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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

Amazon's latest file format (KFX, I think) hasn't been cracked. You can't reliably strip DRM from new Amazon books. The tools work on some of the books some of the time, but you can't rely on it working.

The workarounds mostly involve getting Amazon to give you the book in an older format, but then you lose the typography improvements that KFX gets you.

Apple's DRM format (Fairplay?) has never been cracked but I believe Adobe's has. Buying from the Google store of Kobo store is probably the best bet.

The book DRM problem requires a legislative solution.

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For exporting a library of books you already own/read there aren't going to be many titles that have any improvements in KFX that you would care about. It certainly doesn't hurt to just try it and see what if any of the titles in the library have issues with being deDRMd.

I second buying from Google Play. Outside of a period of time last year where they had a bug that prevented exporting many titles in their catalog (some error in their backend service), I have never had an issue with purchases from there. I will happily continue getting my books from sources that allow true ownership after purchase regardless of any touted benefits Amazon adds to future DRM schemes, just need the words on the page.

Everybody has different things they care about when it comes to typography and layout.

For me, the kerning, hyphenation, and spacing improvements in KFX are pretty big. I also like that I can choose justified or ragged right.

https://www.reddit.com/r/kindle/comments/viqxjj/heres_the_fo...

Maybe I'm missing something, but those all sound like things that are display layer and shouldn't be dependent on KFX to be able to accomplish. I do know that that you can run preprocessing on epubs to adjust some of the layouting to your preference. The rest should just be determined by the reader application you are using and any shortfall in customization of those aspects would be addressed by improvements to that application.

Regardless, my point was that: A - most of the books already in the library were likely enjoyed/acquired without knowledge of hypothetical improvements from Amazon rolling out a new ebook format and DRM scheme. And B - even if there is some magic that Amazon had to include in KFX to support the improvements you listed and can't be reproduced without them; I personally would not consider those or most any improvements to be worth losing ownership of books that I purchase. The most valuable part of an ebook is the text and ownership of a copy of that is what I'm paying for. It is fairly easy for me to be principaled on only buying ebooks that I know I can own a copy of due to the diverse distribution that exists for most titles. Even when I had an Oasis, I didn't purchase anything through Amazon and loaded all my books over USB.

> those all sound like things that are display layer and shouldn't be dependent on KFX to be able to accomplish

Seems like that's how it should work, but it doesn't. Maybe that's by design or maybe it's fallout from poor choices Amazon made earlier in Kindle history. I really don't know.

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