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Comment by mrmondo | Hacker News Reader

I REALLY don’t agree with giving Amazon money (ethically) but I am a hypocrite and end up buying a lot of ebooks and audiobooks from them, I do my best to back up the files using calibre but I‘m sure they could lock down devices / files using DRM and their latest DRM incarnation is very hard to remove. I try to buy DRM-free ebooks and audiobooks whenever possible but I think mostly due to market domination authors and publishers end up at least mostly exclusively providing content via Amazon.

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If you are already using Calibre, it's not hard to protect yourself from Amazon. I have a Kindle PaperWhite that's about ~3 years old and it only connected to the Internet once during initial setup. I've put it in flight mode after that and it will never go online again.

As for books, when I buy them on Amazon I select "transfer via USB" which let's me download it and when I add it to Calibre, the DRM is stripped by DEDRM_tools [1][2] before transfering into the Kindle.

[1] https://github.com/apprenticeharper/DeDRM_tools

[2] Note that the tool only removes the DRM, it doesn't anonymise the file. It's still associated with your account.

Hey, thanks for your reply, I appreciate it.

I’ve used deDRM a lot in the past, but it doesn’t work with the latest DRM on (I think AWZ3 files) - but perhaps it’s been updated since I last checked about 6 months ago or so.

I use it with AWZ3 just fine, but then I also haven't allowed my Kindle to update its software in years, so maybe Amazon is giving me files with older DRM.

Now that is interesting, I have a kindle oasis and mix between reading on that (which is glorious I must be honest) and on my iPhone.

If I can download a “legacy” file format - I might try that.

Thanks again for your input!

I bought a few books a couple of months ago from Amazon for use with their PC viewer and the first thing i did was to remove the DRM (so i can read it on my phone using my preferred ebook reader... and i trust myself more than Amazon to keep the books around) so i think they managed to break the latest version too.

Are you doing "download" vs "send to PC"? These result in different formats.

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