Dedrm Kindle

| 30-04-2021
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I started off reading eBooks from the Amazon Kindle store. As time has progressed, I’ve found myself using my physical Kindle less and less. Partly because I forget to charge it, and partly because I can never get the lighting in my favorite reading locations quite right. And at night? Forget about it.

So I’ve converted all of my Kindle purchases to ePubs for use in iBooks. I could use the Kindle app for iOS but I’ve found iBooks to be faster at syncing read position, and it feels a lot more natural to use.

Since I went through the effort of converting all of my Kindle documents, I figured I’d write a mini guide to getting it done. I’m specifically focusing on the Mac since that’s all I know; other users will have to venture elsewhere.

Setting up Calibre

Install DeDRM plugin to Calibre and remove Kindle kfx drm for free. Download calibre. Download Calibre DeDR. To install, download the DeDRM zip file. Do NOT extract it. In Calibre, click on Preferences, scroll down and click on Plugins in the Advanced section, Click on the “Load plugin from file” button on the bottom right of the Plugins screen. Find and select your DeDRM zip file.

Calibre is a Java application which is an eBook management suite. It’s a bit ugly but it does what it says and works well. Since the Kindle’s eBooks are encrypted, we need to install a decryption plugin to do the heavy lifting there.

  1. Download and install Calibre.
  2. Download and decompress the DeDRM archive.
  3. Open Calibre’s preferences (⌘,).
  4. Go to “Plugins”.
  5. Click “Load plugin from file”.
  6. Choose the K4MobileDeDRM plugin’s zip file (zip within the main zip; don’t extract).
Calibre dedrm kindle

The encryption used on Kindle books is fairly basic. The decryption key is a product of the serial number for your device, so it’s not difficult to determine.​

Getting eBooks

The DeDRM scripts work by understanding Kindle for Mac’s settings files, so to get the eBooks we need use the application. There are scripts to do conversions directly from Kindle hardware’s eBooks, but it’s more effort.

  1. Download Kindle for Mac.
  2. Register it with your account.
  3. Download all of your eBooks (open them from the “Archived Items”).

Converting eBooks

Kindle eBooks are in the MobiPocket format. However, iBooks requires ePub, so we need to both decrypt and convert the files. At this point, we’ve got all we need, so we can use Calibre to do the conversion.

  1. Navigate to ~/Library/Application Support/Kindle/My Kindle Content/
  2. Drag all of the .azw files into the Calibre window.
  3. Select the books in the Calibre window which you wish to export.
  4. Click the “Convert books” toolbar item.
  5. Choose “ePub” as the output format in the top-right of the convert window.
  6. Go to the “Page Setup” item in the left list, and configure the conversion as so:
    1. Select “Kindle” as the input profile.
    2. Select “iPad” as the output profile.
  7. Hit the “OK” button to begin the conversion. It may take a while.
Dedrm Kindle

Dedrm Kindle Unlimited Books

If you have any issues at the decryption step, you should delete your~/Library/Application Support/Kindle folder and start again.

Enjoy

You can now “Save to disk” from the toolbar item to save the books which you’ve converted, and import them into iTunes for use in iBooks. Calibre is powerful enough to do many other formats if you want to use other devices as well.

Dedrm kindle github

Remember, don’t post any of the unencrypted documents anywhere. Just because the DRM is gone doesn’t mean you’re legally authorized to do so. They’re for your personal use only.

Dedrm

A few months ago, Microsoft made headlines when they announced they’d be turning off people’s books. They were turning off the DRM servers behind their ebook store, and refunding customers for any books they’d bought. I never bought any books from Microsoft, but I do have a collection of Kindle books, and this story was a reminder to investigate ways to remove the DRM from those.

Google suggests that Calibre can do this with the right plugins, but I don’t use Calibre for anything else, and I want to install new software as little as possible. I prefer solutions that use command-line tools and (ideally) run inside Docker container – they tend to be much more portable between machines.

Dedrm Kindle For Pc Key

I’ve got a script that works now, which leans on two other tools to do the heavy lifting:

Dedrm kindle pc

  • Stripping the DRM: ch33s3w0rm/kindle_dedrm. This is a Python script which strips the DRM from an encrypted Kindle book. The encryption in a given file is tied to your device, so you’ll need your Kindle’s serial number to perform the decryption.

    It runs in Python 2, no dependencies required:

    It creates a DRM-free AZW file alongside the original file.

  • Converting AZW to EPUB: ebook-convert.

    The AZW format is Kindle-specific; if I read my books on anything else, I need to create a copy as an EPUB.

    There are online converters that take an AZW and return an EPUB, but I feel uncomfortable doing file conversion via a third-party service.

    You can do this with the Calibre GUI app, or its bundled command-line tool, ebook-convert. The latter lets you convert ebooks between formats in a script, and that’s what I really want. I found a Docker image that includes Calibre, and I override the entrypoint to invoke the command-line tool:

    And now I have two copies of my book: an AZW to use on my Kindle, and an EPUB to use everywhere else.

Dedrm Kindle

My script has a couple of extra pieces to upload the files to my ebook manager, which are very specific to my setup – the software I’ve linked above is more general, and hopefully a useful starting point for anybody else who wants to strip the DRM from their Kindle books.