Interesting ... albeit exceedingly complicated and convoluted.
But once you have 7.1, does it work with DeDRM? My understanding is that 7.x only works with "DRM-free" Kindle books, which is a lot of effort for a very limited subset of Kindle books.
Quote:
Originally Posted by IvanXQZ
Apologies if this has already been mentioned. And it's not actually that useful given the work required, but for thoroughness: I saw the note in the first post that Mac versions of Kindle after 7.24 can't be used, and since they are distributed from the Mac App Store, there's no way to get older 7.x releases if you don't already have one. It turns out that's not entirely true -- while still seemingly not as useful as the other methods, there's actually a way to still get Kindle for Mac 7.1.
To get it:
- You need to have already have "purchased" (downloaded, for free) the Kindle app from the Mac App Store, meaning if you have never done so, you'll need to do so with macOS 13 Ventura or later.
- You then need to re-download it on a system running macOS 11.x Big Sur. You'll get a warning that the latest version requires macOS 13.0, but then if you click Continue, you get version 7.1.
If you are already past macOS 11, and you're on an Intel-based (that is, not M1/2/3/4) Mac, you can get an external drive (solid state drive recommended, rather than hard disk drive), hold down shift-command-option-R during startup, which will take you to Recovery mode, and from there you'll be able to format the external drive, and then install the original version of macOS that the computer came with to it, and then start up from it (on a Mac with a T2 chip, meaning most from 2018-2020, you'll also need to allow booting from external drives in the Startup Security Options of the Utilities menu before you start the installation). If the computer came with Big Sur, great and that's what the external drive boots your computer into, you're done. Otherwise, you can use Safari to find Apple's support page for old versions of macOS (Google "download old macos"), and upgrade the system on the external drive to Big Sur. Then you can download Kindle 7.1, and copy it from the Applications folder on the external drive to the one on your internal drive.
If you're on an Apple silicon (M1/2/3/4) Mac on macOS 12 or later, it's trickier. Your options are to either use a second Mac (of any kind) to wipe the entire Mac back to its factory state, using macOS 11 firmware. Or, you can use software that provides emulation (not virtualization) and install macOS 11 as a guest; a popular free option is UTM. Either option requires technical moves beyond what I can get into here, but I wanted to mention it.
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