Removing DRM from Kobo book

[TheSmitty]

Help...

I have a Libra Colour, and Calibre and various plugins that I have installed that were used to remove DRM from my Kindle books (via D&T method)

I have been removing DRM from my kindle books for years (D&T method).

I bought a book on my kobo device. How do I get that into my Calibre without DRM?

Is there one way, or if there are many ways what is the preferred way?

[ownedbycats]

https://www.kobo.com





Then get the DeASCM (ASCM Input) plugin and DeDRM plugin and load the file in Calibre.

There is also a way to do it with the Kobo desktop app, I am not familar.

[Sirtel]

There are several ways.

One is to download the book from the Kobo website (My Account -> My Books). If it has no DRM, you'll get an epub file and there's no need to remove anything. If it has DRM, you'll get a file with the extension .acsm; this must either be opened in Adobe Digital Editions, which will download the actual epub (and you can then get that epub from My Digital Editions folder in Documents), or you can install the deACSM plugin and register it with your Adobe account, then you can add the .acsm file directly to Calibre and the plugin will fetch it as epub.

Other ways are copying the books from your Kobo device or from the Kobo Desktop app. For this you need the obok plugin from the deDRM folder. As I've never used those methods, I'm not really sure how they work.

[Lys]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Other ways are copying the books from your Kobo device or from the Kobo Desktop app. For this you need the obok plugin from the deDRM folder. As I've never used those methods, I'm not really sure how they work.

Obok way is pretty easy:

If you use Kobo Desktop App:
- open the app and download the book(s)
- close the app
- go to calibre and click on Obok plugin icon
- select the book(s) you want to import, and import them

If you use Kobo ereader:
- make sure you have downloaded on the device the book(s) you want to import
- connect the ereader to calibre
- click on Obok plugin icon
- select the book(s) you want to import, and import them


The only issue with Obok plugin is that it doesn't give you any info about the list of books it finds on the App or on the ereader aside of title + authors. You don't have any date nor any way to easily check if you have already imported that book or not. Obok plugin always gives you the full list of downloaded books on the device/app.

[TheSmitty]

Thanks, everyone. You are all very helpful. Knowing how to do this was the one step I missed in my doom-prepping for the Amazon ordeal. I knew it was possible based upon all I read on the forums here but never really tried to do it.

[TheSmitty]

OK, I have obok and it works well enough. One thing I noticed right away is that once I got the book off of my Kobo and into my Calibre library it does not have the checkmark indicating it is 'On Device' even though that is where it came from.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by TheSmitty

OK, I have obok and it works well enough. One thing I noticed right away is that once I got the book off of my Kobo and into my Calibre library it does not have the checkmark indicating it is 'On Device' even though that is where it came from.

Copy title in Calibre in Library view.
Select Device view
Match missing book to Library, but paste the Calibre title to search. Go
Now Update Metadata.
Switch back to Library view and the tick will be there.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by TheSmitty

OK, I have obok and it works well enough. One thing I noticed right away is that once I got the book off of my Kobo and into my Calibre library it does not have the checkmark indicating it is 'On Device' even though that is where it came from.

Relevant:

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

There's two main reasons I've seen for this happening:

Automatch failures. This is very common if the book has multiple authors. It also happens when there's extra fluff in the title. Do what Sirtel mentions and use Match Book to Library.

Less common: the book isn't on the Kobo yet. Either it didn't get a chance to sync, or very rarely I've had the auto-download fail and require to press the 'download' button.

SmartEject can check for unmatched books and warn when trying to eject.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by TheSmitty

OK, I have obok and it works well enough. One thing I noticed right away is that once I got the book off of my Kobo and into my Calibre library it does not have the checkmark indicating it is 'On Device' even though that is where it came from.

If you have KoboUtilities installed, you can try it's Refresh the list of books on the device option. If that doesn't work, then show the list of books on the device and match the book manually.

At the point you are mentioning, calibre is using it's cached copy of the books on the device since that is a lot faster than re-reading the information from the file system.