This entire thing has been made needlessly complicated. Easy fix though.
- Get whatever ebook you want.
- Borrow some code from GitHub and teach a raspberry pi with a camera and a few servos to snap pictures of pages, turn the pages, snap again into a PDF.
- A script then parses all the images and OCRs them for the final PDF.
- You now own a backup of your DRM book, which you own forever. Pretty sure this is actually legal under DMCA since you are taking a backup of something you allegedly own. The encryption circumvention is irrelevant.
- now, break the law and throw the PDF on the internet to everyone. Go little bot! Go go go!
Why are people “buying” DRM infested books? They don’t own anything. “Their” books can be taken away at the whim of the seller. Their rights can change with a change to the EULA. There are other legal ways to use e-readers (not Kindles) that let you keep and back up what you buy.
I don’t know why people buy an stuff like this and get surprised when this happens.
Plenty of other electronics that you have full control over.
Plenty ? Really ? And what are those ?
Four times the prices and from four years ago ?Kobo e-readers are 1-to-1 alternatives that allow you to easily transfer epubs or PDFs to it with a USB cable.
As far as I can tell, Kobos are bootloader locked now https://old.reddit.com/r/kobo/comments/1ewadpc/kobo_is_now_using_secure_boot_on_at_least_one_of/
Having your cake and eating it too isn’t on the menu
Kindles were loss leaders to get you in their ecosystem, just like all the shitty cheap tablets they sold.
The from four years ago part is real, but honestly, 4 year old devices read books about as well as current devices as long as you’re not trying to go all fancy.
It’s just matter of time before they’re all locked down, even the bad ones from 2020.
Just like android where basically it’s all bootloader locked, except for a few suspiciously special models like the Pixel. Or a “new” 1000$ model with hardware from 2018.
Instead of pretending there isn’t a problem because there are still option, you should realize the WINDOW IS CLOSING
A Raspberry Pi with an E-INK screen is surprisingly doable.
The raspberry pi has no low power modes / suspend states, to prevent it being used as a cell phone or tablet.
The standalone eink display are also very expensive, more than a entire eink reader and there is very little choice and they cannot be harvested from a working device.
I am honestly surprised it took this long! Kindle has been around a long time and it’s not like Amazon was any less evil back then. It makes me wonder if the competition has been starting to make them nervous!
amazon: finally we defeated piracy
one kid with a computer: snickers
Yarrrrrr
So they encrypt it via keys they download to protected storage. I hope their market share will tank after a few public outrages. Make sure you’re not one of the victims.
Why not just remove the Amazon from the ebooks?
Remember to pay your local pirate.
I will never, ever purchase a book I can’t remove the DRM from.
And there are people out there who are absolutely fanatical about book preservation. They will photograph every single page and run it through OCR and recreate an ebook just so it gets preserved. DRM is absolutely pointless and stupid.
Exactly this. As an idiot I purchase DRM music when Microsoft had its own music store. Some years later they closed it and there was no way to validate music keys.
But thankfully I still have an old Roxio9( I think) CD, and back then Roxio didn’t know what DRM was and would take the mp3 and burn it to DVD anyway, bypassing the key check, then I would just rip it back off the DVD…DRM is useless
For real.
When I still had Netflix and Disney+ I’d want to watch a show on my PC, but I’d just get black screen with only audio, because something about my setup the DRM didn’t like. (Possibly that I have USB displaylink monitors.)
So I had to watch on another device.
DRM isn’t stopping content being ripped. It’s just making life a pain for paying customers.
Offering a clean, ad free, usable storefront to purchase media would do more to prevent piracy than anything.
But corpos dont like that.
Of course. It’s all about control. They see users as property, an object to be sold and traded.
Do not ever allow yourselves to be disrespected like this.
Try explaining any of this to my friends lol. Obsessed with Google, the tok, xitter, and shitty data stealing llms. Disgusting garbage.
That could’ve been iTunes if their interface didn’t suck ass and if they didn’t go for the subscription-only model in Apple Music.
I swear for years it was THE place to buy music. I mean I never did, I didn’t have access to a card with online payments enabled as a teen, so I just pirated everything anyway. But it seemed like the default place.
I was so out of the loop a few years ago I found out they killed iTunes and was like WHY. idiotic.
There’s no such thing as “impossible” when it comes to piracy.
There’s no impossible because if you can see it, it can be captured and digitized, but there is a level of complication that can make it unreasonable. They could make it unreasonable to crack the drm outright and require you to screenshot/OCR it. Then they can limit the OS to make to difficult to automate capture.
Bottom line, they’re just kicking payers off their network when it’s easier to pirate it than to buy it through their service.
The analog hole works on a lot of stuff
That’s my post apoc Youtube plan. Play on a sanctioned browser with videos and use comskip, write them off to my storage.
We’re going back to my TV->AVI setup from 2003, only maybe we’ll use HVEC this time.
Something something, piracy is a service problem. That’s why Spotify et al. still thrive, but more and more the Netflixes of the world are being replaced with yaaar
It’s also a pricing issue as well.
but there is a level of complication that can make it unreasonable.
Lol, just read the Arch Wiki about Bluray playing. Unreasonable only needs a bit longer.
Especially engineering people get creative out of interest if they’re denied access. And that’s a beautiful thing.
MakeMKV is in AUR :) Sure, it’s not playing a disk…
require you to screenshot/OCR it
So just like what people do with paper books.
What GOOGLE did WITHOUT PERMISSION to paper books. ;)
I’ve imaged a few short books with a cellphone and page correction software.
It takes dedication to make a pleasant final product. But those vacuum book scanners are freaking amazing.
Just wait until you can only stream books, not download them, with random words replaced with synonyms using an algorithm that lets them track down who the originator of any scanned copies is.
That might sound ridiculous, but streaming-only to prevent perfect copies and hiding purchaser identifiers in the data are both DRM techniques that have been explored in other media already. There’s no limit to how anti-consumer publishers can get when they think there’s slightly more money to be had.
Are there any good “open” alternatives to the Paperwhite? I’ve been drooling over getting an e-ink reader for like a month straight now. https://kindlemodding.org/jailbreaking/kindle-models.html
Most of the current models can be jailbroken, but I’d definitely rather another route. (Not having to deal with checking second-hand market seller’s firmware versions etc)Wait, can’t you just load non-Amazon books on the Kindle? I thought this is only about the ability to redistribute books you buy from Amazon.
I mean I’d still sure like to hear if there’s a good alternative. But if not, I think you can still use it, just don’t buy Amazon books for it. Recommend researching first though.
Edit: I found a company called Kobo. 6 and 7 inch colour models available, as well as 6, 8, 10 inch black and white models. Marketing for the 6" Clara Colour model claims good repairability and iFixit seems to agree. And yes, the colour ones are still e-ink.
I second the Kobo. Bought one when my old kindle died, no regrets.
You sure can.
I’ve used calibre in the past.
I just use a USB cable. No extra software required.
I use Calibre with a USB cable. Calibre is great if you do a lot of reading or manage a lot of books.
If it works it works
I only read books uploaded through calibre
PocketBook if you want openness and long runtime (book-replacement), it runs plain Linux.
Kobo/Onyx if you want Android flexibility, with possibility to flash LineageOS/PostmarketOS (though they’re slow for tablet use).
But personally, if you’re not using it to transcript notes (recommendation Remarkable) or want more than merely reading books, i would go with a tablet.
Pocketbook readers are pretty nice
I have a super note, which is an eink tablet, reader, it’s quite nice and drm free but a bit pricey.
Amazon can go suck a fuck!
How exactly does one suck a fuck?
DRM-free.
One just does
Get the fuck drunk enough and it will suck itself.
You never saw a video where someone cleans up their partner after the good time?
- https://www.gutenberg.org/
- https://openlibrary.org/
- https://www.planetebook.com/
- https://archive.org/
- https://www.smashwords.com/
- https://books.google.com/
- https://www.freetechbooks.com/
- https://www.getfreebooks.com/
- https://www.openculture.com/free_ebooks
- https://www.goodreads.com/
- https://www.oreilly.com/ (trial)
- https://annas-archive.org/
- https://pdfcoffee.com/
- https://singlelogin.re/
- https://www.ereaderiq.com/freebies/
- https://www.bookbub.com/ebook-deals/free-ebooks
- https://digilibraries.com/
- https://www.overdrive.com/
- https://manybooks.net/
there’s so many others and of course torrents
It is remarkable how many books available for free on Gutenberg are sold in the same format on Amazon (it’d be one thing if they were special editions, new translations etc, but they’re the same!)
People out to make a quick buck are banking on suckers not knowing about Project Gutenberg, or failing to check it, or not wanting to do a couple of extra steps to get something onto their Kindle.
Check out standard ebooks. They take public domain books and “clean” them up with really good typesetting, spelling fixes, and other things. All free too
Standard is fantastic! The books are better quality than what they charge for on “marketplaces” and can be read for free or downloaded wholesale for a song. Add to that they host an opds catologue that fbreader can browse and you have incredibly convenient public domain books right to the ereader.
The best books are on IRC.
You can also use Book Bounty to integrate LibGen support into Readarr. It’s a workaround for one of Readarr’s biggest weaknesses, as torrents historically aren’t great for ebooks.
Didn’t readarr get discontinued a few weeks ago?
It was officially unsupported, but it still works just fine if you use a third-party metadata provider. There haven’t been any breaking changes on the backend, so (unless sites change things) it will continue to work fine.
I’ve been slowly filling my wife’s Kindle Oasis full of pirated books over the last 2 years. I got it initially because it had internet service everywhere and I could just email her the epubs to simplify loading things.
A couple of weeks ago, even though airplane mode is always on for this thing, (so no wifi either) – this thing wipes something like 400 books from her library overnight. Granted, they were all pirated, but they’re doing some nasty stuff there. It looks like there’s renewed effort to combat this.
Sooooo, I sold it and bought her a Kobo Libra Color. Now, I just have her open up https://send.djazz.se/ – give me the 4 digit code, and I can upload books to her that way. Goodbye Amazon. Don’t let the door hit you.
Cannot recommend Kobo enough. You can jailbreak it if you like, but I didn’t get much benefit from that personally. I’m partial to the overdrive integration, but if you’re loading epubs you probably aren’t using that. If in the US, I’d recommend at least setting it up, since it’s pretty easy and maybe more immediate for some books, but obviously she won’t get to keep the epub after.
Not that I would know from experience, but I hear there are Calibre plugins that will allow a user to pull the DRM’d book (downloaded via Overdrive) to a computer and remove the DRM.
I’ve read that it’s a polite thing to do because you’re able to return borrowed books much more quickly so other users can check them out.
I originally had planned on doing that, but honestly I’ve not plugged my kobo into my computer since I in earnest set it up. Out of the box I jailbroke it, then I realized I liked it a lot and didn’t want to get confused as to what I was recommending to friends/family vs what was actually jailbreak stuff, so I decided I’d reset it and use it the standard way for a bit to get the hang of it. Once I did that I’ve never had a need to plug it into a computer and figured it wasn’t worth the effort.
I hope I’m not considered impolite for using it as intended, though I totally understand people who would want to do as you suggested. Anything to decrease hold times lol. Also not that I would know from experience, but I imagine others greatly respect and appreciate the people who do that, provide the means to do that, or the end results of that.
Bonus points for no jailbreak required : D I didn’t even realize there was a jailbreak for it (or what benefits there are to jailbreaking it… I should do some research but I haven’t found anything I couldn’t do with the stock firmware and it sounds like you generally came to the same conclusion).
Mine is using the stock firmware, wifi off unless using Overdrive, but I plug it into my computer to charge and load it with books. It just shows up as a mass storage device like a USB thumb drive and you can copy/paste books onto it (or use Calibre). After disconnecting it will scan for new/changed files and auto-import any recognized formats into the reader application.
The benefits to jailbreaking it are that you can change the layout of the device, remove store icons, and just in-general tidy up the UI a bit. I haven’t seen anything game-changing from the jailbreak; like adding apps or something.
Kobo is on my Xmas list. I still have a gen 2? Kindle and it’s still pretty workable.
The white one with a keyboard?
That’s weird and sounds like some kind of software problem. I can’t see how that would happen otherwise. I have a Voyage and don’t have wifi configured on it at all, just add books with calibre and it’s been fine for a decade.
It’s not a software problem, the Oasis has free cellular service for life.
If you turn your Wifi off on an Android phone for example - it still scans and uses the wifi to keep track of your location, for instance. It’s an anti-consumer pattern that companies are using. Airplane mode? – Sure, for YOU. But Amazon probably still allows cell service to connect every couple of hours for exactly this kind of thing.
The error message she received wasn’t sly about it either. It said something very direct along the lines of “We have determined that you are not eligible to read this book so we have removed it from your device”
Don’t buy Amazon products. Fairly simple concept.
The problem is some authors signing exclusivity deal with Amazon, which means breaking the DRM and converting it is the only way to read it on a different e-reader.
Too bad. Then theres no sale unless I can crack the DRM ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This. All of these problems are solved by people not giving money. But often it seems difficult for people to actually stand behind principle when the time comes – convenience is a helluva drug.
The problem is some authors signing exclusivity deal with Amazon
Well then those authors can go straight to corpo-sellout hell and die a painful death, I’d rather never read a book again than buy from amazon.
Yep, I had a Kindle library of a few dozen books, when they started their shenanigans locking down the desktop client earlier this year I downloaded all of them, de-drmed and converted to epub with Calibre. Hosting them on Calibre-web and accessing with KOreader on a Kobo. I continue to buy books on Kobo and Google Books, which let me download copies (albeit with DRM).
Makes me wonder after all these years why Amazon is locking down ability to move books around. I wonder if they’re starting to feel some real competition and feel threatened! The market of cheap e-ink Android ereaders seems to be growing more and more
I started that process and hit a road block after getting all the books downloaded to my pc. Can you recommend any tutorials or guides that might help get everything converted?
I used this guide from a thread on Reddit. It relies on Calibre and a set of plugins https://www.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/1c2ryfz/2024_guide_to_dedrm_kindle_books/
Awesome, thanks!
