural similarity index).”
Posting the code on some code sharing platform (not GitHub, where it could probably be taken down quickly) could be a logical next step.
I don't suppose this is going to work well with their comics/graphic novels, will it?
I stopped buying ebooks from Amazon some time ago and switched completely to Kobo (and their much-more-easily-defeated DRM), but Amazon's acquisition of Comixology means they've still got by far the best collection of digital comics on the market.
I haven't gotten images working yet, they have some weird obfuscation applied to them as well
Comics need a full "image" for the page, so this is unlikely to work. Can you inspect the requests and see what you get?
Or to the author: what happens to images in the ebook?
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.
If you can live with lower quality image. Most people probably will be ok with that though.
It will depend on the books, but the images aren't that high resolution in general.
I've had some slightly blurry on 2.8x1.9k screens, especially the older ones.
you just tell puppeteer to change resolution
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
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.
My bad I should’ve clarified this wasn’t meant to be a specific solution to the Kindle problem so much as an available option for the future!
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.
> the Amazon kindle store is currently the absolute best way to grab foreign ebooks wherever you live on the globe
No, piracy is.
As much as I also want that narrative to be true, the amount of books that will never be pirated for whatever reason is just massive.
The Github repo (which was working for me until 5 mins ago) just 404'ed.
https://github.com/PixelMelt/amazon_book_downloader
Kind of expected, but I was surprised at how quick that was.
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.
Does a GitHub archive exist? It sure is something to see code ebb and flow at the whims of the few.
Another reminder that you should always instantly download everything you ever find interesting or valuable. The internet is temporal because it's backed by people and infrastructure which are fallible and fragile in the face of law and talk.
This almost works.
It's hard-coded to the .com store, but that's trivial to change.
The main problem is that every line is treated a `<p>` element. Which means the rendering is askew. That's fine if you're reading a PDF-style document with hard-coded line breaks, but a bit annoying for a reflowable ePub.
Commas are sometimes rendered as apostrophes. Full-stops are also sometimes mid-dots.
Given that the glyph shapes never change, it might be better to "bake in" the shapes rather than manually decoding them. Didn't take too long on my laptop to do the perceptual mapping, but could speed things up for others.
Nevertheless, an excellent demonstration of how pointless DRM is.
Fascinating how much effort Amazon puts into screwing their customers. And impressive how people manage to circumvent that anyway.
But I still think the better option is to never give any money to Amazon.
Just imagine if they had put the same effort into making a usable Android app, then the author wouldn't have bothered. In some sense it's negligence on Amazons part.
Years ago I dropped buying stuff on Amazon, because they can't match prices, shipping times and the site just invites scams, but I kept buying eBooks, because my old Kindle is sort of amazing. Then they started messing with the Kindle platform as well and now I just buy physical books from local retailers.
> Python SVG libraries create spurious connecting lines
That rather sounds like a bug to me.
I'd try browser automation to get the book pages, then OCR it (or just store them as images).
For reference, Libreture maintains a list of non-DRM bookshops [1].
[1] https://libreture.com/bookshops/
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.
> Amazon's Kindle Android app was really buggy and crashed a bunch
This is one of my biggest problems with DRM. It restricts what software you can consume the media on.
I bought a collection of books from Kobo without realizing it was protected by DRM, then realized I could only read them with the kobo reader, which is also really buggy. I really wanted to use a different reader app, but couldn't.
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.
Do the ebooks you're referring to use an image for the ² symbol, rather than css, unicode, or mathjax-generated mathml? A lot of old math books that have been converted from scans do that, for instance, because their OCR was okay at regular text but not good at superscripts, subscripts, or other mathematical symbols.
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.
Can't Amazon be sued for false advertising by having "buy" on the button when it is actually "rent"? #justasking genuine question on interpretation of the term in USA.
Someone is doing that right now - there's a proposed class-action lawsuit [1] that reads in part "On its website, Defendant tells consumers the option to ‘buy’ or ‘purchase’ digital copies of these audiovisual works. But when consumers ‘buy’ digital versions of audiovisual works through Amazon’s website, they do not obtain the full bundle of sticks of rights we traditionally think of as owning property. Instead, they receive ‘non-exclusive, nontransferable, non-sublicensable, limited license’ to access the digital audiovisual work, which is maintained at Defendant’s sole discretion".
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/i-like-plaintiffs-ch...
You're buying a license. (Was hard not to use scare quotes here.)
And while you’re at it, do you expect to sue Steam, and the App Stores, and most other digital marketplaces owned by billionaire corporations? You’re not going to win those lawsuits with such a flimsy argument.
They could just as well argue that you are not buying the book, but a license to access it under certain conditions. A movie theatre is a comparable example: You say you bought a ticket, not that you rented access to the movie, but it’s only valid for one specific viewing despite being a sale.
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.
> That’s not the case with an Amazon eBook where the marketing and reasonable expectation of the average consumer is they’re buying the eBook itself.
Good luck proving that in court without reasonable doubt.
Look at the image again. It’s extremely vague about what you are in fact buying.
https://blog.pixelmelt.dev/content/images/2025/10/image.png
Whether it’s correct, and whether you can argue it in court against a multi-trillion dollar company’s legal team are indeed two very different things.
I wouldn’t be confident in court, but I would be confident that most users expect that ebooks they “bought” in the past could be viewed on their new Kobo eBook reader.
> Whether it’s correct, and whether you can argue it in court against a multi-trillion dollar company’s legal team are indeed two very different things.
Exactly. And because this conversation started because someone was asking about suing them, what you can argue in court is what matters for this thread.
I don’t agree with what Amazon is doing and thus don’t buy DRM ebooks from them, but that’s beside the point of the argument.
> I wouldn’t be confident in court
Which was my argument. Everything else you added were tangential arguments no one was refuting in the first place.
> but I would be confident that most users expect that ebooks they “bought” in the past could be viewed on their new Kobo eBook reader.
You think most people who buy books for ereaders expect that when they buy a book for Kindle, they can just load it up on their Kobo? I wouldn’t be that confident without a survey, but I would welcome seeing one.
People don’t seem to have trouble understanding that when you buy an app on iOS, that doesn’t work on Android, and vice-versa. It is plausible they might have the same intuitive understanding regarding the Kindle and Kobo stores.
You’re right. The answer to whether they could be sued for this is obviously yes, because they have been, and Amazon won.
I got sidetracked. Really, my only argument is that that your theatre comparison is flawed.
Most comparisons are flawed, analogies are seldom perfect. The point is that it’s the type of argument they could use.
Exactly. The button should just say "read on Kindle" or "watch on Prime" etc. Including the word "buy" is at best misleading and at worst deceptive.
I’ve been using https://readest.com and very much enjoying it. I just wish there were a “lifetime purchase” option.
Looks nice. Shame it doesn't have OPDS support, but it's nice to see that it's a planned feature in their GitHub README!
What are you paying for? I see no mention of paid features anywhere (play store, GitHub readme, website, in-app settings). If the app isn't entirely free, this send pretty misleading...
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.
Amazon modifies books without authors consent.
https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Amazon_altering_the_content_of...
Very scummy.
Unrelated to this article. But somewhat related to parts of the discussion here.
One (niche) way to overcome not being able to download books from Amazon anymore is to get ebooks from a library that supports Overdrive/libby. (Some of?) Those support downloading DRM files directly from the app, which you then can run through Adobe + Calibre. Obviously, this is contingent on book availability and your ability to get a proper library card. But works for me for 90% of the books that I need.
Removing DRM from ebooks is the standard. Otherwise I cannot read them in my Kobo because I didn't (and I will never) register my reader into Adobe, and neither I've created a Kobo account (I bypassed the initial setup).
I bypassed it by buying a Kobo.
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's very convenient. Prior to choosing an e-reader, I took one glance at Amazon's DRM-laden offerings and noped out from that ecosystem completely.
I'm an owner of a Kobo, how did you do that?
When I tried, the only options from Amazon were 'transfer to my device' 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.
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.
I hadn't given the online library much of any thought. I kind of assumed it would not have access to anything I wanted. I decided to take a look, and lo-and-behold, it has pretty much everything I've wanted to read recently. The prices are pretty good, it's like $9 for some and a few on sale for $2 which is a steal.
That's good to know, thanks!
I appreciate the author's work, and they're absolutely right about the Kindle app. I'm with you though, I don't want to fight tooth and nail with Amazon to have the ability to read a book without their lousy app, to back that book up, and otherwise legally and fairly use it. I don't want to reward Amazon for being aggressively anti-consumer by spending money on their site, at least not for this.
Does Kobo work with the Libby app?
Even better than a Kindle - library browsing is built-in to the device.
O wow I love that! So tired of Jeff I think I’ll switch.
Yes, my wife uses it all the time
I believe so, haven't tried it myself.
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.
This is an excellent starting point, I have just tried it on "The Origins of Totalitarianism" by Hannah Arendt, and maybe it's because of the numerous bibliographical references, or the the occasional diacritics, but the end result is a bit messy and not really readable.
I think a motivated hacker could definitely improve it in no time.
Still amazing that it works at all, really well done.
EARTH TO AMAZON EARTH TO AMAZON
PLEASE MAKE THE LAST PAGE READ BE THE KINDLE SCREEN DISPLAY WHEN POWERED OFF
END OF TRANSMISSION
Probably discussed elsewhere but you can do this if you jailbreak your Kindle, and either install one of the screensaver hacks or install KOReader and set the last page as your screensaver. A good guide to get started is at https://kindlemodding.org/
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.
I've always wanted it to work this way. However it'd only work if you had a case with the magnetic cover to turn on the device. Otherwise someone would pick up their un-cased kindle with the page lock screen, start reading, and then get confused when they tried to turn the page and nothing happened — the device would still be off!
This is a beautiful solution to a tedious problem that shouldn't exist in the first place! Great work.
TBH I might be inclined to put up with the DRM if the Kindle reader was also usable for other things (PDFs, ebooks purchased from other vendors)
But the library management is broken/non existent
So it's not just that you can't read Kindle books on other devices, but the Kindle itself is pretty much useless for reading things you purchased from other stores
Even though it was cheap and 2nd hand, I regret buying this thing
Have things changed recently? Sideloading books has always been well supported in every kindle I’ve owned, though admittedly my current model is 3 or 4 years old.
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...
Jailbreak it and install KOReader[0], which supports PDFs. You can also install something like Project Title[1] for a fancier UI
https://koreader.rocks/
https://github.com/joshuacant/ProjectTitle
A gentle reminder that physical books are still available, and quite inexpensive when purchased used from, e.g., library book stores or thrift stores. It has no DRM, has a Paper White™ interface, and even has a nice smell and feel. You can loan it, give it, or sell it to any human without hassle or legal risk to yourself or them. You can highlight, add notes ("marginalia"), fold the corner of a page for a bookmark. Over time your copy of a book will accumulate incidental stains and marks, developing an identity of it's own. What's even more remarkable is that you own your copy, and it cannot be remotely changed, deleted, or corrupted or your access revoked.
True, but DRM free books in digital form have a lot more potential utility for non-genius types like myself. Just a good search engine over the text is a huge win before even considering the standard reader features like notes and book marks. With LLMs I can imagine testing my retention of a chapter by asking it where my recollection is wrong or short and having it cite paragraphs in support of its judgement. All of this progress is impeded by the big ebook sellers, but is or will be fulfilled by inde developers at least for those of us that can go to yandex, plug in a title and get a DRM free epub.
I had a kindle with buttons once, and it was good.
Then, I bought a touchscreen kindle paperwhite, and found out that every time you change books it complains that it cant find the cloud, and won't let you categorize anything unless you register it and be online.
That's enough Amazon for me, no point in finding out a second time for hundreds of dollars that they still piss me off.
I always love a story of anger based (reverse)engineering.
Spite is an underated productivity tool.
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
aka "Hate driven development"
The best kind there is!
Interesting stuff. My first thought was "this is topaz" but if the font is bookerly, that makes less sense.
There's this old patent for earlier kindle web obfuscation, which used CSS layout to scramble text https://patents.google.com/patent/US8700991B1
Interesting, hadent seen this before, thanks!
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?
When I bought mine, Amazon didn't have USB C and page turning buttons on the same model. Kobo did.
It has direct integration with borrowing books from the library.
It has direct integration with Instapaper.
You can drag a file onto the device after mounting it over USB.
You can replace the endpoint for the store with a Calibre Web endpoint to directly sync your books from a personal server.
You can pretty easily modify the device however you see fit.
For me the library integration on the device itself was a major selling point. I have no complaints after switching four years ago!
You can sideload books on Kobo over USB they parse the expected formats epub/pdf/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 & comics. My reader Elipsa 2e is also great for taking notes and supports notes in book pages, though that specific model isn't supported by the custom firmware.
As a counterpoint, I bought a kobo (clara?) two years ago, and ended up hating it. It was a lot of minor things that added up. Spuriously turning on in my pocket/bag constantly and ruining progress (the power-on button was poorly placed and very sensitive). Forcing a single font for every book. Page turns were often noticeably slow. Libby/Overdrive integration often spuriously re-downloaded books and lost my progress. It was never clear to me whether I got unlucky with a bad device or not. But none of my issues screamed 'broken' rather than just 'annoying' so I assumed it was normal. I dislike the kindle ecosystem as much as the next person, but I've found the hardware so much better and more reliable that I ended up going back to kindle. The positive vibes in these comments are leading me to reevaluate and think that maybe something was indeed wrong with my device.
It's a much more open reader, you can literally drag a file into the SD card and install whatever software you want
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.
I think a lot of it is due to people just not liking Amazon.
Last time (couple of months ago) I could still claw the book back from my physical kindle device and then deDRM it but the whole process changes from year to year and it's always a great frustration for me (it's backup time! oh no). Looked around what alternatives are there, but I don't want to trade one DRM process for another (even if it's easier to do on a Kobo branded device).
Here in Eastern Europe the local ebooks have no DRM (just a "please don't steal this" message or something similar), but my cynical side says we have like 10 contemporary writers and maybe 20 readers, it's not a big business to begin with. Physical books are heavy, hard to store/pack/move and are quite expensive to ship here - I guess I can't have a cake and eat it as well (for cheap, low effort baking at least).
> I've been "obtaining" ebooks for years
> So let me get this straight: I paid money for this book
One can say that no DRM doesn’t bring issues but one can also say that there is a very polarized approach from the post author on what he believes he is entitled to depending on the situation they bring themselves to.
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.
I live in unbelievably hot and humid Singapore and buying physical books is essentially "not possible". Unless I blast the AC in my house 24/7, all books will eventually succumb to mould.
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!
That's amazing! Well done, it was a fun challenge
I don't think its dumb from a business point of view. You've got to make promises to the editors that the platform is going to drive the sales up, not down.
Is it hostile to customers, absolutely.
I personally have bought many fewer books over the last couple of years, from amazon, as they've made it harder and harder to, you know, read the books I've paid for.
Pirating books is not hard. They're probably the smallest possible thing that people are interested in copying with the broadest variation in acceptable formats.
I know I'm screaming into the void, but if I'm paying real money why is the experience from piracy sites better?
Genuinely curious to hear why you think they make it harder and harder to read books? I've been using my Kindle daily since 2017. I read on both the Kindle device (Paperwhite and vanilla), the iPad and iPhone app, and occasionally the web reader.
I've never experienced issues with them that break the reading experience. The one issue I occasionally run into is that the book progress doesn't sync when I open the app and I have to click "sync now" which sometimes is blazingly fast and sometimes takes like a minute.
I can't imagine migrating away from Kindle now, it's probably one of my favourite devices and the Kindle is my favourite way to read.
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.
that last-read bug sounds exactly like something that doesn't have test coverage
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.
To create a moat and make Kobo and others less interesting.
To stop you from pirating ofc!
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.
> 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?
It doesn’t matter. A straightforward example is that no matter how much UX you do, you can’t offer a listing that the creator sold exclusively to someone else.
But fortunately, with AI content starting to become better we will be able to transform regular people into IP maximalists arguing that copyright protection schemes should be embedded even more than they are today.
Regarding archive.is:
I use it too, but people work hard writing articles. How will they earn money if no one pays them?
Yeah it’s a classic tragedy of the commons. Any individual gains from piracy. C’est la vie. As HNers are proud to say: Your business model is not my problem.
Your intention doesn’t matter to the shareholders. Straight to jail.
Yeah I hope his opsec is good.
After researching the webviewer, and finding basically the same as pixelmelt, I found someone else already made the script,
I've been using https://github.com/teticio/kindle2pdf + tesseract to convert amazon books to text.
So that repo also disappeared. Neither is mentioned in https://github.com/github/dmca
I had a jailbreaked kindle a while back, but did update it by mistake and couldn't make it work again (didn't try that much honestly) and I switched to boox (which is android based e-reader)
I use it with my self-hosted calibre-web where I can sync my books to both KOReader on my boox and phone with the OPDS protocol and I use syncthing to sync my progress and highlights too ..
it's a bit of work to set up but I know it will work for a very long time, where with your solution, I wonder how long before Amazon will make it harder yet again?
Some of us here avoid BOOX devices because of their history of GPL violations.
Does any one else remember when they remotely deleted 1984 from people's devices due to... 'copyright issues'
Having lived through the Amazon Kindle/ebook rise and fall shit show it's safe to say I will never ever pay to buy or rent or whatever they call it for stuff I can get for free from the internet, because when doing the latter I would never need to reverse engineer bs systems just to get what I paid for.
I could feel the anger of the author oozing through the writing. Great work!
Did anyone note that there is no cryptography involved in this way of extracting book contents?
If anyone cloned the code from github before it got taken down, please preserve it forever by publishing it in a crypto blockchain.
I saw some 26 forks before it disappeared. Maybe one of them survived, but github is blocking searches at the moment (for me).
edit: https://github.com/gudvardur/
I’ve stopped buying any books that have that kind of a DRM. Kindle / audible apps are horrible
Because its rendering to bookerly or an analogue a perceptual hash looks like an amazingly good fit. But in general, how applicable would that be to OCR because if you can declare 90% of the text is courier, then it feels like an enormously good way to get over the hump.
I wondered if he was just tuning to the best algorithm for his corner case, but it's one of the algorithms in a decent OCR package anyway?
You'd only have to do a few hint/confirmations.
Impressive. As a bootstrapping founder I live frugally. But I buy and read a loot of books on Kindle. Books give so much value compared to the cost/price. And the convenience of e-books/kindle makes the other option not worth the hassle.
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.
Can someone tell me another effective way to combat book piracy that is not Amazon's way?
I don't understand the author complainant. If you don't like the app, don't use it! Pirate it all you want I don't care, but don't say it's because you didn't like the app. You want books? Buy them physically or find another way to obtain them digitally.
There are authors to these books on Kindle, and they don't want their books free on the internet, it's Amazon's jobs to combat this. They have no choice but to DRM.
> Can someone tell me another effective way to combat book piracy that is not Amazon's way?
There simply no effective way to lock a book from copy while being able to read it. It will simply slow the process to free the book, at worst it will result in error or information loss (some links and fancy layout)
> There are authors to these books on Kindle, and they don't want their books free on the internet, it's Amazon's jobs to combat this. They have no choice but to DRM
We, as a civilisation, don't have to respect their wish. Free (as in beer) books are a necessity for a lot of people, and free (as in speak) book should be the norm, DRM introduce plenty of problem fir thé reader, with not a single added value for the customer.
> 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.
From my experience, making it easier to buy books would help.
I pay money and I want to get back a PDF, mobi, epub, or whatever. That's the kind of interaction I would appreciate.
If you have to have a certain software or a certain hardware in order to read the book you've paid for, I'm going to look for alternatives.
> 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.
Then amazon should make it clear you aren’t buying a book. Putting buy there is deceptive.
And also, amazon is on the hook for providing an actual, working app here.
> They have no choice but to DRM.
They do have choice in the DRM they choose and how it's implemented. The DRM should expire when copyright protection expires and the DRM should be standardized so that I could move my books anywhere I want and read them on most readers, just like DVD and Blu-Ray disks.
This argument would be more persuasive to me if publishers and stores didn't screw over authors harder than we ever do by pirating their books.
Lovely, great effort.
I wonder if Kindle Web reader supports word search, but that probably just searches server side and then returns indexed selections.
And how about copy-and-paste and accessibility, there must be some a11y support?
You can copy and paste text from it. But you get no formatting, paragraph breaks, etc.
That means it could be used to extract some text to map to glyphs, right?
Possibly. But given that the font is known, I think plain OCR might be a better bet.
@op there's a typo: "You can now download the books you own books with my code"
second books seems erroneous
Fixed!
This is a great write-up in terms of content but stylistically it reads like the output of an RLHF'd LLM
It's extra distracting because it doesn't even read like normal LLM prose, but it's close enough to feel off.
The frequent use of bold emphasis, lists, and subject-only rhetorical questions ("Those tiny m3,1 m1,6 m-4,-7 commands? They're micro-MoveTo operations.") are classic LLM-speak, but they're used in such a way that makes me doubt that OP actually used an LLM to write this. I think that OP's natural prose just happens to be stylistically pretty similar to that of an LLM.
It's kind of sad that what were once signs of high effort and dedication (e.g. em-dashes) are now signs of low effort and dishonesty, despite the fact that people still use them in human writing.
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).
.kfx text is syndicated using a reversion letter to kdb.
drm copyright arrays lie in the html/css layer, which stops the user from accessing raw text.
This was brilliant and entertaining!
At one point I did the same for a comic app which was getting the earliest releases of a manga I wanted to read; I still don't read Japanese but was the buyer for my translation circle. They had similar forms of obscure obfuscation; They scrambled the image into chunks, then you got a metadata that remapped it into a finished image. Raw, it looked like one of those slide puzzles.
Over the course of a couple years they updated their scrambling; First to randomize the size of the regions, then to make them triangular instead of rectangular. It was an interesting if tedious challenge to reverse engineer.
Don't stop there! If Amazon sues you, demand a jury trial and win a carve-out making it legal to unlock DRM you own.
or you can extract book (kfx) from the Android kindle app location and run DeDRM via Calibre.
Love what people do out of spite sometimes. Well done.
>I paid money for this book >I can only read it in Amazon's broken app >I can't download it >I can't back it up >I don't actually own it >Amazon can delete it whenever they want
good that you didn't read the terms of amazon's kindle business model before buying that book; all that delicious rage and the interesting knowledge it spurred would have been lost to the world. tbh, i would have expected them to be more sophisticated. good job and kudos, enjoy your well earned book, it's yours now!
sadly i have no use for this, the only few books i ever bought on amazon were paperback, used and in good condition. good deals. but the mere fact that a provider requires me to use specific software to access content is simply unacceptable, making a detailed reading of their absurdly dystopian terms and conditions unnecessary.
i use amazon prime. for me it's very worth it just for the delivery savings as i live in a remote area. it includes access to their video streaming service. one day i decided to try it just to see what was there. i was immediately prompted with a download for some mandatory viewer/drm/codec. not going to happen, baby, so i just closed the tab, never bothered with it again and have the feeling that nothing of value was lost.
Based, bamf'd and extremely goat'd
Well done!
Buy a Kobo and you no longer have to deal with Amazon.
How do you actually use the code? There is no readme.
Did anyone clone this? It’s 404 on GitHub now
Possibly https://github.com/gudvardur/amazon_book_downloader I did not verify.
I hate Amazon's decision to do this. It doesn't even make business sense. You can't tell me they're making that much profit off of Kindles that it makes sense. The book sales have got to be worth more than that in the long run.
A lot of authors only ever offer on Amazon now, which leaves those of us without Kindles (I love my Kobo) in a difficult spot.
Frankly I would write it as anti-competitive. How are other e-reader companies supposed to survive when Amazon owns all the e-books and can just decide that only their e-readers are allowed? No one else has even a fraction of the market.
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.
Based glyph wizard.
When Amazon sees this what do you think they'll do first, fix the crashing android app or add a new layer of protection on their DRM?
Off to the gulag with you!
Nice writing.
Pay for the book, then pirate it. Problem solved. Same with series and movies.
Off-topic: was this article at least partly generated using an LLM?
I ask not as a snark, since the content is genuinely interesting, but out of curiosity. The style seems very LLM: lots of bullet points, titles with sections typical of LLMs, sentences like "Why this is perfect for <thing>", "Why this doesn't work", etc. It matches the tone and style of everything that an LLM spits out at me.
I have the same problem with O'Reilly / Safari ... I don't enjoy using the apps and find they get in the way of the reading experience, plus it's a very expensive subscription. Initially, its hard to tell if rendering problems are just a bad conversion or if the text rendering engine is just buggy / borked.
But there were plenty of other bugs like bookshelf management getting corrupted.
Please don't write your blog post with AI.
Don't force me to either get another AI to remove all the fluff, or to skim read.
There's an interesting article here, covered in a layer of AI slop.
How do you get the feeling this is AI-generated? Because of the many bullet points?
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.
an alternate to exporting kindle ebooks: https://github.com/transitive-bullshit/kindle-ai-export
Not sure I want to trust an LLM with a bulk transcription task that I want to be 100% faithful.
All this to keep people from owning what they bought. Smh
Ever since AI got big everybody always uses 100 million lists in their writing. It gets really annoying to read.
Here is why lists are bad for reading:
1. They break the flow.
I hate it. Cool blog article though.
Wait, does this (absolutely ridiculous) DRM completely fuck up screen readers?
Yes and no.
I actually wrote the code to make this work with screen readers, back when I worked for Kindle in 2018.
I even got to test it out with a few Amazon employees who were blind, which was a really cool experience!
We added some hidden divs which had the plaintext version for screenreaders. For whatever reason, upper management was ok with the plaintext being scrapable, as long as the formatted version couldn't be scraped.
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!
Any book DRM is easy to defeat now that OCR is so good. Just automate screenshotting and OCRing every page.
Have you tried this? I think you'll find OCR (at least free OCR) isn't as good as you think it is.
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.
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.
Holy fuck. The depravity of enshittification knows no bounds.
I consider myself warned and will never buy anything Kindle.
DRM should be illegal. This shit sucks so much.
Using it against consumers should be anyway, but it sure is fun to make and break it, its the ultimate brain teaser!
I can't wait for Kovid Goyal to figure this out and get Calibre back to fucking with Amazon.