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Originally Posted by KenJackson
As an experiment, I installed Kindles4PC under Wine. It works just fine, as others have said.
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Oh, good news, thanks. I'd been trying to get it to work under Wine on my Intel Mac for ages so I could use a particular Windows-only tool to yield DRM-free Topaz files as a paranoid backup that I could use with future Kindle apps. I'll have to try updating Wine again.
Quote:
Originally Posted by KenJackson
Then I 'bought' Common Sense by Thomas Paine. Since the price $0.00, I figured surely it won't be DRM corrupted. But it is. Good grief!  It's public domain, available uncorrupted at the Gutenberg Project, and Amazon isn't even charging anything for it, so why oh why do they "protect" it with DRM? Bizarre thinking, that.
But looking back on the Common Sense page, I see that it also says Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited |
That particular edition isn't available in Canada, so I chose another one from the "Customers Also Bought",
The Prince, from the same "publisher", Public Domain Books, same SDU: Unlimited.
Loaded it up via Kindle for Mac, and then dragged the downloaded file over to Kindle Previewer (which gives normally gives an error message for DRM-ed Mobi, but opened just fine with this) and it also opens fine with Calibre, once I change the extension to .mobi.
Perhaps you grabbed the wrong file from the K4PC folder? It can be annoying the way K4PC names all the books by their ASIN.
Or maybe you ran into the same Calibre problem as I did (kept opening it with the K4Mac app instead of the built-in viewer until I renamed the extension from AZW).
In any case, pretty much every SDU: Unlimited book I've ever bothered to try, and most other MR posters' anecdotal evidence seem to indicate that books labeled with it generally are DRM-free.
Quote:
Originally Posted by KenJackson
It's not like I'm sitting here holding my breath waiting for Amazon to blink.
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Nor should you, I agree. One day, Amazon may sell ePub, but it'll likely sell Amazon-DRMed ePub which some enterprising clever people will have to figure out how to liberate.
In the meantime, people should just buy from the places which have the books they want in the format they prefer at the prices they like with service that's decent.
Works for me, which why I've probably dropped the cost of a brand new Kindle on Fictionwise's remaining MultiFormat selections during their coupon sales, since I started buying e-books these past few months, and will very likely be doing he same with Baen's Webscription this new year.