Disclaimer: I don't endorse pirating e-books. If you do this, you won't hurt Amazon or Sony, but you might hurt the author.
Sermon: Why DRM Is Bad
And this is also the most difficult and also indispensable part to use Calibre to decrypt DRM Kindle books. Step 1 download Calibre to your computer and launch it. Step 2 download DeDRMtools to your computer. After downloading DeDRM tools to your Mac, you need to unzip it. Step 3 load DeDRM Calibre Plugin to Calibre. Preparing (What You Need) Calibre (need calibre version 4.x and earlier) DeDRMtools (version 6.8.1. In addition, on Windows and Mac, the default Kindle for Mac/PC key is added the first time the plugin is run. Continue reading for key generation and management instructions. Creating New Keys: On the right-hand side of the plugin’s customization dialog, you will see a button with an icon that looks like a green plus sign (+). Prior to using Calibre I'd tried DeDRM.app unsuccessfully; it didn't have a key ('.der file') and coulndn't find one. After I'd gotten the Calibre process working I tried DeDRM again and it had the 'defaultkey'. I ran it again the Documents/Digital Editions ePub and it told me the DRM was removed.
Like many people you own an Amazon Kindle device for reading e-books.
And like many companies that trade in digital intellectual property, Amazon includes digital rights management (DRM) software in their e-books. The stated purpose is to prevent piracy, and for that DRM is modestly effective. But DRM also inconveniences legitimate customers.
The problem here is that America's copyright lawyers figured out how to change the rules of ownership. When you buy a paperback book, its content belongs to the author, but the physical book belongs to you. You can loan it to someone, trade it, sell it, or just keep it and reread it as many times as you want. But when you 'buy' a Kindle book, you're renting temporary authorization from Amazon to store the book on up to 6 Amazon-approved devices. This arrangement is bad for customers, for a number of reasons:
- Any Kindle book that you 'own' can disappear at any time, because of technological failure, change of license, or simple human error.
- If Amazon ever abandons their Kindle business, all your Kindle books could vanish in a flash. Wait, though, isn't Amazon too big to disappear? Maybe. But Kodak, Enron, General Motors, Sears, and the Smith-Corona typewriter company were once 'too big to fail' American institutions too.
- DRM interferes with legal uses of copyrighted text, like satire, reuse in teaching materials, and citation in reviews or academic papers. As a one-time IT guy at a public university, I frequently battled with DRM-ed written and recorded materials that instructors or researchers wanted to excerpt. The worst offender here is DVD region encoding.
- DRM-ed Kindle books are incompatible with non-Amazon book readers and software. Sure, Amazon software is supported on most platforms now, but what about a decade from now? How many people still have the equipment to read a floppy disk, VHS tape, phonograph record, or audio cassette? A lot of music, art, and writing is abandoned every time our storage technology changes to a different format, whether you're talking about reel-to-reel tapes or clay tablets. If it's important to you, make as many different copies of it as you can stand.
But DRM isn't going away, so...
To Remove the DRM from a Kindle E-Book:
(July 2017: Updated for Calibre 3 and added screenshots.)
(December 2017: Added a note about using Calibre with a Kindle reading app instead of an e-ink Kindle.)
(April 2018: As of version 6.6.0, Apprentice Alf's DRM removal tools support Amazon's newer .kfx file format. You'll also need to install the KFX conversion plugin to import your .kfx files into Calibre.)
- Download and install the Calibre e-book management utility. Calibre is open-source software and costs nothing, although if you find it useful you might throw developer Kovid Goyal a few dollars. Calibre is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
- Download Apprentice Alf's DRM removal tools for ebooks. This comes as a .zip archive, so open it up and put the 'DeDRM_calibre_plugin' folder where you can find it. (You don't need to unzip the 'DeDRM_plugin.zip' file in the DeDRM_calibre_plugin folder.)
- Start up Calibre and go to Preferences -> Advanced -> Plugins.
(Click images for full size.)
- Click the 'Load plugin from file' button.
- Select the 'DeDRM_plugin.zip' file you placed in step 2 and click 'Open'. Calibre will add this plugin under its 'File type plugins' list in the Preferences window.
If Calibre gives you an error like `ERROR: Unhandled exception: InvalidPlugin:The plugin in C:UsersMeDownloadsDeDRM_tools_6.6.1.zip' is invalid. It does not contain a top-level __init__.py file`, you're trying to load the full archive folder into Calibre. Instead you need to open up the .zip file you downloaded and drill down a couple of levels. Using this example the file you want is C:UsersMeDownloadsDeDRM_tools_6.6.1.zipDeDRM_calibre_pluginDeDRM_plugin.zip.
Note: If you're using a Kindle reading app instead of a handheld Kindle, you can skip steps 6-8 below. Instead, just drag the books you've downloaded into Calibre to remove the DRM. On Windows, your Kindle library will be something like `C:UsersyouDocumentsMy Kindle Content` and on a Mac it'll be `/Users/you/Library/Containers/com.amazon.Kindle/Data/Library/Application Support/Kindle/My Kindle Content`. Note again: For this to work, Kindle for PC or Mac should be installed on the same computer and user account as Calibre, and the version of the reading app you're using matters too. I'd suggest tracking down a copy of Kindle for PC/Mac version 1.17 or earlier.
Note #2: If you're trying to de-DRM Amazon's newer .kfx files, you'll also need to install the KFX conversion plugin. Full details and discussion, as well as a .zip archive containing the plugin, are at the provided link. You can install this like you did the DeDRM plugin in steps 3-5 above.
- Next you'll need to add your Kindle's serial number. Select 'DeDRM' under the 'File type plugins' list and click the 'Customize plugin' button.
- In the 'Customize' window that opens, click the 'eInk Kindle ebooks' button, then click the + button to add your Kindle's serial number. (On my basic wi-fi Kindle this is listed under Settings -> Device Info.) Enter the serial number as 16 characters, without spaces. Then click the 'Apply' button, and close out the preferences window.
- Make sure your Kindle is connected to your computer as a USB device. If it is connected, you'll be able to browse it like your computer's hard drive.
- Now you need to add your Kindle books to the 'Library' in Calibre. There are various ways to do this. In Calibre, you can click the 'Add Books' button, or click 'Calibre Library' and then right-click and select 'Add books', or just drag the book files (.kfx, .azw3, .mobi) from your Kindle's documents folder into the Library window.
- If you configured the De-DRM plugin correctly (steps 3-7), Calibre will automatically strip the DRM from your Kindle books as it adds them to its library. This can take a while, so patience is a virtue.
- As Calibre imports your books, it copies them to your 'Documents' folder under 'Calibre library'.
- To ensure the DRM was removed, you can try converting one of your imported books to a different format. Right-click one of the books in your Calibre Library window and select 'Convert books -> Convert individually'. The default export format is .epub, which is fine for testing. Click OK, and if the process completes with no errors then you know the DRM is gone. (The .epub book is placed in the same location as the original file in the 'Calibre library' folder on your computer.)
Finally, back up your DRM-free files. You do back everything up, right?
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DeDRM Script for Mac
System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.6 (sorry, it doesn’t work on Mac OS X 10.4 and below).
Version 2.8 of this Applecript application is available in the large “tools” archive linked to at the end of the main blog.
Itool For Mac
Instructions for Use
1. Download the latest tools zip archive, unzip it by double-clicking, and open the DeDRM_for_Mac_and_Win folder.
2. Unzip DeDRM_X.X.app.zip by double-clicking it.
3. Place the AppleScript application in your Applications folder or on your Desktop, or wherever is convenient for you.
4. Run the AppleScript application by double-clicking it.
Kindle For Mac App
5. You can remove the DRM from a single ebook file by clicking on the “Select Ebook…” button.
Alternatively, if you need to remove the DRM from ebooks that aren’t from Kindle for Mac or Adobe Digital Editions, click on the “Configure…” button to enter the keys needed for the various ebook formats. And, if you want all your drm-freed ebooks to be saved into a particular folder, instead of into the same folder as the original ebook, choose that folder at the end of the Configuration process.
6. To remove DRM from several ebooks or folders of ebooks at once, just Drag & Drop the files and folders onto the AppleScript application when it is not running. Having a link to DeDRM in your dock makes this convenient.
Amazon Topaz ebooks: Most Amazon Kindle ebooks are Mobipocket format ebooks. However, some are in a format known as Topaz. This AppleScript will remove drm from kindle files, but to allow the file to be converted into other formats, the Topaz format must be converted during the de-drming process. The end result is that you end up with three files from one Topaz format ebook. Windows user, please refer to kindle drm removal.