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Originally Posted by OldCrank
Ok, so Amazon Topaz can be unlocked with this Caliber? There are plug ins for Topaz and others? I read somewhere that Topaz can be "stripped" but it still isn't unlocked because somehow it is actually an image, not text or something like that. It had to be done that way to get publishers to sign onboard with releasing more e-books?
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There are plugins, but the actual tools that do the unlocking are kept separate from Calibre and you will have to obtain them separately.
Topaz is actually a combination of images and (often very bad) OCR. It's kind of like the PDF of Amazon formats, and it's an older format which isn't popular. The main reason why it got used was that it was very cheap for the publishers to pay Amazon to make instead of creating a "real" text-based e-book that someone would have to go through and proofread; also it was useful for some books with fancy formatting and image layouts which couldn't be properly represented with Mobi.
Topaz books can be converted, but they're usually a mess that needs to be cleaned up (unless you don't mind reading a lot of typos).
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Originally Posted by OldCrank
I guess this is a way to get books, but actually I am feeling more like I'm a criminal, so I don't know if I would be able to do it. Somehow it all seems wrong. Wrong that the publishers have to do it and wrong that we have to steal it from ourselves just to use it as WE wish, instead of how THEY demand. It's why I don't download music. I just listen to the radio and if it doesn't have what I want, I don't listen at all.
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It's perfectly okay if you're not comfortable with doing it. Perhaps your best bet would be to start trying books from publishers and sources which sell them DRM-free and that way the issue would simply never arise.
If you like science-fiction and fantasy, there are several good options, with Baen's
Webscription being the main one (they offer not only their own books, but also from several other publishers' sf/fantasy imprints) and they have a very helpful Free Library of promotional first-in-series books which they let you try out at no charge.
You can buy directly from some authors, such as via the
BookViewCafé, which is a consortium of print authors banding together to sell e-books of their out-of-print works, or the authors' individual websites.
For mystery and other categories, you can try
Fictionwise's MultiFormat selections, which are DRM-free. They occasionally offer good discount coupons which usually show up in the Deals forum here, and they carry books from imprints like
Belgrave House and
e-Reads, which reprint backlist works by established authors in many genres.
Computer books and romance also have decent selections of DRM-free books. Unfortunately, if you're looking for specialty non-fiction or New York Times bestseller-type material, then you'd be out of luck, because those are almost always DRMed.