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Comment by bariumbitmap | Hacker News Reader

The Kindle DRM situation is really bad right now. It used to be possible to install the DeDRM plugin in Calibre and get decrypted KFX files from the Kindle for PC application. That hasn't been possible since early 2025. The pros can still break it but they aren't sharing with the rest of the class anymore.

> 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/...

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While Amazon does some shady stuff, at least _some_ of the blame here belongs on the big publishing companies.

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)

Books are rapidly dropping in relevance. It could certainly be that that's exactly how this went down a decade ago, but I'd be willing to bet on Amazon stipulating "no DRM to be on Amazon" (not just Kindle; bundle all the first party distribution together) now and at least some of the big houses folding.

Dropping in popularity, but not relevance.

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.

Dropping in popularity equals dropping in relevance.

When more people get their information calories from sources that are not books, what the books say becomes less relevant.

There's plenty of blame to go around. Tech companies like Amazon blame publishers or other tech companies, publishers blame tech companies or other publishers. My point is that DRM has gone from bad to worse.

One argument I heard was that this was actually due to "kindle unlimited". I think publishers didn't really care that people were removing drm after purchasing a book, but with amazon's push to a streaming model people started subscribing and mass downloading books to read after unsubscribing. Both unlimited and book purchases used the same drm.

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.

If you worked on that code, could tou tell us something more about this technique? What do you think about the OP way of hacking the e-book contents?

So... It's your fault? I mean, you wrote it. You had the option to say no. You didn't. Tired of programmers making the world worse and trying to blame everyone but themselves for why the world got shittier.

The new crack is still shared publicly if you're willing to make some minimal effort to look for it.

The solution is being shared in the very forum thread you linked, but apparently didn't read.

Like the hn commenting guidelines you apparently didn't read :p

Oh I learned recursion. Thanks guys. :D

Automatic screenshots and OCR still work well enough.

A proper epub consists of multiple html and css, not to mention the correct font files (ttf or otf). OCR can't recover those. I've found other books like that, you know, where someone didn't even bother to remove the page numbers from the OCRed text, and it's just a subpar reading experience.

For novels where you just want the text it is fine and you can reformat the text as you like.

I can always retypeset the text... but I'm not a professional editor/typesetter. You often lose parts/phrases/words the author wanted emphasized with italic and bold. Blockquotes can be gone. Even paragraph indentations in the worst offenders. I couldn't recreate that if I tried. Lord forbid there's a list/table/figure (even in some of the fiction I've read, they'll have those... weirdo science fiction novels, after all). I've gotten pretty good at fixing epubs with Calibre's editor, some of these are salvageable. Just finished with one where they split the chapters wrong (not at the chapter headings, but in between for some reason). And I'll often go get a high-res cover image off the publisher's website; they like to use bad sized-for-favicon scans off a random google image search for some reason.

But for me, the bad OCR ebooks can be painful to read.

The best OCR tool I have ever used is Editable Text and Images in Adobe Acrobat. It can actually replace text in place with a dynamically generated vector font that matches the original font. It is actually really impressive.

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