Title: Removing DRM from Amazon Kindle and Apple books
Slug: removing-drm-from-amazon-kindle-and-apple-books
Date: 2013-01-11 13:31:28
Author: Kartones
Lang: en
Tags: Offtopic, Tools
Description: My frustration with DRM on Amazon Kindle and Apple books, and provides a list of software tools to remove DRM from these platforms.

 <p>I have both an Amazon Kindle and an iPad, and I read books on both. The kindle is superb for normal text books but sucks rendering PDFs so I leave magazines and technical books for the iPad. But in both cases I hate to have content with DRM that I cannot freely transfer between both and make a backup of.</p> <p>I don't care that both Apple and Amazon are big companies. Amazon <a href="http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/10/drm-be-damned-how-to-protect-your-amazon-e-books-from-being-deleted/">has removed books</a> legaly bought. Apple is the new dictator and locks you more and more into only their ecosystem. I want to not just being able to re-download my books, but store them wherever I like. Nothing guarantees you that in the future they won't decide to shutdown services (<a href="http://www.t3.com/news/ea-shuts-down-servers-for-12-games">like EA does with videogames</a>) or remove content. When you buy a paper book, if later the publisher has licensing issues does somebody come to your house and retrieve the book you bought?</p> <p>I don't care about watermarked PDFs stating who bought them. It works because if you share them you can get identified and prosecuted, but it doesn't limits where do you read them.</p> <p>The same that I have dumped all my old PC games into ISOs, all my DVDs into divx/mkv and all my CDs into MP3s, I wanted to have an easy way to deploy the books I've bought in any of my devices, so after some digging I made this small list of required software to "free your books".</p> <p> </p> <p>You just need four tools, and all of them work at least with Windows and Mac.</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://calibre-ebook.com/">Calibre</a>: The greatest ebook catalog and converter application. And its free! I use it also for managing all my Kindle books</li> <li><a href="http://www.filehippo.com/download_itunes_32/13258/">iTunes 10.7 or lower</a>: v11 is unsupported so you need to keep with 10.X.</li> <li><a href="http://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/drm-removal-tools-for-ebooks/">epub &amp; mobi DeDRM tools</a>: Calibre plugins and stand alone tools included.</li> 
 </ul> <p>It is not uncommon to see "no DRM found" messages for example in Requiem, as for example some free iTunes books are simply in epub format (well, and those in <a href="http://www.macrumors.com/2012/01/19/new-ibooks-not-technically-in-epub-format/">iBooks are mostly epub too</a>).</p> <p>One final warning: While this will remove the protection, it won't remove all authoring nor owner details, so don't try to be too smart and publish/share your books. This tools are meant to help freeing the format, not "cleaning for piracy".</p>
