I mean, this is how you get me to stop buying Kindle books.
this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2025
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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!
The encryption circumvention is irrelevant.
Oh you sweet summer child, judges will bend over backwards to slap people with multi-decade-to-life charges for 'hacking,' even if the 'hacking' is just the rightsholder accidentally presenting data to you.
I need to root my Kindle...
Bad corporate behaviour is a political problem.
Here we are talking about technological solutions for political problems. Why?
I feel like nothing is impossible.
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.
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
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.
Yarrrrrr
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.
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.
Log2(8.2billion) is about 33. That means if each word only had 1 synonym, you only need to change 33 words to uniquely identify who was responsible.
21 words need to change if each has 3 options. 17 words for 4 options.
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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.
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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.
- 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
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