How To Use Dedrm Tool For Mac Kindle App

I just heard about the woman whose Kindle ebooks were wiped when her account was suspended, and it got me thinking: Do I really own anything that I've bought with DRM? It seems like I could lose it at any time, or lose the ability to view something just because I switched devices. How can I get rid of the DRM so I can keep my own backups?

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Then the kindle books downloaded via Kindle for PC or Mac will be displayed under Kindle column in the left sidebar, while the Kindle books downloaded via Kindle devices will be displayed under Kindle Device column in the left sidebar after connecting Kindle e-ink reader to computer.

Amazon's terms of service grants it basically god-like authority over its domain, but we all…

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Sincerely,
Sick of DRM

Dear SoD,
It's always a bit disheartening to hear about content getting changed or removed because of DRM. Combined with the news a few years ago that Amazon could wipe content they didn't have the license for, DRM is increasingly an issue with further reaching implications than simply keeping you from pirating content. Wiping content is one issue—but DRM also usually locks the media to your device or service—which means you often can't transfer your library between different devices. With that in mind, let's first take a quick look at what you're actually buying when you buy DRM content before digging into how to remove DRM from videos and books.

What You're Buying When You Buy Digital Content

Just as a quick primer here, we should note what exactly it is you're purchasing when you buy digital content, and why this problem exists in the first place. When you purchase digital content, you're typically just buying a license to use it. You do not 'own' the books or media you purchase in traditional terms. For example, here's Amazon's Terms of Use (bolding ours):

Upon your download of Kindle Content and payment of any applicable fees (including applicable taxes), the Content Provider grants you a non-exclusive right to view, use, and display such Kindle Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Kindle or a Reading Application or as otherwise permitted as part of the Service, solely on the number of Kindles or Supported Devices specified in the Kindle Store, and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider.

Most Terms of Use at other digital stores follow Amazon here, and they all also have something similar to this little caveat:

In addition, you may not bypass, modify, defeat, or circumvent security features that protect the Kindle Content.

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So, just so you know: removing DRM from ebooks and videos is typically against the Terms of Use. Most services like Amazon or Barnes and Noble allow you to store your books or video purchases in the cloud so you can download them again later. But they're always restricted to their apps, and that's a bummer.

How to Remove DRM from Ebooks (and Back Up Your Library Permanently)

The easiest way to strip DRM from Kindle books (and Barnes and Noble, Adobe Digital Content, etc) is with the free ebook software Calibre, DRM removal plugins, and a copy of the Kindle desktop software (PC/Mac). These directions are for Kindle, but will work with Barnes and Noble, Adobe Digital Editions, and older formats. Here's what you need to do:

Download Calibre, the the plugins, and the Kindle Desktop software.
Unzip the contents of the plugin directory.
Open up Calibre and click on 'Preferences.'
Navigate to 'Plugins' under the 'Advanced' section.
Click 'Load Plugin from file,' and select K3MobiDeDRM_v04.5_plugin.zip from the directory you just unzipped.
Load up the Kindle app on your Mac or Windows computer and download all your books from Amazon.
Navigate to either C:Users[your username]DocumentsMy Kindle Content on Windows or [your username]My DocumentsMy Kindle Content on Mac.
Your books aren't named in any meaningful way, so just drag all the *.azw files into Calibre.
After a short wait (depending on the size of your library), Calibre will finish importing the books. Now you have a DRM-free backup of all your books on your computer.

It's a little convoluted, but once you get the hang of it, Calibre is a solid way to backup all your purchased ebooks.

How to Remove DRM from Movies and TV Shows

Movies are slightly easier to remove DRM from then ebooks, but the process isn't free. For this, we like Tunebite ($25) on Windows, or Noteburner M4V Converter ($50) on Mac. Both will cost you a little money, but removing DRM from video files downloaded from the likes of Amazon or iTunes is an incredibly simple process.

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Alternately, you can record directly from your computer using a screen recording tool (any of these five will do). You will, of course, have to wait for the entire movie since it operates essentially like dubbing, but if you already use screen recording tools it's a free option for backing up your movies.

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As a few commenters have noted in the discussion, Requiem is also an excellent way to remove DRM from iTunes downloads. The process is pretty self-explanatory. Download a version of Requiem that corresponds to your version of iTunes, and open up the video files you want to remove the DRM with.

The Case for Abandoning DRM Content Completely

How To Use Dedrm Tool For Mac Kindle App For Pc

While it is possible to strip away all the DRM from the content you already own, it's even better to buy from sellers that don't use DRM in the first place. That's easier said than done, of course, as most major stores (iBooks, iTunes, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc) all use DRM for their content.

For books, crowdfunded efforts like Story Bundle or Humble Ebook Bundle are great ways to get DRM-free books, but they're not the same as a store. Occasionally, you can also grab books directly from a publisher like Tor that come DRM-free, or grab older books from Project Gutenberg.

The same goes for videos. Much like books, you have to go directly to a performer to get a DRM-free video. For instance, comedians Louis CK, Jim Gaffigan, and Aziz Ansari both released their comedy shows free of DRM, but those types of instances are few and far between (occasionally smaller films, like Indie Game: The Movie will do it). However, if you really want to avoid DRM, it's still easier to buy a physical disc and rip it yourself—whether it's a DVD or Blu-Ray disc. They still technically have DRM, but it's the easiest to bypass.

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The fact is, while piracy is certainly an issue, so is user experience. You want to pay money for something knowing you'll be able to use it in the future regardless of what device you have in your hand, and DRM often makes that hard. Author Cory Doctorow describes this problem pretty bluntly as: 'If you can't open it, you don't own it.' Worse, when you're locked into a certain store or hardware, you end up getting stuck on the upgrade treadmill because your content is locked to one type of device. Sure, Amazon's Kindle app exists across platforms, but if you buy a Nook, you all of a sudden have no books. Same if you buy movies from iTunes and switch away from the Apple TV. And there's always a (slight) chance any given service will stop providing support. Then you're really left in the lurch. Photo by Gavin Baker.

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Sincerely,
Lifehacker

Have a question or suggestion for Ask Lifehacker? Send it to tips+asklh@lifehacker.com.

Title photo by Austin Parrish Thomas.

You’re not a Jolly Roger flying pirate, you’re just somebody that wants to backup the ebooks they paid for and read them on the devices they want to read them on. Follow along as we show you how to liberate your Kindle books.

Why Do I Want To Do This?

Most media these days, from purchased TV show episodes to ebooks to physical media like DVDS, are loaded with Digital Rights Management (DRM) schemes. The DRM schemes are put in place by the publishers as a safeguard against piracy and to control how the consumer uses the media they’ve purchased (e.g. you can watch this movie or read this book on our device, but not on our competitor’s device).

We don’t know about you, but we don’t particularly care to be told how we can enjoy the media we’ve paid good money for. In fact, we opted not to put DRM on our book The How-To Geek Guide to Windows 8 specifically for that reason. We respect you as a reader of this site, a consumer, and a person far too much to restrict how you can enjoy a book you purchase from us. After you buy it, you can read it however you want to read it on whatever device you want to read it on.

As for preventing piracy, DRM’s value in doing so is dubious at best; why would anyone go to the hassle of stripping DRM if they intended to pirate the material anyway (as DRM-free pirated copies of just about everything already exist all over the Internet). In other words, DRM poses a fairly large inconvenience to the paying customers and no inconvenience at all to the pirates.

With that in mind, read on to see how you can be an upstanding citizen that supports the people who create the content you love, but with the freedom to enjoy that content on your devices as you see fit.

Note: This tutorial will only help you strip the DRM from books you have actually purchased. The tools used herein will not work to strip the DRM from library ebooks, loaned ebooks, or other ebooks of which you are not the original purchaser.

What Do I Need?

For this tutorial, you’ll need three things:

A Copy of Calibre Ebook Manager
A Copy of Apprentice Alf’s DRM Removal Tools for eBooks
A Kindle eBook
(Optional) Kindle for PC

You’ll absolutely need Calibre and Apprentice Alf’s excellent DRM-stripping plugins. The Kindle for PC application is entirely optional, but it does make it way easier to get to all your Kindle books at one time instead of manually transferring/downloading each book one by one.

We won’t be covering how to install and use Calibre in this tutorial. If you’re new to using Calibre we highly recommend checking out our guide: How To Organize Your Ebook Collection with Calibre.

There are a few noteworthy things before we continue. First, although we’re using Windows 7, you could follow along and use the same techniques on OS X using the OS X version of Calibre.

Second, included in the Apprentice Alf DRM removal pack are stand alone tools for both Windows and OS X. Because these tools require additional configuration including the installation of Python and various dependencies, we’ve opted to focus on the Calibre-based workflow, which is much faster (should you wish to use the stand alone tools, we would recommend reading the readme.txt included with the bundle). Further, since you’ll need an ebook management tool to organize and transfer your new DRM-free book collection, you might as well use the best one in town.

Installing Apprentice Alf’s DRM Removal Plugins

The removal plugins are really fantastic in that not only do they work well, but for as long as you keep them installed they will automatically strip the DRM from any future DRM-laden books you add to Calibre.

Visit Apprentice Alf’s DRM removal page and grab the current release of the DRM removal tools–as of this writing it is v6.05 available here.

Extract the contents of the zip file to a temporary location. There are several sub-folders within the pack, but the one we’re interested in is DeDRM_calibre_plugin; located in that folder is DeDRM_plugin.zip. After confirming you have properly extracted the archive and the zip file in question is accounted for, fire up Calibre.

Click on Preferences on the toolbar and select “Change calibre behavior” (or, alternatively, press CTRL+P). Don’t select “Get plugins to enhance calibre” as that only gives you access to the official Calibre plugin repository and won’t allow you to add your own third-party plugins.

Scroll down to the Advanced section and click on Plugins.

Within the Plugins menu, click on the “Load plugin from file” button in the lower right hand corner:

Browse to the location of the DeDRM_plugin.zip, select and add it. You will receive a warning about the dangers of installing third-party plugins. Go ahead and click OK. You will see a dialog box indicating a successful installation:

Click OK and confirm that DeDRM is found in the “File type plugins” list. After confirming, click Apply in the upper left corner, close the Preferences pane, and restart Calibre.

Using Apprentice Alf’s DRM Removal Plugins

At this point, we’re ready to start stripping the DRM from our books. The DRM-removal plugins automatically strip the DRM from the books on import. If you’ve previously imported books to Calibre that have DRM, you’ll need to export them and import them again to initiate the DRM-removal process.

For books that are not currently in Calibre, all you need to do to strip the DRM from the book is to simply drag and drop the book into Calibre (or use the Import file function).

There are several ways to go about getting your DRM-loaded Kindle books. You can:

Mount your Kindle as a USB device and pull them off.
Download them via the Actions menu in the Manage My Kindle section of your Amazon account.
Download them using the Kindle for PC app.

Let’s look at each technique in order to highlight the benefits/shortcomings and what you need to do.

Copying the Books from Your Kindle: If you’re going to rip the book directly from your Kindle device (or use the download and transfer technique), you need to manually enter the serial number of your Kindle into the DeDRM removal plugin. Do so by navigating back to Preferences -> Advanced -> Plugins -> File type plugins and double clicking on the entry for DeDRM. You’ll see a box like so:

Click on the first entry “eInk Kindle ebooks” and, in the resulting dialog box, click the + sign and enter the serial number off the back of your Kindle.

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Double check the serial number; any discrepancy between the serial number in the book file and the plugin will lead to decryption failure.

Grabbing Copies of Your Books via the Download & Transfer Technique: The second method you can use is to download the book directly from your Manage My Kindle page within your Amazon account. There’s a little “Actions” pull down menu located on the right hand side next to each book’s entry.

We found this technique to be lacking in several ways. You have to select a physical Kindle as the destination device and you have to enter the serial number of the device into DeDRM (just like in the previous step). On top of that, this was the only technique that didn’t yield consistent 100% success in our testing. If you absolutely must use this approach, give it a shot, but we can’t recommend it in light of how well the other two methods work.

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Downloading Your Books via the Kindle for PC App: If instead you have sent your Kindle books to Kindle for PC, and we strongly recommend this method because it’s so easy, you can find the locally stored books in the following directory:

C:Users[Your Windows Username]DocumentsMy Kindle Content

Each Kindle book you import to Kindle for PC will have two companion files (.MBP and .PHL files); you can ignore the extraneous file types. Books will also have odd names, like “B001QTXLQ4_EBOK”. Don’t worry the proper name and author data are stored in the files. This technique is nice because you can snatch all your books in one swoop and dump them into Calibre. Simply select all the actual book files (all the .AZW, .TPZ, and .MOBI files) and dump them right into Calibre to import them.

Now, Calibre will import any ebook file (DRM-laden or DRM-free) without a hiccup. The real test of whether or not the import-and-strip process has worked properly is to try and convert the book into a new format. Right click on the entry for the new book and select Convert Books -> Convert Individually. This will pull up the conversion menu. Convert it to any other format, it doesn’t matter which.

If the book’s DRM hasn’t been properly removed, you’ll get an error like this:

Now, this error does not necessarily mean that the DeDRM plugin isn’t working properly. If you’re loading books off your physical Kindle and you entered the serial number wrong in the DeDRM configuration, the process would fail like this. If you tried to add Kindle books that you’re not the actual owner of, it will also fail.

Load the books from the proper source, however, and the process starts successfully. You’ll see the little “Jobs” marker in the lower right hand corner twirling away. Click on it and you will see your conversion process (note the Error entries, those were books that we knew didn’t meet the criteria for the DRM-removal process and we threw at the system anyway, all in the name of thoroughness).

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The end result of the process was a DRM-free book that had been successfully converted to a generic MOBI file–ready to transfer to any device we wished, or to be converted into a new format.

That’s all there is to it! Rinse and repeat with any Kindle book you wish to liberate and use on the device of your choice, or that you would like to back up independently of the Amazon ecosystem.