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Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone comment on the difficulty (for a hacker) of using Remarkable with Kindle books? I have a Kindle already, if that makes a difference in generating DRM-free files of content I already purchased reading rights to.

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It is trivial to convert DRM'd Kindle e-books you own into epub or other formats. Check out Calibre and the Apprentice Alf plugin.

https://calibre-ebook.com/

https://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/

has something changed? it used to be easy but looks like there's a per-device encryption support in new kindles.

You just need an older version of the Kindle desktop app that doesn't support the newer (uncracked) DRM. Then you just download the books you've purchased in the app, load them into Calibre, and De-DRM them.

AFAIK drm version 3 still isn't cracked, but there's some epubs without drm, and most with drm is possible to get with older drm for backwards compatability reasons.

I'm not sure what the status of drm circumvention for fair/own use is in the US - I think there was a case that opened up for viewing/backing up dvds, but if not - this is still illegal, which partly defeats the purpose of buying through Amazon.

it's interesting but some kindle books I've purchased have a little blurb at the beginning of the book that says something like "the publisher has distributed this book without DRM"

I always wondered if the kindle file was actually unencrypted.

I think as long as there is no copyright infringement involved (i.e. as long as you don't redistribute it) it's ok. IANAL.

Possibly. I vaguely recall this... But I'm not sure if there's been other rulings, or if ebooks or media-as-a-service has been in the courts after this.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/07/court...

I have never been able to get EPUBs to reliably work on remarkable. My solution is to convert them to PDFs.

You can also install KOReader on remarkable as a reader. Works better IMHO. https://github.com/koreader/koreader

If you do it, do you lose the ability to annotate?

I use them all the time. Never had any issue.

I also use reMarkable as a (pretty good) EPUB reader, but it is really slow when opening the book for the first time or changing the rendering settings (font size, margins, etc.).

It can sometimes take a minute or two and sometimes it just hangs completely and you have to close the book and re-open it. I assume it's because it has to somehow render the whole book, to support the handwritten annotations and put them in correct places.

I love reading on my remarkable but using it with Kindle books has been a pain. You can break the Kindle DRM but it’s cumbersome.

Though my main pain point is that you lose the book position syncing you get with the Kindle hardware/apps.

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