Drm Removal Tool For Ebooks

[Young Vadlapatla]

Thisblog is intended to help anyone looking for free and simple software for removing DRM from their Kindle ebooks, stripping DRM from their Adobe Digital Editions ebooks, getting rid of DRM from their Barnes and Noble ebooks, freeing their Kobo ebooks of DRM, or decrypting their Fictionwise eReader ebooks.

They have since been improved by many people, but mostly some_updates, DiapDealer, Apprentice Alf, and Apprentice Harper. While there are many sites that redistribute these tools, the most up-to-date versions of the tools are currently released here.

Anyone trying to sell you ebook DRM removal tools for Adobe Adept ePub and PDFs, Barnes & Noble ePubs, Kindle ebooks, Kobo ebooks, or eReader ebooks has probably just repackaged (an earlier) version of the tools available here.

The DRM removal plugin (DeDRM_plugin.zip) can be found in the tools archive linked from the most recent post in this blog. The DeDRM plugin can remove DRM from Kindle eBooks (but not rented Kindle ebooks, books downloaded to a Kindle Fire, Kindle for iOS or the Windows Store Kindle App), Barnes & Noble ePub ebooks (but not books downloaded to the Windows Store Nook App) , any ebooks using Adobe Digital Editions DRM (this includes ePubs from Kobo and Sony that are downloaded for Adobe Digital Editions), and the older Mobipocket and eReader ebooks. For other kinds of ebooks see the other posts in this blog.

On Macintosh and Windows systems no customisation is required for ebooks from Kindle for Mac/PC, Nook Study, or Adobe Digital Editions (ADE), provided that calibre is run on the same computer and user account as the installation of Kindle for Mac/PC, Nook Study, or ADE to which the books were downloaded. The default key is found and stored in the preferences automatically. Anyone using Linux should read the ReadMe file for details of how to obtain the keys manually.

The DeDRM calibre plugin removes DRM from ebooks as they are imported into calibre. So to use the plugin, just import your DRMed ebooks into calibre, and the DRM will be removed. If you have already imported your ebooks into calibre, you will need to remove the DRMed ebooks and import them again.

The calibre developers are not involved in the development of the DRM removal plugin, and are not able to help with any DRM removal questions. If you have any difficulties following the instructions in this post, the calibre developers will not be able to help.

(The problem is that Windows will allow apps to browse inside zip archives without needing to unzip them first. If there are zip archives inside the main zip archives, Windows will show them as unzipped as well. So what happens is people will unzip the DeDRM_tools_X.X.X.zip to create the DeDRM_tools_X.X.X folder but when using calibre they will actually navigate to the still zipped file by mistake and cannot tell they have done so because they do not have file extensions showing. So to the unwary Windows user, it appears that the zip archive was unzipped and that everything inside it was unzipped as well so there is no way to install the plugins.

This is why we strongly recommend renaming the DeDRM_tools_X.X.X.zip archive (after extracting its contents) to DeDRM_tools_zip_X.X.X.zip. If people do that, they are less likely to navigate to the wrong location from inside calibre.)

The DRM only gets removed when the ebook is imported into calibre. If the book is already in calibre, you must delete the book from calibre and import the ebook again. It is not enough to just import the book again: calibre will discard the newly imported DRM-free version as a duplicate, leaving only the original DRMed version.

Kindle ebooks are in either Library/Application Support/Kindle/My Kindle Content or Documents/My Kindle Content or Library/Containers/com.amazon.Kindle/Data/Library/Application Support/Kindle/My Kindle Content, depending on your version of Kindle for Mac.

Even though Barnes & Noble has removed the download pages for their older PC and Mac software from their website, the installation files are still currently available on their servers via these direct links:

The downloaded books can be found in Documents/My Barnes & Noble eBooks. There are a few types of books which cannot be downloaded with this software, but they cannot currently be decrypted with the tools. These include Page Perfect Nookbooks (PDFs), enhanced ebooks (i.e. Nook Kids Read-to-me), and many image heavy items (i.e. comics/graphic novels).

You must use the exact file that is used by your ebook reading software or hardware. See the previous question on where to find your ebook files. Do not use an old copy you have that you can no longer read.

If you cannot read the ebook on your current device or installed software, the tools will certainly not be able to remove the DRM. Download a fresh copy that does work with your current device or installed software.

Barnes and Noble changed the way they generate the decryption key for their DRMed ebooks starting in late 2014, with all accounts apparently being switched over to the new scheme by the end of March 2015.

If you are on Windows 8 or newer and using the Windows Store Kindle app, you must download and install the Kindle for PC application directly from the Amazon website. The tools do not work with the Windows Store Kindle app.

Amazon have introduced a format called KF8 which the tools identify by giving the extension .azw3. Recent versions of calibre know about .azw3 files and can convert them to Mobipocket or ePub. To view .azw3 files with calibre it is necessary to tell calibre to use its internal viewer for .azw3 files in calibre Preferences/Change calibre behaviour/Behaviour/.

Kobo uses Adobe Digital Editions encryption, but it also uses its own application and encryption system, so you might not have already installed Adobe Digital Editions. Version 2.0.1 (download here) is strongly recommended. Version 3.0 and later are capable of utilizing a new encryption scheme which the tools cannot unlock.

Alternatively, you may use the Obok calibre plugin to remove DRM from Kobo books downloaded with the Kobo Desktop application (not the Windows Store app) or on an attached E-Ink Kobo reader (but not a Kobo Arc or Kobo Vox). If both are available, ebooks will be read from the attached E-Ink Kobo reader. To import from the desktop application, unplug the Kobo reader. See the Readme file inside the Obok_calibre_plugin folder of the tools archive for further instructions.

Most Amazon Kindle ebooks are Mobipocket format ebooks, or the new KF8 format. However, some are in a format known as Topaz. The Topaz format is only used by Amazon. A Topaz ebook is a collections of glyphs and their positions on each page tagged with some additional information from that page including OCRed text (Optical Character Recognition generated Text) to allow searching, and some additional layout information. Each page of a Topaz ebook is effectively a description of an image of that page. To convert a Topaz ebook to another format is not easy as there is not a one-to-one mapping between glyphs and characters/fonts. To account for this, two different formats are generated by the DRM removal software. The first is an html description built from the OCRtext and images stored in the Topaz file (HTMLZ). This format is easily reflowed but may suffer from typical OCRtext errors including typos, garbled text, missing italics, missing bolds, etc. The second format uses the glyph and position information to create an accurate scalable vector graphics (SVG) image of each page of the book that can be viewed in web browsers that support svg images (Safari, Firefox 4 or later, etc). Additional conversion software can be used to convert these SVG images to an image only PDF file. The DeDRM and Kindlebooks tools from this site provide both versions of the Topaz ebook so that the user can choose which one to use. The K4MobiDeDRM plugin only produces the html version of the ebook. The html version can be manually cleaned up and spell checked and then converted using Sigil/calibre to epubs, mobi ebooks, and etc.

All the DRM removal tools hosted here are almost entirely scripts of one kind or another: Python, Applescript or Windows Batch files. So they are inherently open source, and open to inspection by everyone who downloads them. The source for any compiled pieces are provided right inside the tools themselves.

If your PDF ebooks cannot be read in Adobe Digital Editions, the tools here cannot help. They are probably encrypted using the Content Server 3 (or earlier) methods which Adobe no longer support, not even to allow conversion to Content Server 4 (AKA Adobe Digital Editions).

The tools in the archive maintained on this blog can remove all the kinds of DRM described above from ebooks, except for some of the older Adobe PDF DRM schemes, the ePub DRM scheme by Apple, and the NOOK Study PDF DRM scheme by Barnes & Noble. To remove DRM from ebooks sold by Apple, a separately maintained tool is required, described in my post Apple and ebooks: iBookstore DRM and how to remove it. There is currently no tools that removes DRM from Barnes & Noble NOOK Study ebooks. There are commercially available tools for the older Adobe PDF DRM schemes.

The simplest way for most people (especially Windows users) to remove the other kinds of DRM from their ebooks is to use the calibre plugin, as described in my post DeDRM plugin for Calibre: the simplest option for removing DRM from most ebooks.

For this reason, the tools will usually change the ebook file name extension. .mobi is used for Mobipocket format ebooks (all Kindle devices can read these). .azw3 is used for KF8 format ebooks. Not all Kindle devices can read these. Currently, Kindle 1, Kindle 2, Kindle 3 with firmware less than 3.4 and Kindle for iOS cannot read KF8 format ebooks, and ebooks in that format will need to be converted to Mobipocket format before transferring to such devices.

The Rocket ebook format used its own DRM scheme. If you are still able to read your Rocket ebooks on your Reader, you might be able to remove the DRM using the information and tools provided in the Other Tools folder of the main archive.

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