Is it easy to remove DRM protection?

[sadievan]

Originally Posted by Pushka

Ooh, that makes me feel good. I am an older female who never grew up with computers and the first experience with one was this huge thing in a building at uni where we had to feed typed cards into a slot to run the spss statistics package for research. The original computers! But that pesky drm is not a problem for me. I am motivated though.

Ditto. I too am an older female (of course I still look 20 yrs old, without glasses, from a distance. :-D). Got my first computer probably 35 + years ago. An old Radio Shack that didn't even have a hard drive. Everything done with floppys. Just kept playing with it til I learned, along with the help of the old BB boards and then forums such as these. I have not had a problem yet.

Carol

[Pushka]

Originally Posted by sadievan

Ditto. I too am an older female (of course I still look 20 yrs old, without glasses, from a distance. :-D). Got my first computer probably 35 + years ago. An old Radio Shack that didn't even have a hard drive. Everything done with floppys. Just kept playing with it til I learned, along with the help of the old BB boards and then forums such as these. I have not had a problem yet.

Carol

Yep. We share similar experiences then, as well as a name !

[abookreader]

Originally Posted by erictoma View Post
Because the only way to try it is to order Kindle 3 from Amazon and buying an eBook from Kobo or any others protected eBook
that means waste of money , times and nerves too

no.

1. Download and install Adobe Digital Editions
2. Download and install Calibre
3. Download and install Kindle 4 PC
4. While we are at it, go ahead and download and install Barnes and Noble desktop app
5. Download and install the Calibre Plug-ins
6. Go to Kobobooks and buy a very cheap or free book that has DRM - click download to put it into Adobe Digital Editions on your computer
7. Open Calibre and click Add book. Go the the My Documents/My Digital Editions folder and find the book
7. Click Open
8 Sit and Wait

9. Once the book is listed in Calibre, select it and then click view
10. If Calibre displays the book for you = that is it. You have an un-DRMd book.

11. Repeat all those steps for the other Vendors (Amazon, Barnes). If you can read them in Calibre, then the DRM is no longer an issue.

After you do all that, you can then decide whether or not it is "easy" for you. Whether or not it is easy for me isn't relevant because I'm not going to be coming over to your house to liberate your books for you.

[Barty]

It's easy, once you figure out how

The reason it's less than straightforward is because of the legality, which means you're not going to find a wiki page that lays it all out step by step.

In any event, you don't have to be a coder or a hacker. You don't need to know python. With the plug in, you don't even need to know what python is. You just need to find the right file, download it, unzip, and put the right file in the right place. In the time it took you to read this entire thread, you could've googled alf apprentice and got it figured out.

As for computing time, on a 4 year old PC it takes a second or two to strip the drm and a minute or two to convert from ePub to mobi.

All this is theoretical, of course, as I never do this myself!

[erictoma]

Originally Posted by abookreader

no.

1. Download and install Adobe Digital Editions
2. Download and install Calibre
3. Download and install Kindle 4 PC
4. While we are at it, go ahead and download and install Barnes and Noble desktop app
5. Download and install the Calibre Plug-ins
6. Go to Kobobooks and buy a very cheap or free book that has DRM - click download to put it into Adobe Digital Editions on your computer
7. Open Calibre and click Add book. Go the the My Documents/My Digital Editions folder and find the book
7. Click Open
8 Sit and Wait

9. Once the book is listed in Calibre, select it and then click view
10. If Calibre displays the book for you = that is it. You have an un-DRMd book.

11. Repeat all those steps for the other Vendors (Amazon, Barnes). If you can read them in Calibre, then the DRM is no longer an issue.

After you do all that, you can then decide whether or not it is "easy" for you. Whether or not it is easy for me isn't relevant because I'm not going to be coming over to your house to liberate your books for you.

that is the best answer so far !
thank you

[Harmon]

Originally Posted by leebase

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

Lee

Yes. Your friend Apprentice Alf has a friend who commented on it in the November 18 entry. That is, assuming you are on a Mac. He may have said something useful for those on a PC, but I'm not PC.

[Harmon]

Originally Posted by 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.)

As of sometime after November 18, it has become much easier, at least on a Mac. It requires 3 steps, all straightforward. Follow the Readme.

Thanks for the pointer on Topaz books at Amazon. It might affect my buying decisions...

[Catlady]

Just FYI, every free book I've gotten from the Christian publisher Revell has been Topaz. One of them turned up a few weeks later as a free epub at BN.

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by Harmon

As of sometime after November 18, it has become much easier, at least on a Mac. It requires 3 steps, all straightforward. Follow the Readme.

Actually, I was referring to the improvements made by the recent set of tools when I made my "lots of pointing and clicking" remark.

But yes, it is now a lot easier than it used to be (formerly, I did it all on the command line before any widgets had been assembled), though it doesn't match the sheer convenience of the new script droplet that Mac users can enjoy, or even the one-clickability of a successfully installed Calibre plug-in.

Originally Posted by Catlady

Just FYI, every free book I've gotten from the Christian publisher Revell has been Topaz. One of them turned up a few weeks later as a free epub at BN.

Certain publishers are like that. A couple of the free e-books in recent months have been Topaz on Amazon, but ePub at B&N/Kobo/Sony. Of course, they're probably freebie-ing older titles that the publisher likely hasn't felt any particular inclination to "update" to Mobi format.

[speedlever]

erictoma,

As others have said, you just need to try it for yourself.

While my family thinks I'm a geek, I'm probably not nearly as geeky as many of the folks here (said respectfully!). I'm in the PC camp, btw.

Option 1 is working with python and the scripts. It took me several hours of fishing around and trying different things before I was able to get the scripts to work. Initially I found help at Ilovecabbages blog on circumventing DRM. In the comments section was a post by maelcum with a link to a manual.

At first I was trying to work with acsm files which just generated error codes. Then I figured out that the actual epub files I needed to work with were stored somewhere in My Documents. After several hours, I was able to successfully work with DRM files.

Option 2 is working within Calibre. I find this much easier and simpler. I have v2.3 tools and loaded the plug-ins which took a little figuring out to learn how to do that. (check under File Type Plugins to see if they loaded properly if it seems like nothing happens when you install the plugins).

I've d/l books from several sources. I have no idea if they have DRM or not. I load them into Calibre and can bring them up with the built in epub reader. I've converted some to mobi and can read them on a free mobipocket reader I found. AFAIK, Calibre, in all its fullness, is working perfectly for me.

Obviously, I'm too new with this stuff to be intelligent. But my point is that even with my (low) level of knowledge about Calibre, ebooks, and DRM, I seem to have a functioning system to do what I want to accomplish... which simply is to read the books of my choice on the device of my choice.

Hope you find what you're looking for.

[Catlady]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

Certain publishers are like that. A couple of the free e-books in recent months have been Topaz on Amazon, but ePub at B&N/Kobo/Sony. Of course, they're probably freebie-ing older titles that the publisher likely hasn't felt any particular inclination to "update" to Mobi format.

Oh, I had just assumed that Topaz was a newer format to make decrypting harder. So it's actually an older format?

[ATDrake]

Well, technically, Topaz *is* a newer format designed to (among other things) make decrypting harder. So you're right about that.

Amazon had bought .mobi when they purchased the Mobipocket operation outright, and went and commissioned a new format for a variety of reasons and it was years before anyone went and reverse-engineered it. Here's a blog entry with comments by one of the programmers who helped created it.

However, it's mostly been used for older books because it started as a quick and easy way for publishers to get their books on Kindle cheaply so that Amazon could have a larger catalogue to supply its users. Nowadays many publishers have made ebook releases part of their production flow, and sell in more than one store.

Amazon now provides tools to convert ePub files to Mobipocket format for submission, so it's probably more cost effective for the publishers to come up with an ePub file that they can then send practically everywhere after a little tweaking to make it fit the various store requirements, instead of both commissioning an ePub and also paying Amazon to convert a Topaz for them.

That's likely why, to give an example, you may get an older series that starts off Topaz, but the newest books in it are Mobi, like the Billy Boyle series where the first book was a freebie a couple of months back at both Amazon and B&N.

Here's the 5th book, released in August this year: both a Print Length and a File Size, so Mobipocket.

But up to the 3rd book, released in 2008 when the Kindle was just coming out, it's Print Length only.

Back then, the Nook and other competitors simply didn't exist, ePub probably was a blip on the radar of most folks, and Soho Press seems to be one of the smaller imprints.

Having their book sold by Amazon for its trendy new device getting press coverage, instead of one of the less well-known-to-the-general-public stores like Fictionwise, probably seemed like a better idea than releasing it who-knew-where-in-whatever-format to sell in unguessable quantities. And Amazon would even make the ebooks for them, too!

But then the B&N, Sony Reader, and Kobo stores came along, so if they wanted to have the entire series available for those readers, they now also had to pony up an ePub for the earlier books, which is why I ended up converting the B&N freebie to read on my Kindle instead.

I strongly suspect this is the situation behind many of the Topaz books available in ePub at other stores nowadays, and most publishers just doesn't want to go through the trouble of converting and resubmitting a Mobi version even if they have the means to do so, now that they're selling elsewhere as well as Amazon.

[speedlever]

So is it accurate to say that Topaz is a fading format and not a rising one?

[sadievan]

For some reason the Calibre plug in for Adobe epub isn't working on my little netbook, but works on my regular laptop. Just tried it with a Library book (I'm a slow reader and 14 days is not enough time for me). On my laptop it's a breeze just adding the file.

Carol

[KevinH]

Hi,

Did you remember to add in your adeptkey.der file on the netbook? Are you using the exact same ADE account on both machines? Otherwise you will need to add the second adeptkey.der file (renamed to prevent conflicts?) to the plugin on the netbook.