Is it easy to remove DRM protection?

[leebase]

Just a note from a 25 year professional programmer: _I_ do not find it easy to remove DRM. If I do not find it easy, I doubt most of the general public would. Now, I admit, I have not been highly motivated. I can read my Amazon books via Amazon apps, iBooks via the iBook app, and Fictionwise books via Stanza.

Every now and then I check back into the issue to see if it's become "easy". To date, it's been far easier to locate a copy of the book on the darknet (not always easy either) than to remove drm.

Going to give the tools_v2.2a a try. Maybe it is now "easy" after all.

Lee

[DiapDealer]

Programming experience will not (and does not) play into "ease of use" when using someone else's programs that -- for obvious reasons -- cannot be openly discussed or linked to.

Obviously, there are some hoops to jump through to find out which tools are necessary for which type of ebook, but after some initial research, I guarantee that the process has never been "easier."

While command-line knowledge used to be required, that is no longer the case. And any questions that are asked -- in the appropriate forums (translated as "where you got the tools") -- are given prompt, courteous, and thorough responses. Nobody has to "go it alone" unless they choose to.

[leebase]

Just answering the OP's question. For _me_ the answer is "no - it is not easy". Doable? Yes. Are there fine folks on this forum who will help via private message? You bet. Is it "worth it"? Depends.

I've done a lot of this type of stuff. Searching for answers on the net. Getting programs to work. I have been using linux for years -- if that gives folks any clue that I'm not exactly a "newby".

However, I do have an update. I just tried the tools_v2.2a plugin method. Well, not "me", of course, but "a friend". And it was as painless a process as I could imagine.

Locate tools_v2.2a via google.
Unzip it.
Look in the Calibre Plugins directory.
read the .txt instructions

My "friend" now has a bunch (but not all) of his kindle books loaded in Calibre. He sent them to his iPad via calibre, was prompted to change the format to epub -- worked fairly smoothly.

I had begun to buy my books via the iBookStore because I like the iBooks app better. But now that it's fairly easy to strip the drm, make an epub, and load a kindle book into the ibook app, I'm likely to go back to buying my books from Amazon.

Lee

[speedlever]

You might as well snag the v2.3 file.

It initially confused me when I loaded the plugins. It didn't seem to do anything so I didn't know if it worked or if I had not done the process correctly. But I checked the file type plug-ins and saw they were loaded. I only noticed one plug-in change in v2.3 so I only loaded that particular one after removing the older plug-in.

[leebase]

The books of "my friend" that didn't convert were the Topaz books. Any solution for those yet?

Lee

[ATDrake]

Yes, but it's tedious and non-automated and you'd essentially have to take them apart and then reassemble them into a working format by hand, or at least a lot of hand gestures as you pointed and clicked through all the steps.

This, among other reasons, is why the Topaz format is "dreaded" and people try to avoid it.

(Buyer beware the Amazon listing with only a Print Length in the Product Details and no accompanying File Size. It is but one of the marks of the Dreaded Topaz, by which It shall be known...

The other is a TPZ0 at the beginning of the file, sample or actual, when you view it with a hex editor or the like.)

[sadievan]

Originally Posted by wallcraft

As ATDrake says, .pyw requires extra code to work. However, the tools_2.2a bundle includes .pyw versions of most DRM stripping .py scripts.

Thanks.

Carol

[DiapDealer]

Any solution for those yet?

Yes. Unfortunately not a plugin, though. The process doesn't lend itself to a plugin-type scenario. Look for a folder that has the name 'Topaz' in it...and a readme that is similarly named.

[sadievan]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

A new version 2.3 of the archive has just been released.

Thanks for the heads up on the update.

Carol

[KevinH]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Yes. Unfortunately not a plugin, though. The process doesn't lend itself to a plugin-type scenario. Look for a folder that has the name 'Topaz' in it...and a readme that is similarly named.

But please be forewarned, Topaz ebooks are very very much like a poor man’s image only based PDF file. A Topaz Book is actually a binary encoded (via a dictionary) pseudo-xml description of glyphs [themselves described by xml descriptions of the contour points to make each glyph which may be one or more letters or even just a part of a letter] and their x,y locations on the page. It is then processed page by page with some added Amazon created OCRText info to enable at least some string search capability to be used in the Kindle. No true fonts per-se are embedded. Just pure glyph descriptions. So Topaz is really a description of the image of each page and not anything like a normal pml or html based ebook format.

To create the html, the tools will use the x,y position info and Amazon's OCRInfo, and the like, to recreate as a best guess what each page looked like but it will miss all italics, most non-heading bolding, etc. And it is only as good as the OCRText that Amazon includes.

When my "friend" decoded some Topaz books, some were nearly perfect, and others were quite horrible and needed many hours of hand cleanup to fix OCR errors (loaded in OpenOffice.org and spell checked in all languages used in the document and then exported to xhtml via Writer2xhtml plugin).

The nice thing is that the tools also create exact svg images of each page (embedded in xhtml) so using tools like ImageMajik, and Inkscape, you can create an image-only pdf file with some hand work. It will be huge though.

Not easy but worth it for some of the history books "my friend" wanted to read on his Sony reader. "He" simply could not find them anywhere else.

[sadievan]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Yes. Unfortunately not a plugin, though. The process doesn't lend itself to a plugin-type scenario. Look for a folder that has the name 'Topaz' in it...and a readme that is similarly named.

Even though not a plug in, it is pretty straight forward to follow the directions. I think sometimes people get intimidated when reading the directions, but if you just work through and follow the steps, it all makes sense.

I don't have an eReader yet, hopefully Christmas if my kids love me. I have not read any of the liberated Topaz files, just skimmed a little way into it. Not the best, but doable. From what I've read the short time I've been on this forum is that some of the Topaz can really be bad. I have gotten some free ones, don't know if I would pay for a Topaz file. Maybe if the book sounded really good and I couldn't get it anyplace else.

Thanks
Carol

[sadievan]

I have a question.

If Topaz is so bad, which I'm not doubting, why do the publishers use it? Is it cheaper/easier for them?

Also, does anyone know if you do get a Topaz by mistake from Amazon, will they take it back? What do you tell them. Obviously you can't say 'I tried to remove the DRM and it didn't look right when I did'.

Carol

[DiapDealer]

If Topaz is so bad, which I'm not doubting, why do the publishers use it? Is it cheaper/easier for them?

Publishers don't use it. They have no electronic version themselves (and maybe no desire to invest time or money in one) so they give Amazon the ok to create the ebook for them. That's Topaz. Which is also why when you run into a Topaz book, it will usually be the only version available. Which means you usually won't find the title at any other online ebook seller other than Amazon.

Sometimes, the publisher will later have their own electronic version made, and the Topaz version is "updated" to the more familiar mobi or epub format.

[KevinH]

Originally Posted by sadievan

I have a question.

If Topaz is so bad, which I'm not doubting, why do the publishers use it? Is it cheaper/easier for them?

Carol

The reason it is used is that true "electronic" descriptions of many older or esoteric titles (like my obscure history books on WWII tanks) never existed or no longer existed.

Without an computer file in some readable form you can not easily be make epubs or mobis. So instead of scanning and OCRing the book *and* then painfully correcting the errors to make an ebook which would be very expensive, they instead generate a glyph based layout description of each page (taking up less space than what a jpeg of each page would consume) that can be partially "reflowed" and where the OCR need not be perfect since it will be only used for "searching" inside the book. This saves them many hours (and $) of proofreading and correcting, while not taking up the space of an image only pdf, and while allowing for some form of reflow. This also allows them to grow their library of offered books (especially of the back catalog) very quickly

Ingenious really!

I only buy Topaz books when no epub or mobi is available, but I am glad at least some version of these more obscure or special interest older books are available.

If I were Amazon, I would ask people to use these Tools and do the proofreading of the book and submit cleaned up html based versions back to Amazon in exchange for a free ebook - or something like that.

[ATDrake]

It used to be (and may still) cheaper for the publishers, because Amazon would do the conversion work for them for a low cost and apparently this could be done as a byproduct of preparing the "Look Inside" feature for print books.

Apparently it's more expensive to do a "real" text-based ebook version, though judging from some of HarperCollins' typo-ridden offerings, the services which provide that may not exactly be giving quality for money spent.

And Topaz does have certain very limited advantages, in that done well, it can preserve and present a more complex typographical layout than Amazon's Mobipocket format is capable of. This can be important for poetry books, and illustrated ones with the pictures supposed to show at a particular point in the text.

And it makes it possible for Amazon to have books in foreign language scripts that aren't covered by the Kindle's internal fonts, which only cover Roman (with accents), Greek, and now Cyrillic and Chinese/Japanese/Korean with the K3 model. ePub can use embedded fonts for additional display/languages, but Mobi's limited to whatever's included on the device.

So in theory, someone with a Mongolian book written in the old script which goes vertically could make a Topaz version and have it look more-or-less like it should.

Topaz does have a number of potentially good uses. Unfortunately, it more often ends up being used for books that just don't need what it provides and would be better off in a "plain" version.

As for taking back your Topaz mistakes, Amazon does let you return any e-book within 7 days for whatever reason.

You could always try telling them that you're finding that the layout/font used is unreadable for you (some of the publishers use faint and skinny typefaces), or the book keeps losing its place and crashing your Kindle (also a common problem), or that the formatting is bad and you keep running into annoying typos that make you regret paying for such poor work.