How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM
blog.pixelmelt.dev
blog.pixelmelt.dev
"Was it worth it? To read one book? No. To prove a point? Absolutely. To learn about SVG rendering, perceptual hashing, and font metrics? Probably yes."
"Wait, you work in tech, why would you ever work on your own car when you can clearly pay someone else to do it???"
Because I like to learn things.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, if you haven't read it
> Even the maintainer of the DeDRM plugin has gone underground, refraining from issuing an official new release out of concern that Amazon will simply slap it down.
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?p=4516384#p...
> This works for most Kindle books currently, but Amazon is cracking down hard on the workarounds lately. So free any books you need to asap.
https://github.com/apprenticeharper/DeDRM_tools/discussions/...
One of the big publishers put heavy pressure on Amazon to patch DRM exploits or else they would pull all their content from the platform (or so I was told).
(I worked at Kindle 2017-2019, and was on the team that wrote the code that OP reversed engineered)
Reading is still a completely different thing from a book, a stream of consciousness between a writer and a reader, than it is reading in almost any other format. The way we read online from websites and apps is changing how our brains work and how we process text for information (not for the better). We're slowly becoming like the look-up tools that we use in Google and other search engines and LLM agents.
The best way for many chronically online dopamine fried people today to revert their brain back to some normality would be for them to read books and to fight through the distractions as they read.
When more people get their information calories from sources that are not books, what the books say becomes less relevant.
Maybe streaming is inevitable, but streaming is at least partially pushed by the streaming services who make more money on streaming than they do purchases.
But for me, the bad OCR ebooks can be painful to read.
I jailbroke both kindles. And use koreader on them which now supports progress sync with Kavita which is amazing! So I don't really lose functionality.
Many websites sell epubs, with or without protection. The DRM is never usually that hard to break with Calibre. If you're into that sort of thing.
Overview: https://www.hotelexistence.ca/remove-drm-with-kindleocrer/ (there's a sample conversion at the bottom, so you can see if it works "good enough" for your purposes)
Script: https://github.com/raudette/kindleOCRer
In action: https://youtu.be/3-07wMCKlkw
That would provide a closer-to-original version of the ebook, rather than just a visually similar one.
That any of this is necessary at all is absurd. Hats off to anyone with the patience to bypass Amazon's DRM rather than giving up on the Amazon ebook ecosystem entirely.
The only viable option would be to buy the book and then pirate a de-DRM'd copy.
Dont pay for your own hope that you can pick the lock of your own paid for jail cell.
In the old days, we used to cart boxes of books down to the used book store in exchange for credit, and then load back up with more reading to bring home.
I don't have anywhere close to enough bookshelf space for the number of books I've read over the years.
I moved my book boxes many times before I gave up on most of them. Now I don't even have space to put them all out. 88 square meters for a family of four with toys etc. doesn't go very far.
You don't keep proof, though, and probably isn't allowed to keep a backup after you give the book away. But most countries laws don't care about any of this (and it's not a backup).
Whereas of everyone buys new, keeps the book, and pirates, the author isn't going to see much negative impact.
Hanging on to the "proof" is important. Otherwise all you really prove is that you paid money to touch a physical copy.
https://apps.apple.com/app/id1668658774 can be used to verify if they require a physical copy.
(usps bound printed matter is usually least expensive when shipping books)
Or, you might find the author online and see if they have some sort of donation mechanism set up. It's very common these days for a lot of professionals, but some authors are old school.
https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/
When I upload the PDF on Amazon, a minimal price is automatically calculated. In the case of the DOOM, Amazon sets the minimal price at $51.35.
There is a slider which authors can use in order to add their "share" on top of Amazon price. I have added $3.88 which Amazon also takes a cut on. The result is $1.59 royalty and $0.77 profit per book sold.
Amazon: 40% of the price
Author: 3% of the price (half of which goes to taxes)
Color printed books are expensive, but I think he chose the premium color print option rather than the standard color print option. You can try it out: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/royalty-calculator { pages: 432, dimensions: 7.5"x9.25" } Roughly $18 for basic color and $36 for premium color (which probably also means heavier, higher quality paper).
Amazon takes 40%. Barnes and Noble Press takes 45% for self-published books, and their printing costs are within a couple dollars. Compare to typical retailer+distributor costs of >50% while authors get <15%.
The economics of retail print publishing and logistics don't seem to work out at higher author royalty rates. Authors who don't want to give up 40% of list price always have the option to handle printing, shipping, and accounting themselves, selling on ebay or from their own website.
Feels jank to pay for the book AND pay to free it, but that's the world we live in.
It should show up in the epubor app on the Kindle tab after you install the kindle app and used it to download your books. No need to drag and drop from the file system it's all right there in the app. It finds Kindle, Kobo, etc and lists them.
EDIT - Make sure you leave the Kindle app running. I think it needs to be able to read the keys from memory or something.
I only have Linux machines at my disposal and I have a PocketBook. The device is nice, but the store is truly abysmal. Often there is some adobe based DRM on books I want to buy and I never got it to work with my ereader.
I just gave up and pirate them now, unless there is a DRM free version (authors like Ruther Bregman and Cory Doctorow provide them.)
It used to be quite easy to strip DRM from kindle books, with my old kindle keybaord, so in the past I always bought a lot of ebooks from Amazon. But now I can't get them on my device anymore. A true shame, the Amazon ebook store really has all the books.
This whole situation p**es me off enough to not feel bad about pirating.
You can also just add "SideloadedMode=true" to your "Kobo eReader.conf" to achieve that. This removes the "Home" and "Discover" tabs as well, defaulting to the clean "My Books" tab instead.
Not a civil issue, like libel or fraud, but the sort of talk that can get a policeman to come and drag you off to jail. If you've ever wondered why DRM is so roundly hated by engineers of a certain age, it's because not only it dumb makework that they are required to implement, not only is it extremely irritating to discover it interfering with your own computer, but if you do effectively point out how dumb, irritating, and eminently circumventable it is, they made it against the law to even tell anyone.
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/licensing-scheme-fair-use...
> they made it against the law to even tell anyone.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
The law says “no person shall circumvent” DRM, and later prohibits the distribution of “technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof” to break DRM. It’s worded pretty carefully to avoid prohibiting more traditional forms of speech like this post, and as far as I’m aware has never been used in the manner you suggest.
These sorts of code are usually pretty short, right? It isn’t as if it needs to be maintainable or have a nice GUI.
Reality is moving away from states, and is now moving faster than legacy "laws" can ever hope to catch up.
That's a big part of what's fueling the wave of abandonment of DRM. I mostly play bluegrass - and given the lineal connection between traditional music and internet freedom, it probably comes as no surprise - but every serious bluegrass album is DRM-free now. Every grammy winner in the bluegrass and americana categories since at least 2020 has been DRM-free.
> Defendants then linked their site to those "mirror" sites, after first checking to ensure that the mirror sites in fact were posting DeCSS or something that looked like it, and proclaimed on their own site that DeCSS could be had by clicking on the hyperlinks on defendants' site. By doing so, they offered, provided or otherwise trafficked in DeCSS.
The appeal was mostly about whether the DMCA and/or the specific injunction in question violated the First Amendment, and the court found that it didn't.
(Universal City Studios vs. Reimerdes at the district court level, Universal City Studios v. Corley at the circuit)
(to clarify, I wasn't talking about any git-specific hashes, just regular sha2/blake2b hashes of python, json, and font files. However, the two sha1 commit hashes in the git history match as well.)
4526863 - Initial commit
The repo as I and many other people cloned it has the first commit ("first commit", not "initial commit") at Oct 12 23:20 Z, and the "done" commit at Oct 15 19:37 Z.
A likely explanation is that pixelmelt squashed both commits at or after they put up the blog post, but didn't force-push the rewritten history to github until it hit HN and blew up.
REDACTED
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C1
13256278887989457651018865901401704639
REDACTED
13256278887989457651018865901401704641
Found not guilty, but he was charged and tried.
Not necessarily. Being found not guilty just means that the facts of that specific case, as determined by the jury, did not fit a guilty verdict. It doesn't mean that someone who did a similar or analogous thing couldn't be prosecuted under the same law and found guilty.
Not necessarily. A cynical modern legal strategy is to bombard people with frivolous legal actions that only the well-heeled can afford. Defendants can argue that claims are baseless or frivolous, but to make that argument, they must hire a lawyer and appear in court.
To see my point, look at the number of frivolous prosecutions now being launched by ... ah, never mind, I don't want to get political.
But individuals have been successfully prosecuted for "aiding and abetting" violations of the DMCA, where speech was a material element of the proscribed behavior. Oh, and -- IANAL.
Why only describe them and not go for the easiest example: Nintendo.
It does, but you're still bankrupt.
I'll do you one better: 2600 Magazine was prohibited from saying which website hosted DRM-circumvention code:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_City_Studios,_Inc._v...
They were legally prohibited from saying, on their own website, words like "You can get DeCSS from http://lemuria.org/~tom/DeCSS/" and nothing else. Criminalised speech.
But yes, obviously serious threats of violence are not protected speech.
They can also contravene a number of other legal safeguards along the way, and disregard judges' orders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_R%C3%BCmeysa_%C3%...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Rasha_Alawieh
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Mahmoud_Khalil
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Mohsen_Mahdawi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activist_deportations_in_the_s...
It appears the US has elected an administration that wants to turn the country into a lawless shithole, where the powerful do whatever the fuck they want, and they deliberately fuck with laws and safeguards, and deliberately target their political enemies (e.g. student activists), to flex how powerful they are.
I kind of hate the thing where people want to make this the part that matters, because Trump is a massive outlier who doesn't care about that and says the thing he's not supposed to say.
But the people who still do the prosecution under the pretext and then don't admit to why are even worse, because they're doing the same thing and then lying about it on top of that. If all you do is punish people for not lying, that's not going to solve anything. You need to take away their ability to trump up charges against random people.
Jerry Seinfeld: You disagree?
Norm MacDonald: Yeah, I thought it was the raping.
Because then you don't really have any rights. They can't formally punish you for speech but they can punish you for breaking the same unrelated law a million other people broke without knowing and that only you were prosecuted for, "coincidentally" right after you said something they didn't like.
The fact that your statement is becoming more and more true in the United States is an indictment.
Dispute that this should constitute a crime as much as you want (and please, do. Take it to court, get the laws changed, go into politics, get the US fixed, this is bullshit) but for as long as it is: being charged with a crime for "doing crime and teaching others to do the same crime" is not a first amendment violation.
The current regime (before it was a regime) got away with a lot of very bad speech because "the first amendment says all speech is allowed, no matter what" and should be made to hold everyone to the same standard they hold themselves to.
I think this is a weaker example.
Judge Kaplan very likely went beyond what the law allows, in issuing the injunction against Eric Corley for even _adding a hyperlink_ to the DeCSS code on his website.
However, we don't know this for sure, because Corley did not take this to the Supreme Court. There is a chance that the SCOTUS would have accepted the case, and found that neither a hyperlink to computer source code, nor computer source code itself, constitutes "technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof"... but at the same time, maybe they wouldn't accept it, and maybe they would but it'd cost a lot of money Corley didn't have to see the case through. So who knows? Corley seemed satisfied enough that, even though he was personally enjoined from linking to DeCSS, it nonetheless spread like wildfire all over the world, and DVDs were effectively copyable from that day forward.
http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/shirt/
DeCSS was also available in DNS txt records for a while circa 2000.
There used to be some debate about whether a prose description is equivalent to computer code even though there are proofs in information theory that they are. English and C are just two different languages in which you can encode the same information.
But we don't even have to go there anymore. LLMs mean there are now machines that can execute a prose description. Code is speech and speech is code.
Even accidentally releasing a demo or preview with DRM should invalidate copyright on that software/movie/book/whatever.
I wouldn't go that far. 18 months is long enough though.
Fair use exists for both people and corporations. Just because a corporation copies something in a way that is fre use, that doesn't mean that people should be able to freely copy it.
Equally cynically, it's fair use because if it isn't, the entire economy collapses overnight.
> Equally cynically, it's fair use because if it isn't, the entire economy collapses overnight.
Sounds about right. If they had the moral fortitude to apply the laws as they were supposed to, they'd do the right thing and if it collapses the economy then so be it. The fact they didn't reveals political calculation in their judgements.
When laws are stripped of their moral advantage, resistance to laws, courts and authorities becomes civil disobedience and a moral imperative of citizens. We cannot have mutually exclusive ideas existing simultaneously. That's how we get distortions like "you citizen must pay outta the nose for everything but the elite corporations can do whatever they want with complete impunity". The only acceptable way for them to resolve their conundrum is to either hold corporations accountable for their copyright infringement or abolish copyright for all. Anything else can and should cause civil unrest.
This doesn't make for a good anti-DRM argument because the concern can simply be addressed by requiring a DRM-free copy to be deposited at the library of congress (or similar[1]) so it can be released in 150 years (or whatever) it actually becomes public domain.
Moreover how would you even define what "DRM" is? Is spotify refusing to provide a .mp3 file download for their streaming service a "DRM"? What if they implement streaming via webrtc, to make it extra-annoying to manually download? For games, is it "DRM" to add mandatory online requirements even for single player? What if there's an ostensible reason for the online requirement, like if the gameplay is computed server-side a-la world of warcraft?
Then do that. It's not my job to try to argue your side of things. No one does that, as you well know, so my argument not only stands, but wins.
>Moreover how would you even define what "DRM" is?
Anything that interferes with copying the work in question.
>Is spotify refusing to provide a .mp3 file download for their streaming service a "DRM"?
Yes. This is an obnoxiously juvenile question. The nature of streaming services is that they send the media to the node (on demand). If that is done in a way that makes it difficult to play it a second time except to "stream" it again, you can hardly claim this is incidental. They go to great lengths to prevent it.
>For games, is it "DRM" to add mandatory online requirements even for single player?
Again, yes. There is no other purpose to such a requirement, and no one makes it a secret that this is done specifically to thwart so-called "piracy" attempts.
>What if there's an ostensible reason for the online requirement, like if the gameplay is computed server-side a-la world of warcraft?
You mean like with Blizzard, where they sued the programmers who did bnetd and prevented people from connecting to third party servers which computed gameplay? That wasn't even done to further piracy, by the way, they were just being dicks.
This is a nonsensical complaint, because the actually existing DMCA already conditions legal consequences on whether DRM is present.
[1] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/decss-haiku.txt
I do remember trying to learn CSS for web definitely made me feel like it was a Cascading Style Scrambling
"No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title [...]"
(A) to “circumvent a technological measure” means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and
(B) a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
I'm less sure about (B), not being a lawyer, but I think it's so generic that it does apply: the "ordinary course of [...] operation" of reading the book requires running the apps provided by Amazon. This seems to fit "requires the application of [...] a process [...] with the authority of the copyright owner".
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/uscode.php?width=840...
Problem: we can't make cryptography exports (software exports) illegal
-> what actually IS illegal to export?
-> munitions!
-> let's just declare that cryptography is "munitions"
-> problem solved
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
Anyway I'm not surprised. This kind of pedantry is what lawyers do for a living.
You're being needlessly obtuse. If you bother to learn about the topic, you'll understand it's about distributing software.
The doctrine has never been tested in court as no case involving it has gone to trail.
All I am saying is that I am not sure it's so simple: sure, if everyone had them, the risk that there is some lunatic crazy enough to actually put them to use rises; but it also potentially stops a bunch of wars, especially bigger countries going after smaller ones.
If it is a munition the US government has limitations on it's actions controlling it covered under the 2nd amendment to the constitution.
In reality it nor the first amendment(freedom of speech) hack probably would not work. The limitation was on exporting strong crypto, not using or importing it. It was stupid and impossible to control. But I would guess any charges would be espionage(illegal speech) and smuggling(illegal goods). regardless of how you packaged it.
That's a rather facetious interpretation. You're complaining that there was no law preventing software being distributed, and as there was a need to prevent that then lawmakers fixed that problem. That's hardly surprising, isn't it?
You also seem surprised that including cryptography software in existing lists designed to prevent export of military and/or dual-use technology is also surprising, unexpected, or outlandish. If you actually think about it, is it really?
If you go by the common interpretation of "munitions" and by and large the contents of that list, then it clearly does was not intended to include mathematics.
I think you are trying very hard to imagine inconsistencies where there are none. Not only are you trying to argue that cryptographical software is not relevant to military uses, which is an absurd argument to make, but you are also trying to argue that managing what items feature in an export control list is not the responsibility of an executive branch.
The only requirement to export-control something is that the item features in an export-control list. You're complaining that a specific type of software was added to such a list. Tell me exactly what part you don't, can't, or refuse to understand.
!copy !save
The plan was to render notepad.exe and thus whole windows an illegal software because it allows to circumvent the existing DRM. Of course this would make illegal also less and vim, therefore I got scared of the power that lay in my hands, and cease to hit the atomic button.
_____
(1) I've noticed that I recently started to use "I remember" more and more on the hackernews. I'm getting old.
The Serial Copy Management System (SCMS)[1] is a DRM standard built into digital audio tech like DAT, MiniDisc, DCC, and consumer audio CD recorders. It works by adding just 2 bits — but no encryption or obfuscation whatsoever — to the digital audio signal that tell the recorder if further digital copying is allowed. Importantly, SCMS only ever blocked making a digital copy of a copy — you could always make a first-generation copy from an original, but not chain further digital copies. The requirement was pushed by copyright holders: in the US, consumer devices had to implement SCMS to ensure you couldn’t endlessly duplicate perfect digital recordings, but pro studio gear was exempt. SCMS doesn’t restrict analog copying, just digital serial copying. Most people found it annoying rather than effective.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Copy_Management_System
They broke that a while ago by making their DRM even worse, so now I just pirate those books.
At least Steve Jobs understood how DRM should work.
I've loaded it up with the epubs I have in my Calibre library (which ironically contains mostly books I've bought from Amazon before they made stripping DRM unreasonably hard).
Now I won't buy anything from Amazon because I can't strip the DRM, and hence can't read the books on my e-reader of choice.
Their loss, not mine.
Pirated books have no DRM, usually come in an open .epub format, which can be converted to whatever your reader requires, and you end up actually owning them, even if amazon decides to abandon the kindle ecosystem.
This is why I have a Boox Android eInk tablet, although I only use it with burner accounts. They run Ancient versions of Android.
I run Storyteller app on it and have my ebooks & audiobooks synced up perfectly like whispersync but better.
I’m paying for BookFusion, to have synced cross-platform reading. It’s expensive, but seems to be one of the few cross-platform synced readers that supports the EPUB Media Overlays from Storyteller.
Have you experienced ghosting with your Boox tablet? I’d like to get one, but I know that ghosting would bother me.
Once you get all the e-ink settings dialed in to make black text more readable on the color e-ink screen, it’s pretty damned good. I never notice ghosting. It’s not very easy to get the settings dialed in though. If you are purely reading on it get a black and white screen if it’s in stock so you aren’t fiddling with it to get text to really be boldly black instead of grey.
I personally know people who pirate books, but pay hundreds of dollars a year for streaming services or battle pass type video games. It blows my mind. Books are so cheap people!
I recently bought the complete Storm Archives series by Brandon Sanderson on ebook for $10. That's over 100 hours of entertainment. It's literally a ratio of 10 CENTS per hour of entertainment.
Even a 60 euros for a 6 hour experience comes at 10 euro per hour, cheaper than music and on par with movies.
Add replayability, multiplayer, longer games, cheaper games, ... and many many games are under 1 euro per hour, sometimes far under. Even someone playing fifa or call of duty has a price to hour ratio thats absurdly good.
And the range available is insane, used to be if you liked some genre you had maybe a game once every two years, now there are so many that not only you can't play all your games, even a seasonned gigantic fan of gaming cannot know all good games released anymore.
At least you can transfer movies around different services. It’s a shame you can’t with books.
In the present case, Amazon clearly states that the customer is buying a book, so it should work the same way as buying a physical book.
One solution would be to buy a DRM free digital version.
It was mostly a passing mention in the lawsuit against them where the damages are just for pirating books they didn't also buy. The fact that they bought used books and scanned them since its cheaper than ebooks was allowed by the court.
I've been downloading every book whose title I see mentioned anywhere. I've got the last 20 years or so of the NYT Book Review Notable Books (100 per calendar year), the Book of the Month Club list, etc. Why go to the library, when I can have one of my own?
The library ebook lending solutions tend not to avoid the DRM problem either.
Consider that maybe buying Amazon Kindle books is giving more support to DRM schemes like the one described in the article than it is to authors and publishers.
What is your definition of “cheap” and how many books do you consume compared to movies and TV shows on streaming services? You also haven’t stated which categories of books are cheap and are better value for you. Others may not have an interest in Storm Archives or something that’s interesting to you. There may be people interested in reading a lot of nonfiction alongside some fiction. Individual interests vary a lot.
Someone using only one streaming service may probably be getting thousands of hours of entertainment over one year.
Such comparisons also don’t account for regional price variations and availability.
I, too, do not buy ebooks that I cannot strip the DRM from. I would face a dilemma were I to have need of a book that I cannot get as either a physical copy or a DRM-free electronic copy, but I have not faced that situation yet.
I have spent over $2000 this year on books.
- Brandon Sanderson's books are actually relatively inexpensive, despite their popularity
- Brandon sanderson ebooks are available without DRM. Interestingly, this is actually more common for fantasy and SF than other genres.
Other books are more expensive and more likely to be locked behind DRM for digital books.
Because it's a Tor policy? Brandon Sanderson's ebooks are DRM-free because his publisher is Tor.
But it's also useful to point out that it isn't just Tor. Baen, best known for military scifi, has had a DRM-free policy for slightly longer than Tor. (Not just that, but the Baen Free Library is a really cool approach to ebooks as well, with DRM free copies of some of their most out-of-print/hard-to-print books and also the first book or two in nearly every series that they publish for a "try before you buy". Some of their hardcovers have even included CDs of sections of the Baen Free Library over the years.)
Baen did it first but Tor did it louder in that Tor's parent Macmillan went to bat for Tor and few other brands in a big lawsuit with Amazon that Amazon was applying their DRM whether the publisher wanted that or not because it was a lock-in moat for Amazon, which led to why there is now a required "This book is DRM free at the request of the publisher" acknowledgment on kindle copies of most Tor books (and a few other publishers).
I personally know people that pirate everything and PAY FOR PIRATING SERVICES. This blows my mind even more! I know that globally it's probably still cheaper to pay for those services rather than paying for 4 different streaming services each month, but god, if I go pirate than I would go for 0$/month expenses.
A) the content creator, owner of the IP
B) the people that copy the content made by A and publish it (i.e. the "release groups"). They can distirbute the content over bittorrent, sharing sites etc
C) people that run platforms that share copies made by B, and they offer access to those copies (sometimes even just a hash to a torrent) with some kind of paid subscription. Their added value is making it easier to access content copied by B.
D) final users, they can choose to consume content from A, B or C.
My point was that D paying for C are... weird, in my opinion.
Edit: technically there is a 5th group, like C but that do it for free, running forums etc at most hosting some banner to pay the hosting cost and not much more.
Hard disagree, lot of video game will give you a better hours of entertainment per dollars ratio.
Lot of sport will do the same, as will board games and roleplaying games. Lot of hobbies are cheaper than books.
When I'm following a new book that's coming out, I'll drop the $30 on the unnecessarily large hardcover with the thick paper that fluffs it up.
I have only ever purchased one eBook though, and it was an awful experience. I had to crack the DRM so I could read it on the same app I read all my other books on.
When I buy a physical book, I can put it on my shelf and share it with anyone I want. I can't do that with an ebook. And if I can't comfortably read the oversized print copy, I'm going to just go find a copy online.
I basically refuse to buy physical modern fiction due to the publishing industry making every physical copy as large as possible. I have old mass-market paperbacks that have twice the density per page, thinner pages, and overall more portable than the massive soft-covers with giant print that they sell today. They're just uncomfortable to read. I took a copy of "Death's End" and a copy of "Thinking in Jazz" by Paul F Berliner. From the outside, the two books have nearly the same dimensions. The latter weighs almost twice as much, has nearly 300 more pages, and the page density is nearly a third tighter. Why should both these books take up the same amount of space on my shelf? Why do publishers think they're so important as to take up two seats on the plane? Bring back smaller mass market formfactors ffs and I'll pay full price for their bullshit.
Publishing companies are making their products worse and worse to consume. As Gabe Newel says, it's a distribution problem.
Games that sell a battlepass or have ongoing MTX are an minority of the video games available.
There are plenty of games available that are priced similarly to books and there really isn't a question as far as which will provide more entertainment.
For instance, I recently purchased the Mass Effect series for $6. I should be able to easily get 100+ hours out of that set of games.
I have one that's been around since I was a kid, and I love taking the family there. Everybody picks a book, and it might cost anywhere from $80-120 (I've got a good sized family), but these days that's about what it would cost to go to a movie. And since you have a physical book, you can swap when you're done.
We also started celebrating Jolabokaflod a few years back, which is an Icelandic post-war tradition of giving books as gifts on Christmas Eve and reading them. This is a lot of fun, and it's a great excuse to hit the book store.
I know someone who wrote a (technical) book and how hard it is to get sales in the age of easy internet piracy.
I understand the desire to use the books as you please, but please remember that buying the book and downloading a pirated copy for your own use are not mutually exclusive choices.
You can still purchase the book to support the author even if you're not using the exact same file to read it. As the other commenter said, books are extremely cheap relative to the value and/or entertainment time they provide.
I think this is the problem that should be addressed.
Musicians went through a similar process in reverse order: first Napster ("piracy") then streaming services (analogous to Kindle/Amazon, where a huge 3rd party inserts themselves between content creator & consumer). Eventually some musicians twigged that they were getting screwed every way, so they set up ways for fans to pay them directly or via a less money-hungry intermediary (e.g. Bandcamp).
Not a perfect solution by any means, but if book authors feel their situation is bad enough, they could look into how musicians are dealing with it.
I'm probably not alone in thinking I'd far rather pay an author directly than Amazon or book publishers.
"Bookcamp", anyone?
Personally I have no issue paying for books and other media as it's not the price keeping me away. My issue is that any amount of that money going to providers that are pushing this DRM locked content, which I will absolutely under no circumstances support, no matter how cheap.
Giving money so a good thing you enjoy can continue existing really isn't a concept that's completely out there for most people. There's a thriving ecosystem of platforms for funding/tipping/donating.
There was a time I could go to Borders, Barnes and Noble, Crown Books, and a couple of independent bookstores. Now I can go to Barnes and Noble and the remaining independent store.
Seems like there should be some sort of new coop structure where a writer can engage with editors, graphics people, and marketers on a fee for service or sales percentage basis. Without the agent/publisher gatekeepers.
I haven't done that in a while though, so I'm not sure if they closed that loophole.
One of the big publishers put heavy pressure on Amazon to patch this exploit or else they would pull all their content from the platform (or so I was told).
(I worked at Kindle 2017-2019, and was on the team that wrote the code that OP reversed engineered)
For one thing, DRM also works in Amazon's favour (reselling multiple copies)
For another, DRM is a pretty big sticking point for copyright holders, music, text, whatever. It's the one big thing that publishers all think that their business model depends on
Thanks to Apple
>many video games are also sold without digital restrictions
Thanks to GoG and (to a lesser extent) Steam
Personally, I buy more music now than any other time in my life: high quality sources playable on all my devices.
The point you are responding to is at least partially true. Re-read it and see. Your brutal "No" only serves to discredit your own (partially true) argument.
There are also plenty of good free books from indie authors like me (www.rodyne.com) that don't make it to Amazon. I also normally check out smashwords (www.smashwords.com) for their free books or sales, and download about 30 books - about 5 are usually worth keeping, which is about in line with Kindle books I pay for. Also worth signing up for your local library for the best-sellers, they often have partnerships to allow you to loan ebooks.
Because I did that on two books maybe 1-2 weeks ago without issue. I might be on an old version of the desktop app.
Edit: apparently it's for titles April 2025 or later
https://linuxsecurity.com/news/government/sklyarov-hearing-s...
Sure seems like whoever at Amazon wrote this didn’t realize that it backdoors their DRM.
Or maybe they did, and now they will have to fix it.
We knew it was reverse-engineerable, we just didn't care.
Upper management seemed happy enough that it was pretty obfuscated, and we were happy that they didn't force us to do more about it.
This is very relatable. Management want X, engineers recognise X is dumb and deliver something that sorta looks like X, management see something that looks like X and are happy.
Email in bio if you have other questions about it you care to ask.
Amazon would need to drop this feature to seriously lock down their books
Do you tell yourself "well if I hadn't, the next person would've" ?
Did they force you to do it, then ? Was it worth it ?
I definitely have regrets about my time working at Amazon. Specifically, I wish that I had pushed back more about doing certain things.
Honestly, DRM wasn't even the worst. All the unnecessary user tracking was way worse, in my opinion.
Its impossible to know for sure, because I didn't push back as much as I should have, but I really think that "well if I hadn't, the next person would've" was absolutely true in this case (knowing what I know about all the other engineers that were in the department at the same time as me). I'm not saying the other engineers were bad people, a lot of them were lovely but they definitely had different convictions than I have.
> To read one book? No.
> To prove a point? Absolutely.
> To learn about SVG rendering, perceptual hashing, and font metrics? Probably yes.
The dedication on this endeavor is admirable. I quite enjoyed reading it even though certain things were new to me (structural similarity index).”
Posting the code on some code sharing platform (not GitHub, where it could probably be taken down quickly) could be a logical next step.
https://github.com/PixelMelt/amazon_book_downloader
Kind of expected, but I was surprised at how quick that was.
https://archive.softwareheritage.org/ https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Software_Heritage
I stopped buying ebooks from Amazon some time ago and switched completely to Kobo (and their much-more-easily-defeated DRM), but Amazon's acquisition of Comixology means they've still got by far the best collection of digital comics on the market.
I have about half of them already ripped, from an earlier time when the Kindle4PC application was easier to crack. But I still grab new comics from time to time.
Most local ebook stores will put undue barriers on who can purchase what because of generic region policies and/or their publishing contracts being country limited. Amazon will accept any valid credit card from anywhere as long as you create an account on the dedicated store. It's digital goods so you can also fill in any random address if needed.
No, piracy is.
Or to the author: what happens to images in the ebook?
I've had some slightly blurry on 2.8x1.9k screens, especially the older ones.
1. If possible, buy from the author directly (I mostly read tech books, so that's often an option).
2. Otherwise buy from elsewhere, without DRM.
3. If all other options fail, buy from Amazon but immediately download a DRM-free copy from libgen and use that.
This is both ethical and practical.
Btw, in Poland where I live, every ebook shop sells drm free books. Every single one. Why? Amazon don't sell polish books, yet kindles for the long time were the only readers available, so people had to use a cable to transfer the books. And kindle can't read any other drm than their own. So shops had no choice and it stayed that way.
So maybe a third option (not really but maybe?) is to buy polish version and use Ai to translate it?
I put that in the same bucket as my "right" to buy your house for $1.
And yes, DRM infringes on essential rights, it not only limits what you can do with something you supposedly bought, but takes away your control over your own hardware.
And even more basic is the right not to get frauded. If someone claims to be selling something to you, but then they only give you locked down, perhaps even revokable access to it, then they are defrauding you.
It's hard-coded to the .com store, but that's trivial to change.
The main problem is that every line is treated a `<p>` element. Which means the rendering is askew. That's fine if you're reading a PDF-style document with hard-coded line breaks, but a bit annoying for a reflowable ePub.
Commas are sometimes rendered as apostrophes. Full-stops are also sometimes mid-dots.
Given that the glyph shapes never change, it might be better to "bake in" the shapes rather than manually decoding them. Didn't take too long on my laptop to do the perceptual mapping, but could speed things up for others.
Nevertheless, an excellent demonstration of how pointless DRM is.
One (niche) way to overcome not being able to download books from Amazon anymore is to get ebooks from a library that supports Overdrive/libby. (Some of?) Those support downloading DRM files directly from the app, which you then can run through Adobe + Calibre. Obviously, this is contingent on book availability and your ability to get a proper library card. But works for me for 90% of the books that I need.
Over the course of a couple years they updated their scrambling; First to randomize the size of the regions, then to make them triangular instead of rectangular. It was an interesting if tedious challenge to reverse engineer.
But I still think the better option is to never give any money to Amazon.
Years ago I dropped buying stuff on Amazon, because they can't match prices, shipping times and the site just invites scams, but I kept buying eBooks, because my old Kindle is sort of amazing. Then they started messing with the Kindle platform as well and now I just buy physical books from local retailers.
A second peeve is that in dark mode you can only have gray on black, not white on black.
I’ve never seen a Kindle book rendering anything as vector graphics. That’s just not a thing in the Kindle world, as far as I can tell. It’s either basic text or pixel images.
One example I just checked is a book from MIT Press from 2021, where even √2 is rendered as an image, and also isn’t scaled correctly with respect to the text size. It really puts you off reading such books in Kindle.
Anyway, I guess my point is that TFA won’t help with what I find the most annoying about the Kindle experience.
They could just as well argue that you are not buying the book, but a license to access it under certain conditions. A movie theatre is a comparable example: You say you bought a ticket, not that you rented access to the movie, but it’s only valid for one specific viewing despite being a sale.
Not that I necessarily agree with the other comment either.
Good luck proving that in court without reasonable doubt.
Look at the image again. It’s extremely vague about what you are in fact buying.
I wouldn’t be confident in court, but I would be confident that most users expect that ebooks they “bought” in the past could be viewed on their new Kobo eBook reader.
Exactly. And because this conversation started because someone was asking about suing them, what you can argue in court is what matters for this thread.
I don’t agree with what Amazon is doing and thus don’t buy DRM ebooks from them, but that’s beside the point of the argument.
> I wouldn’t be confident in court
Which was my argument. Everything else you added were tangential arguments no one was refuting in the first place.
> but I would be confident that most users expect that ebooks they “bought” in the past could be viewed on their new Kobo eBook reader.
You think most people who buy books for ereaders expect that when they buy a book for Kindle, they can just load it up on their Kobo? I wouldn’t be that confident without a survey, but I would welcome seeing one.
People don’t seem to have trouble understanding that when you buy an app on iOS, that doesn’t work on Android, and vice-versa. It is plausible they might have the same intuitive understanding regarding the Kindle and Kobo stores.
I got sidetracked. Really, my only argument is that that your theatre comparison is flawed.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/i-like-plaintiffs-ch...
This is one of my biggest problems with DRM. It restricts what software you can consume the media on.
I bought a collection of books from Kobo without realizing it was protected by DRM, then realized I could only read them with the kobo reader, which is also really buggy. I really wanted to use a different reader app, but couldn't.
I suppose if you want to implement your own cloud-based (Dropbox? Google Drive?) storage service and circumvent the author's monetisation model, you could.
I wish more people would understand that we empower those companies by using their products and services. Avoid when you can and they lose their power.
When I tried, the only options from Amazon were 'transfer to my device' and that only works if you have a Kindle. There was 0 way to just download the stupid file and let me copy it myself.
There is a library built into the kobo you can purchase from, which I do for newer books. However, I've been on a classics kick and I pirate them tbh. Dumas doesn't mind.
That's good to know, thanks!
https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Amazon_altering_the_content_of...
PLEASE MAKE THE LAST PAGE READ BE THE KINDLE SCREEN DISPLAY WHEN POWERED OFF
END OF TRANSMISSION
It has direct integration with borrowing books from the library.
It has direct integration with Instapaper.
You can drag a file onto the device after mounting it over USB.
You can replace the endpoint for the store with a Calibre Web endpoint to directly sync your books from a personal server.
You can pretty easily modify the device however you see fit.
For me the library integration on the device itself was a major selling point. I have no complaints after switching four years ago!
I find their default interface is also good and can read anything without mayor problems, books, web & comics. My reader Elipsa 2e is also great for taking notes and supports notes in book pages, though that specific model isn't supported by the custom firmware.
But the library management is broken/non existent
So it's not just that you can't read Kindle books on other devices, but the Kindle itself is pretty much useless for reading things you purchased from other stores
Even though it was cheap and 2nd hand, I regret buying this thing
[0]: https://goodereader.com/blog/kindle/amazon-removing-download...
I think a motivated hacker could definitely improve it in no time.
Still amazing that it works at all, really well done.
But there were plenty of other bugs like bookshelf management getting corrupted.
Then, I bought a touchscreen kindle paperwhite, and found out that every time you change books it complains that it cant find the cloud, and won't let you categorize anything unless you register it and be online.
That's enough Amazon for me, no point in finding out a second time for hundreds of dollars that they still piss me off.
Pirating books is not hard. They're probably the smallest possible thing that people are interested in copying with the broadest variation in acceptable formats.
I know I'm screaming into the void, but if I'm paying real money why is the experience from piracy sites better?
I've never experienced issues with them that break the reading experience. The one issue I occasionally run into is that the book progress doesn't sync when I open the app and I have to click "sync now" which sometimes is blazingly fast and sometimes takes like a minute.
I can't imagine migrating away from Kindle now, it's probably one of my favourite devices and the Kindle is my favourite way to read.
All seamlessly, because Kindle used the cellular network for reading progress. Really a magical experience.
Then they removed cellular and _buttons_ from the devices. And now their app is actively crashing on my Kindle when I try to use it to buy a book.
But the main problem is that they don't sync the "last read" bookmarks until you open a book. But since that book didn't have a bookmark, it's reset to the beginning and then synced, so my "last read" bookmark is now at the beginning.
That's all changed now. I'd love to know why it's changed. My first thought was publisher pressure. But Kobo hasn't implemented harsh measures. Just Amazon has.
At any rate, I'm now using Kobo for my reading. Easy to break DRM. And they don't assume the same level of control over Kobo ereaders the way Amazon does with Kindle. I have over a thousand ebooks. I'm able to tag books in Calibre, and those tags automatically show up as Collections on the Kobo. It's a simple thing, but Amazon never gave me such flexibility. Makes a huge difference for me.
It's also possible to alter Kobo's UI/UX with various plugins without the need to jailbreak. Kobo (the company) is perfectly happy to let you do whatever you want with your own device. That's such a breath of fresh air compared to how Kindle is locked down.
I'm either old and stubborn or principled, but I want to use my current phone and "system" I've been using to read ebooks for the last 15 years.
(It's possible that kindle unlimited is a cheap enough system to make dealing with amazon software, but amazon is annoying enough that so far nothing has convinced me to buy into it)
It’s why archive.is is so much better to read on than a news site.
Might as well ask “when I engage with GPL projects it’s so much worse of an experience than if I just bundle the code and distribute it without a license, why?” It’s often cheaper to not comply than to comply.
But my kindle has definitely been “good enough” for me with Libby.
I use it too, but people work hard writing articles. How will they earn money if no one pays them?
Amazon theoretically makes money with which they pay people to make the user experience good.
Pirates have... a few nerds with some spare time?
But fortunately, with AI content starting to become better we will be able to transform regular people into IP maximalists arguing that copyright protection schemes should be embedded even more than they are today.
Upper management really enjoyed telling us (the engineers) that we needed to implement more DRM, and we liked complaining that it was dumb.
Fun to see someone reverse engineer what we implemented!
Is it hostile to customers, absolutely.
Here in Eastern Europe the local ebooks have no DRM (just a "please don't steal this" message or something similar), but my cynical side says we have like 10 contemporary writers and maybe 20 readers, it's not a big business to begin with. Physical books are heavy, hard to store/pack/move and are quite expensive to ship here - I guess I can't have a cake and eat it as well (for cheap, low effort baking at least).
ugh. The right thing to do is buy and THEN download the no drm version from "other sources." You should always support the authors.
> So let me get this straight: I paid money for this book
One can say that no DRM doesn’t bring issues but one can also say that there is a very polarized approach from the post author on what he believes he is entitled to depending on the situation they bring themselves to.
Now I have all of my epubs, unlocked, DRM-free, backed up, and I place them on whatever my ereader of the time is (currently Kobo), or read them on my own self hosted web reader.
I use it with my self-hosted calibre-web where I can sync my books to both KOReader on my boox and phone with the OPDS protocol and I use syncthing to sync my progress and highlights too ..
it's a bit of work to set up but I know it will work for a very long time, where with your solution, I wonder how long before Amazon will make it harder yet again?
I've been using https://github.com/teticio/kindle2pdf + tesseract to convert amazon books to text.
So that repo also disappeared. Neither is mentioned in https://github.com/github/dmca
I wondered if he was just tuning to the best algorithm for his corner case, but it's one of the algorithms in a decent OCR package anyway?
You'd only have to do a few hint/confirmations.
I ask not as a snark, since the content is genuinely interesting, but out of curiosity. The style seems very LLM: lots of bullet points, titles with sections typical of LLMs, sentences like "Why this is perfect for <thing>", "Why this doesn't work", etc. It matches the tone and style of everything that an LLM spits out at me.
There's this old patent for earlier kindle web obfuscation, which used CSS layout to scramble text https://patents.google.com/patent/US8700991B1
second books seems erroneous
I wonder if Kindle Web reader supports word search, but that probably just searches server side and then returns indexed selections.
And how about copy-and-paste and accessibility, there must be some a11y support?
I doubt he would’ve done that intentionally to make his indignant point.
That rather sounds like a bug to me.
I'd try browser automation to get the book pages, then OCR it (or just store them as images).
I don't understand the author complainant. If you don't like the app, don't use it! Pirate it all you want I don't care, but don't say it's because you didn't like the app. You want books? Buy them physically or find another way to obtain them digitally.
There are authors to these books on Kindle, and they don't want their books free on the internet, it's Amazon's jobs to combat this. They have no choice but to DRM.
And also, amazon is on the hook for providing an actual, working app here.
There simply no effective way to lock a book from copy while being able to read it. It will simply slow the process to free the book, at worst it will result in error or information loss (some links and fancy layout)
> There are authors to these books on Kindle, and they don't want their books free on the internet, it's Amazon's jobs to combat this. They have no choice but to DRM
We, as a civilisation, don't have to respect their wish. Free (as in beer) books are a necessity for a lot of people, and free (as in speak) book should be the norm, DRM introduce plenty of problem fir thé reader, with not a single added value for the customer.
Obviously you don't respect their wish, but Amazon needs to respect their wish.
I pay money and I want to get back a PDF, mobi, epub, or whatever. That's the kind of interaction I would appreciate.
If you have to have a certain software or a certain hardware in order to read the book you've paid for, I'm going to look for alternatives.
As you should. It was the author's choice to publish on Kindle, and it's completely his fault.
They do have choice in the DRM they choose and how it's implemented. The DRM should expire when copyright protection expires and the DRM should be standardized so that I could move my books anywhere I want and read them on most readers, just like DVD and Blu-Ray disks.
drm copyright arrays lie in the html/css layer, which stops the user from accessing raw text.
Pay for the book, then pirate it. Problem solved. Same with series and movies.
good that you didn't read the terms of amazon's kindle business model before buying that book; all that delicious rage and the interesting knowledge it spurred would have been lost to the world. tbh, i would have expected them to be more sophisticated. good job and kudos, enjoy your well earned book, it's yours now!
sadly i have no use for this, the only few books i ever bought on amazon were paperback, used and in good condition. good deals. but the mere fact that a provider requires me to use specific software to access content is simply unacceptable, making a detailed reading of their absurdly dystopian terms and conditions unnecessary.
i use amazon prime. for me it's very worth it just for the delivery savings as i live in a remote area. it includes access to their video streaming service. one day i decided to try it just to see what was there. i was immediately prompted with a download for some mandatory viewer/drm/codec. not going to happen, baby, so i just closed the tab, never bothered with it again and have the feeling that nothing of value was lost.
I consider myself warned and will never buy anything Kindle.
A lot of authors only ever offer on Amazon now, which leaves those of us without Kindles (I love my Kobo) in a difficult spot.
Frankly I would write it as anti-competitive. How are other e-reader companies supposed to survive when Amazon owns all the e-books and can just decide that only their e-readers are allowed? No one else has even a fraction of the market.
My primary use of a Kindle has been 15+ minutes off the nearest paved road into the woods, very definitely offline. Who decided on-demand downloading 5 pages at a time was good enough?
I actually wrote the code to make this work with screen readers, back when I worked for Kindle in 2018.
I even got to test it out with a few Amazon employees who were blind, which was a really cool experience!
We added some hidden divs which had the plaintext version for screenreaders. For whatever reason, upper management was ok with the plaintext being scrapable, as long as the formatted version couldn't be scraped.
> For whatever reason, upper management was ok with the plaintext being scrapable, as long as the formatted version couldn't be scraped.
I guess it’s either “formatted version is slightly better and typesetting is hard to get right” or “well we’ll have plausible deniability in case publishers ask us where’s our DRM”. Probably both. Still doesn’t make a lot of sense to me though.
Thanks for sharing!
As far as people being on board with this--I did not have to push it through, it was a task that management wanted done that I happily did, because I could see the value of it.
Amazon actually does a really good job with accessibility across all their products. When I was there, they had at least 2 full time employees (1 Product manager and 1 Quality assurance engineer) whose full time job was just accessibility, across all Kindle platforms and I heard the intention was to grow that team as I was leaving. They had an entire team working on accessibility for the retail website, from what I heard (though I only met one or two of those people).
However, there still was a sentiment among certain engineers that worrying about accessibility was a waste of time because it only helps a small section of the population. Thankfully Web accessibility (both in standards and in culture) has come a long way in the last 8-10 years, and I think a lot more people believe in its importance now that they did back in 2017 when I started working on this.
Don't force me to either get another AI to remove all the fluff, or to skim read.
There's an interesting article here, covered in a layer of AI slop.
A lot of the writing also has this feeling to a lesser extent.
My advice is always to write something first and then (if you insist) get AI to proofread and make editorial suggestions. This seems like it was written by AI from some prompt and notes, and then modified in a few places.
It just adds a bunch of weird fluff.
Here is why lists are bad for reading:
1. They break the flow.
I hate it. Cool blog article though.