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Comment by zigzaggy | Hacker News Reader

Can I use this to change my purchased kindle books into ebooks for all devices?

I’m somewhat tech literate, but pretty ignorant about e-book file types.

You cannot -- Kindle ebooks are in a format called KFX (or AZW/mobi or AZW3, depending on when you got them), which this tool doesn't support as an input.

If you wanted to do that, I'd just use Calibre, which has really comprehensive format conversion abilities: https://calibre-ebook.com

Most Kindle ebooks have DRM as well, which I think is currently hard to remove -- there's a plugin for calibre that you could try. Some publishers don't apply it, though, so maybe.

Removing drm from .azw3 is easy. [0] All you need is the ID of your kindle, since it's tied to your device.

There is also a plugin for Calibre, although I haven't tested this myself. I'm not sure if it requires a device ID or not. [1]

[0]: https://alexwlchan.net/2019/08/removing-the-drm-from-my-kind...

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

Calibre is great, but IMO it’s the wrong approach for this particular conversion. Use KindleUnpack instead, which is close to lossless.

https://github.com/kevinhendricks/KindleUnpack

This is a fantastic way to read books published by Tor on multiple devices. Now if only Tor would sell the ePub files on their website. (Tor eBooks are not DRMed.)

KindleUnpack doesn't seem to handle DRM though.

Neither does Calibre’s converter. To convert an encrypted AZW3 to an unencrypted EPUB, one can presumably decrypt it first and convert it second.

Calibre has a plugin the allows the converter to work with DRM

I'm an author on Amazon and wonder: Is this also true if I switch off DRM for my books on Amazon? Could someone clarify this? I publish all my books without DRM.

So one thing I know is that for all the books by John Scalzi, their listings on Google Play Books have a note of:

    At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

(see https://play.google.com/store/books/details/John_Scalzi_Old_... for an example)

And indeed once you purchased his books you can download a DRM-free epub or pdf file of the book you purchased and use any tool you like to read it.

I don't see similar note on the listings of his books on Kindle store, so my _guess_ would be that Amazon is unwilling do fulfill this request from the author, but I could be wrong (I never owned any kindle device anyways).

The Kindle store doesn't make it obvious if something is DRM free anymore. The most obvious way is that DRM free books will usually list the number of simultaneous devices as unlimited while DRM books will not. Happy to be corrected if there is a nicer way of telling.

In case the question isn't about the format but about the DRM, Apprentice Alf has a wonderful plugin for Calibre: https://apprenticealf.wordpress.com

And unfortunately I don't think the DRM for the latest format (KFX) has been cracked yet. The best anybody can do is work around it by getting Amazon to send you the book in an older Kindle format but then you lose all the nice things that you get with KFX.

> The best anybody can do is work around it by getting Amazon to send you the book in an older Kindle format but then you lose all the nice things that you get with KFX.

What do you get with KFX? It's hard for me to imagine any goodies I'd rather have than a file that I own and can read at my leisure.

One really nice feature you get is that if Amazon decides they want to delete the book from your kindle they can. It's a nice feature for Amazon and the publishers love it as well.

Justification is much better on kfx

The improvements are listed here:

https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G202087570

The writing is on the wall though - DRM is getting better and the easy to crack formats will probably fade away soon.

The solution isn't technical (ie better cracks), it's legislative. Books are special and most e-books shouldn't be DRM'd. Purchasers of ebooks should have the right to resell, to gift, to bequeath, to trade, and do all the other things that have been part of book culture for the past few hundred years.

I haven't tested it:

https://www.epubor.com/ultimate.html

eBook DRM Removal functions

Support eBooks purchased from: Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Sony, Kobo, Google Play, Lulu, Smashwords, Fictionwise, and more... Input formats: KFX, EPUB, PDF, AZW, AZW1, AZW3, AZW4, Mobi, PRC, TPZ, Topaz, TXT, and HTML. Output formats: EPUB, Mobi, AZW3, TXT and PDF.

That's basically a repackaging of the Apprentice Alf DRM tools.

April 2018: As of version 6.6.0, Apprentice Alf's DRM removal tools support Amazon's newer .kfx file format. You'll also need to install the KFX conversion plugin(link is external) to import your .kfx files into Calibre.

https://www.geoffstratton.com/remove-drm-amazon-kindle-books

The GitHub repo for the DRM removal tools is here:

https://github.com/apprenticeharper/DeDRM_tools

The README says this:

> Note that DRM can only be removed from KFX format files downloaded with Kindle for PC/Mac 1.26 or earlier. Amazon changes the DRM for KFX files in Kindle for PC/Mac 1.27 and later.

KFX is different from older versions in that the file is tailored to the device it is downloaded on. If you download with the Kindle for PC, the file is optimized for your big, high resolution screen and isn't going to be great on an eink device.

There are no cracks that work with the KFX files extracted from the Kindle reader.

I haven't tried with this tool yet but I would be surprised if so, purchased Kindle books usually have quite a bit of DRM involved.

There are methods to strip it using old versions of the desktop kindle app that have exploits, but it's not overly easy to do if you're not familiar with stuff like that.

Search for "Apprentice Alf" for a DRM stripping plugin for Calibre. This is how I liberated my kindle library. Once you've stripped the DRM, you can freely convert them to epub.

No, your Kindle books are AZW3 or such, and they also have DRM applied.

If you strip the DRM, with tools which are common to find on the net, you can then use Calibre to convert them to EPUB, which is a very common format.

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