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Comment by shadowprofile77 | Hacker News Reader

And this is why I immediately strip the DRM protections of any kindle book I buy from the site, and can then use them on any device or app that handles the format (or an epub conversion). There's no good reason whatsoever to buy a digital good and leave it beholden to the sometimes shitty whims of whoever sold it to you. That's not a purchase or ownership at all. It's just a long term lease but without a defined expiration date.

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>That's not a purchase or ownership at all.

Well no, it's not. You're purchasing a license to consume the content, conditional on the terms of the license. What gives you the impression you're buying the book?

It's an easy mistake to make when the page for acquiring the license presents you with a picture of a book and requires you click a button labeled "add to cart".

Only everything about the purchase flow that anyone reads or sees, or should reasonably be expected to read or see.

If amazon really wanted the customer to understand the fine-print, they could force that. They don't, so why should customers care?

How do you strip the DRM, if you don't mind sharing?

This[0] is a guide on exactly how to do it, but basically you install a Calibre extension[1], get your Kindle books (Calibre can automatically pull them from your Kindle, or you can download from Amazon.com), and import them. The plugin will strip the DRM as they are imported into Calibre.

[0]: https://www.howtogeek.com/162994/how-to-strip-the-drm-from-y...

[1]: https://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/drm-removal-t...

The other reply to this covers it well. I'll just add one more thing. Some latest versions of the kindle app give you an edition of the ebook that can't so easily be stripped down with calibre. In these cases, a couple solutions exist: first, there's a certain plugin for calibre that does support DRM stripping, which can be installed to the calibre app (i'll try to find it and post here) and secondly (what I myself do), just download and install an old version of the kindle app for your desktop machine and download your purchases to that, they'll appear in their older format which can be DRM stripped via Calibre, and even converted to other formats like epub.

None of this by itself is promotion of piracy as far as I'm concerned, since we're just talking about gaining full control of the things we DID buy and paid for from Amazon, so I refuse to consider it "wrong" despite their tiresome efforts at DRM lock-in.

so to follow up, the issue revolves mostly around the newer Kindle KFX format, and because it's been a while since I've done any DRM strips through calibre, it might at this point not even be an issue due to some more recent update. If it is though, this post from 2019 covers the details of getting around this too.

https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/calibre-kfx-drm-guide.ht...

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