How To Strip DRM from Kindle E-Books and Others | Hacker News Reader

How To Strip DRM from Kindle E-Books and Others

wired.com

317 pointsDanielRibeiro103 comments

I have started going back to real books for any book I might want to keep, loan, or give to a friend when I'm finished. It would be nice not to be screwed over by DRM yet again. I like my Kindle, but it doesn't help me read. It helps Amazon make money. The only thing it does is for me is to help me carry lots of books around easily.

Not buying eBooks from suppliers that infest them with DRM doesn't mean not buying eBooks. I love my Kobo reader with all my heart and it has massively increased my consumption of fiction. Just don't support and buy eBooks from suppliers that use DRM.

Baen Books is my favorite for science fiction. (www.baenebooks.com) O'Reilly Media for technical books. (http://shop.oreilly.com/category/ebooks.do) Calibre eBook store. (http://drmfree.calibre-ebook.com/) Project Gutenberg for the classics. (http://www.gutenberg.org/)

There are quite a few more, but I don't want to link them because I haven't personally used them. I'm also hoping DRM-Free eBook bundles catch on (https://www.humblebundle.com/).

If there are books that I "desperately" want to read and can't find them in DRM-Free form, I visit the local library. If the library doesn't have it, I will buy a print version. As long as it isn't a technical reference manual I will use frequently, I then donate it to the library when I'm done with it.

For all fans of fantasy and science fiction, the dragonmount.com is also a DRM free webshop for ebooks. (I have no affiliation with said site, btw. Just a happy customer).

While http://dragonmount.com is a Wheel of Time community they sell the entire range of DRM free TOR science fiction novels (among others). Definitely a good place to shop.

> they sell the entire range of DRM free TOR science fiction novels

Which are all not available outside the US. I could only find 4 books on that entire site that were actually available to be purchased outside the US.

I just tried entering a bogus US address, and got as far as the page where you can choose a payment method (which includes PayPal, so presumably you don't need a US credit card). If you get access to the books as a download, I suppose that you actually would be able to buy a book in this manner... Has anyone tried doing this?

I somewhat agree. But, I personally vastly prefer the experience of reading on the Kindle to a physical book (instant dictionary definitions, easier on the subway because I can hold on in the subway and still turn pages, the ability to choose my preferred font size and text width which allows me to read faster, and so on). I would pay more to read a book on a Kindle and frequently do (one can often find good quality used paper books for less).

The one thing I don't buy on Kindle are the rare books I expect to want to keep a long time. For everything else, I'm willing to accept that I might somehow lose access or be unable to read it in several years.

If your books have no DRM, how will DRM screw you over? Isn't that the point of this posting?

It's not just the books, but the reader.

This is straight Stallman: if you don't fundamentally control your computing environment, you don't own it, and you have no freedoms within it save those granted by the entity that does control that environment.

A Lessig might modify that slightly and say that your freedoms are actually balanced between four influences: Law, Norms, Market, Architecture. In the case of DRMd works on proprietary hardware, law and architecture are both opposed to the rights of the individual. Presumably Amazon responded to social norms and market pressures.

I prefer having more power on my side. It's a key reason I've avoided the e-reader game to date, despite some interest in going there.

I don't get what you mean in this context. I have complete control over what I put on my Kindle and what I don't. I don't use any DRM of any kind, ever, so that's a non-issue.

No, I don't have the power to program the thing myself, so Stallman wouldn't approve it, but then again he wouldn't approve of most computer operating systems or the vast majority of laptops sold either, so I don't see why e-readers are different....

Does anyone else have the power to modify your device? To add, remove, or change software or content? To disable it?

If the answer to any of these questions is "yes", then no, you do NOT have complete control over the device.

Depends a little on what you run on the Kindle. It's perfectly possible to run 100% open source. Amazon isn't exactly making it super convenient, but they're doing very little to prevent it. Stock, of course, they retain the ability to do so but on the other hand A) sponsor the hardware and B) provide updates and very good support.

I consider it a pretty fair tradeoff. They're not stopping you from churning your own butter, so to speak, but do count on you deciding it's easier to just run their stock stuff. Like a lot of semi-locked hardware, it's not like they'd be such floozies about proliferating the hardware if they weren't making a lot of it back in book sales.

So how can you run a Kindle fully open source?

For my kindle, I think I'm in the clear.

(Edit: It's never hooked up to the Internet, except when plugged into my computer, so I don't see how Amazon or anyone else is going to be able to touch it.)

Some people are refusing to pay Amazon (or other providers) for DRMd content - a boycott of anything with DRM.

Some people are not going to break any laws, even if those laws are mostly technical and not going to be enforced. And providing means to remove DRM is more problematic because the law is enforced a bit more rigorously there.

I am coming to a similar opinion with respect to the music and movie industries. For example, there are a few long since syndicated and no longer frequently broadcast TV shows that I and my family would gladly pay for. But there is no option to do so. We have purchased a few others, to be greatly disappointed when we found all the music changed, in cases where the music was closely tied into the plot.

Every item I purchase from these content owners contributes to the efforts they are making including to privatize and balkanize the Internet. Therefore, I will no longer spend my money in a fashion that contributes to this.

A fellow in... France, I believe, wrote a very pointed and eloquent article/post on precisely this point, some months back.

My understanding is that removing DRM for personal use only is legal in the US.

It is not. Section 1201 of the DMCA specifiys: "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."

There is an exception to users whose ability to make legal use of the protected material is impeded, but only after the Librarian of Congress rules that the given type of user of the given type of work qualifies for the above exception.

The exception mentioned above also, explicitly, does not apply to the following provision: "No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that-- `(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; `(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or `(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person's knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c105:1:./temp/~c105hq5...:

Interesting, then some of the news articles I've read on this are incorrect.

I think you need a good way to resolve this problem. So I recomended you this article.

http://www.epubsoft.com/how-to-remove-drm-from-azw-on-kindle...

Since I disapprove of Amazon's DRM policy, the only books on my kindle are tech books from O'Reilly (DRM-free) and fiction from Project Gutenburg (DRM-free)

I know I could download ebooks from Amazon and just remove their DRM, but I think it's better to vote with my wallet.

After all, they sell the Kindle at cost and rely on you buying books from them to make any profit. So don't buy their books and maybe they'll learn..

Some books on Amazon are DRM free. The publisher is the one who decides if they want to use it.

Yeah, but even if they're DRM-free Amazon can still take them away - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4682392

Until they offer a cast-iron, legally-binding guarantee that any ebook I buy from them cannot be taken away from me, they don't get my money.

If I buy a book, it's my book: If the bookshop I bought it from takes it back, then that's theft.

As far as I'm concerned, the same holds true for ebooks. I buy it, it's mine. Period. Until Amazon agrees with me, I don't buy their ebooks. It's that simple.

They can't take them away from you if you backup your DRM-free books on a different media.

Why should the grandparent jump through the hoops though?

Also, isn't stripping DRM from Amazon ebooks against the TOS? Potentially exposing him/her to some legal trouble?

O'Reilly will put your ebooks into your Dropbox folder if you let them. Amazon could do that. Problem solved.

Link: http://shop.oreilly.com/category/customer-service/dropbox.do

Backups are 'jumping through hoops' now?

As others have said, breaking the DRM for personal uses (backups, changing devices) should be perfectly legal in the US and probably most of Europe as well.

How do you see which books are DRM-free before purchase?

At least some books mention that "At the publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied." in the book description field. For example: http://www.amazon.com/Pirate-Cinema-ebook/dp/B0089LOEBS/ref=...

Is there a way to tell if this book has DRM?

http://www.amazon.com/Neuroscience-Exploring-the-Brain-ebook...

Yes. This part in the details section:

"Simultaneous Device Usage: Up to 4 simultaneous devices, per publisher limits"

means that it has DRM.

This I would also like to know.

How do you buy DRM-free tech books from O'Reilly?

All O'Reilly ebooks are DRM-free.

http://shop.oreilly.com/category/ebooks.do

And you can resell their DRM free ebooks. Just let that sink in for a minute.

Do they make you promise not to resell a book more times than you bought it?

Unsurprisingly, yes. You have to delete the book after you sell it. Relevant quote: "Resale: If you buy an O'Reilly ebook, when you are done with it you may resell it, provided that you do not retain any copies of the book after you sell it. This is the same as the situation when you sell a used print copy—when you sell the copy, you deliver it to the buyer and no longer have a copy in your library. If you have bought a hard copy/ebook bundle, you may of course retain the hard copy, if you sell the ebook." - Under more about usage. Still an awesome policy.

Are they if I buy them through Amazon?

Buy them directly from O'Reilly. Tim O'Reilly and crew were early and full-throated in their support for DRM-free content, and they deserve your support.

You can also watch one of their pages/blogs (it used to have an RSS feed, too, IIRC) for frequent sales, if you are looking for discounted prices.

Dunno - I don't buy ebooks from Amazon. See above :)

More to the point - why would you?? Going via Amazon is just adding one extra step to a transaction. Buy direct.

They don't have DRM

The Wired link adds nothing. They link to (http://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/ebooks-formats...)

I disagree.

Wired's nice little introduction will make more people aware that they don't have to put up with DRM.

Wired's attention will also make it easier to find definitive info on DRM removal. When I'm not looking for anything in particular, I look at sites like Wired. But when I want to know how to do something specific, I go straight to Google. And Wired's story will boost Apprentice Alf's search ranking, making the solution that much easier to find for folks tired of DRM.

"The Wired link adds no value for the readers of HN, apart from a tl;dr".

I disagree--I learned something.

What extra information did the Wired link add over the page that Wired link to?

(http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/01/how-to-strip-drm-from...)

(http://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/drm-removal-to...)

Perhaps not information, but the fact it's reposted on Wired means the article has a larger audience (at least by one--me).

It add nothing other than exposing Apprentice Alf's blog posting to their large readership - which is more than nothing.

I wouldn't say that. Wired offered a good synopsis to what apprenticealf's site contains which is all a lot of people want, including me.

The real problem is there is nothing that requires companies to provide continued access to DRM-encumbered media; they can turn it off whenever they want.

In my opinion, if a company can't or won't provide a way for a customer to access their purchased files, then they should be required by law to provide a way for the customer to un-DRM those files.

I would think that the problem is that one of the reasons people like Amazon want to use DRM is to ensure that no DRM free copies of the media exist. One DRM-free copy can multiply into 1 million DRM free copies very quickly.

Of course in reality this is laughably unworkable unless they release a future version of the kindle which requires DRMd media.

And that's happened. Several times. One that comes to mind was a Microsoft product, though I know there've been others.

Does anyone know of an "orphaned DRM systems" list somewhere?

Another, from Yahoo: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07...

I found this link to be more helpful, in regards to what plugins to use. (Note for Windows + Kindle)

http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2012/06/15/how-add-kindle-...

At least that is 18 months more recent, that should help a bit.

Frankly, I don't care about DRM for fiction. I generally only read fiction once, anyway (and donate the paper book afterwards).

For technical books it's a different story, but then the Kindle is not a medium that works well for diagrams and special formatting that you would expect in technical writing.

So in the end, Kindle DRM does not hurt me much. Then again, it is so easy to strip that I think Amazon does not care, either. It's just a pacifier for publishers.

There's a 3rd category: non-fiction that doesn't necessarily require diagrams. For this category, ebooks are great in the sense that I can add highlighting and notes very easily. For me this is the largest category of books and so DRM scares me. It also scares me that the highlights and notes are not owned by me. I wonder if I can somehow retrieve all of them?

Does removing the DRM also remove the highlight tracking/syncing provided by Amazon? If so, that'd be a deal breaker for me to use this other than as last resort backups

No it doesn't. You reload DRM-stripped books on the device, as if it had never been bought from Amazon.

Don't forget that DRMs aren't here to save Amazon from piracy. Today and for the next couple of years, what they really care about is securing a dominant position. So the DRM security only needs to be good enough to reassure clueless edition managers, who believe that DRM will help their business rather than hurt it. So they have no incentive to get out of their way to bug DRM-stripping customers (in light of which, I'd guess some of the morons who handled Linn Nygaard's case will be fired, and deservedly so).

Same as iTunes DRM actually, which Apple ended up discarding once they were in a position to tell the music editor to just shut up.

> No it doesn't. You reload DRM-stripped books on the device, as if it had never been bought from Amazon.

Yeah that's the issue...From what I can tell, Amazon differentiates between both and I imagine that would affect how its central database of highlights/bookmarkings keeps track of each individual book. I suppose this would affect you only if you were highlighting a DRM book and then stripped the DRM...which I guess is mostly an edge case.

From what I saw on my own Kindle, there's no "central database of highlights/bookmarkings"; it's stored per book in new files Kindle create next to each book.

No.

You need to have a unique ID set in the header. You can do this in calibre.

Specifically, a unique 4 byte character sequence at the 32 byte offset in the header (MOBI header). See: http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/MOBI

If that's set (easy in calibre), you will sync across your devices.

Can you provide more details? Assuming I have some random AZW3 book and calibre - how to correctly upload it back to Kindle and not lose that unique ID along the way?

My expectation has always been that if I loaded a book back onto the device after stripping the DRM, it would appear as a different book to the Kindle than the original. I doubt that highlighting and page synchronization will work.

So, yes, the main purpose of DRM stripping -- at least for me -- is as part of backing the books up into my Calibre collection. I don't bother to copy the stripped copies back onto my Kindle, there's just not any compelling reason to.

He publicly admitted that he cracks his ebooks. IANAL, but his missteps would be much easier to proof in court, compared to the case of the Norwegian kindle user.

But for some reason, I strongly doubt Amazon will ban him...

But for some reason, I strongly doubt Amazon will ban him...

And the point is that even if they ban him and try to delete his library, they will fail because he has backups without DRM.

Why would he end up in court?

With respect to the conversations about the legality of stripping the DRM from e-books (in the USA). I just looked up the Librian of Congress's 2010 DMCA statement, where it is stated that one of the classes works which qualify for exception from the no disabling DRM clause of the DMCA is:

"Literary works distributed in ebook format when all existing ebook editions of the work (including digital text editions made available by authorized entities) contain access controls that prevent the enabling either of the book’s read-aloud function or of screen readers that render the text into a specialized format."

I suspect that it is in error, but this excemption does not specify that the reason for disabling DRM is to use it for one of the mentioned purposes, only that stripping DRM would be nessasary for the mentioned purposes. The lack of enforcement probably makes this a moot point, but if all of a e-book's versions have DRM, and you get in trouble for stripping the DRM off, this would probably hold up as a solid technicality.

Granted, it is still illegal to distribute software designed to aid people in lawfully stripping DRM from e-books.

Any good command line tool for doing this?

They are included in the tools zip

I've always just sort of tolerated the Kindle.

Lately I've been doing most of my reading via Safari. I pay for the "library" level plan and feel it's worth every penny, in spite of the horrendous mobile app. Every few months, I spend Safari token on an ePub copy of something particularly good.

I'd like to see all publishers offer the option to purchase a print + DRM-free digital copy for not much more than print alone just as O'Reilly and Pearson do today.

Sadly, I would be glad to pay a reasonable price for books without DRM, but my options are still quite limited. I've been waiting patiently for Tor's ebook store to open (promised "by the end of summer 2012"). Baen is fine for a couple genres, but I don't trust Smashwords because of sockpuppet reviews. I don't want to pirate, I am glad to give authors their fair share.

Baen also has a problem with OCR'd text. I downloaded a Greg Bear book from them a few weeks ago and it was clearly OCR'd without a second look towards quality. It had so many typos and spelling errors that it was practically unreadable. I returned it for a refund.

To be fair Amazon also has this problem. It's hard being an ebook consumer when 90% of books either have DRM or are unreadably OCR'd.

I've seen that with a couple books from Smashwords, but I'd expect better from Baen. I think I've only bought books by their regular authors (Weber, Flint, Drake) and I've not had that problem.

I've never experienced this with Amazon. Presumably it is a publisher problem, not a retailer problem. What publishers have you experienced this with?

It's endemic in the industry. With a few exceptions, try downloading any book printed before, say, the year 2000. A good example is the Kindle copy of Dune that Amazon sells. Spend $15 ($3 more than having the print version delivered to your doorstep!) on one of the most famous science fiction books of all time only to find that it's riddled with spelling errors, grammar errors, and word omissions. (Or just read the Amazon reviews that tell you as much.)

Another good example is the older Dark Tower books. I bought book 3 a year ago and it was in the same unreadable state. I also returned it for a refund.

New books aren't a problem, they're designed with ebooks in mind. It's just older books that the publisher quickly OCR'd and spammed Amazon with to make a quick buck.

I've seen this problem too with Amazon, though only when I first got the Kindle a couple of years ago. I suspect those books date back to when publishers didn't take ebooks seriously. Now that they do, the formatting / spelling errors have mostly vanished.

I tried doing this with some case studies in graduate school - any open sourced OCR is very difficult to deal with.

Of course, this was a couple years ago. Can anyone recommend a library or API that offers a decent OCR?

I just started a project of scanning in and OCR`ing old school news-papers. Tesseract [1] works very well. The result is almost always completely read-able, with a few obvious mistakes (that seem like could be reduced to almost none with a fairly simple post-processor). In terms of usability, it is a terminal program that is run as `tesseract srcFile.jpg dstFile`. It also has a list of gui front-ends on the site (none of which I have looked at).

[1] http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/

Cool - Tesseract was what I came across last week while working on one of my own projects. It's the only one I know of right now, and it's nice to hear someone confirm it.

iBookstore allows publishers to sell books as DRM-free, so Tor books should be OK from it. Subterranean Press' books are DRM-free in iBookstore too.

Unfortunately, other's aren't (I only bought a few books there and it's a 50/50 split so far) and you don't have any way of knowing before buying.

All you lawyers: Is removing / tampering with Kindle DRM legal in this case? Considering we bought the material?

I am not a lawyer, but I do know a little bit about DRM. I believe the DMCA makes cracking all forms of DRM illegal except in certain cases which are outlined by the Library of Congress every three years. The last time the exceptions were updated was July 2010 [1], so they will be up for review again in 2013. If I'm interpreting the current guidelines correctly, you can only crack ebook DRM if it is preventing you from using text-to-speech (presumably for blind people or people with poor eyesight).

It all comes down to the end user agreement you agree to when purchasing the ebook. Content providers are within their right to define how they want their copyrighted works to be used - though a judge could potentially throw out the end user agreement in court.

So, if Amazon stipulates that you should not tamper with or remove the DRM from the ebook, it's a violation of your purchase agreement if you do.

Basically, you agree to not remove the DRM when you pay them for their content. The only legal alternative is to not buy from them.

EULAs can't override laws. Even if you break the EULA for legitimate purpose - you aren't necessarily breaking any laws.

Nobody said anything about breaking laws.

EULAs are technically legally binding contracts, and breaking them leaves you liable in civil court.

I'm not a lawyer (so correct me if I'm wrong) but here in Poland there is a law that allows you to reverse engineer a product that you bought to make it work on your hardware (e.g. you bought a windows only program but want to make it work under Linux) So I I buy a book that can't be viewed on device of my choosing (e.g. because of DRM) then I'm free to do whatever I want to the product to make it work on my hardware. No EULA can be above the state law.

In the UK at least, there are a variety of reasons why a contract, or at least part of it, may be unenforceable - such as unfair/unreasonable terms, things that contradict the law, or the particular terms were considered "hidden" (e.g. too small a font size, or an important clause is buried in page 27 of an unrelated section).

Point is, EULA can't even restrict you for civil cases if it contradicts your rights. But that can vary from country to country.

And also state to state, which is why I said pending a Judge doesn't throw it out.

It should be legal per fair use. But this is gray area. Logic wise - it should be 100% legal. But laws are often broken and stuff like DMCA is really messy.

This is from 2011 and hugely outdated. As far as I'm aware, the newer Topaz Kindle format hasn't been cracked and thus the DRM cannot be stripped. It's been a long time since I've bought a book that wasn't Topaz-imprisoned.

This is not true. Topaz is a scanned, PDF like format that Amazon uses for older books where for whatever reason they can't get a digital copy. While it's true that Topaz books can't have the DRM easily removed, only around 5% of Amazon's books are in this format.

It still works. I can verify that from having seen it done first hand as recently as yesterday.

http://thepiratebay.se/browse/601 + a spiral binder + a laser printer.

Knowledge should be free.

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