problem with Thorium (how do I "free" an EPub that only opens with that software?)

[Jacques Q.]

Hello. Not sure this is the right place to post this message, but I found no thread dealing with the issue I have.
I got an EPub that can apparently only be managed by a software called Thorium (the file I get is in a .acpl format that I can't open with anything else).
Now : how do I manage to "free" this EPub ? I can't stand being chained to just my computer screen with a software that is obviously far, far from optimal, but there seems to be no option in DeDRM (sorry if I mention it, but obviously this is the only tool I know of that would/could/should allow me to do that) to "free" such files.
Would anyone have a suggestion regarding how to deal with this issue ? Thanks a lot in advance.

[rantanplan]

You have an ebook with CARE-DRM. Those are usually only available at libraries.

Currently, there is no way to remove that DRM, as noDRM team was hit with a cease and desist specifcially for this DRM-scheme last year.

You'll likely get no help here because it's highly frowned upon to remove DRM from library ebooks.

[John F]

Originally Posted by rantanplan

...

You'll likely get no help here because it's highly frowned upon to remove DRM from library ebooks.

Frowned upon by some, but the OP seems to have a legitimate need (doesn't want to have to read on a computer, but on a device that they prefer).

A little more detail on what happened:

https://github.com/noDRM/DeDRM_tools/issues/18

So if the OP wants to pursue it, there is probably a version of NoDRM somewhere that can remove the DRM*.

*Don't PM me asking how/where, I have no idea.

[Jacques Q.]

Thanks a lot to both persons who took the time to reply.
What I did eventually was *not* a technical solution (which apparently doesn't exist anyway) : I plainly got in touch with the publisher, from whose online bookstore I had bought the book, explained that I was a very old technically disabled person (which is only partly true...), had just received a Kindle as a Christmas present and wanted to start using my device with this ebook but saw there was a problem - and God, how disappointed I was -, and they were nice enough to answer that yes, indeed, an .aclp DRMed e-book would not be useable in this context, and they refunded me. I then bought the same e-book again from a bookstore using the horrendous but for now cancellable Adobe DRM, deleted the DRM immediately and did what I wanted with the e-book.
Lesson learnt : now that new e-books (ie published after Jan. 3, 2023) are not deDRMable on Kindles any more (which used to be my way to do things), do not try to be "nice" to publishers by buying from them directly, but first of all make sure that the online bookstore you buy from uses a DRM system that can be deleted.

[shalym]

Originally Posted by Jacques Q.

Lesson learnt : now that new e-books (ie published after Jan. 3, 2023) are not deDRMable on Kindles any more (which used to be my way to do things), do not try to be "nice" to publishers by buying from them directly, but first of all make sure that the online bookstore you buy from uses a DRM system that can be deleted.

Actually, you can still free your Kindle books using the download for USB option in My Content and Devices because you have kindle devices. (at least for now...we don't know what will happen in the future)

Shari

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by Jacques Q.

Hello. Not sure this is the right place to post this message, but I found no thread dealing with the issue I have.
I got an EPub that can apparently only be managed by a software called Thorium (the file I get is in a .acpl format that I can't open with anything else).
Now : how do I manage to "free" this EPub ? I can't stand being chained to just my computer screen with a software that is obviously far, far from optimal, but there seems to be no option in DeDRM (sorry if I mention it, but obviously this is the only tool I know of that would/could/should allow me to do that) to "free" such files.
Would anyone have a suggestion regarding how to deal with this issue ? Thanks a lot in advance.

Increase the text size (imagine you are reading on a 6-7" screen), and take a screen capture of each page (select region to crop any unwanted margins), maybe convert to a more more compressible image format, and make a PDF out of it (ideally OCR it). If you use a Mac the screen capture is very efficient, you could probably manage 30/min or more. Should be equally good capture tools for Windows. And all this sweat equity should indemnify you against piracy charges.

Kindle isn't spectacular with PDF, but it is not too bad.

As it happens I've just been giving myself a refresher on Kindle PDF support, as I haven't used it much recently and some details were fuzzy. (Scribe is deprecating PDF as part of positioning it as a Notebook device, and replacing it with Print Replica, originally developed for textbooks. When they're finished it should be more functional than the legacy PDF support, which will never get updated, or at least better integrated in the Kindleverse. Wanted some comparison points.)

Attaching a couple of screenshots for Portrait and Landscape. PDF page size is 6 x 9 in, and it is a 6" screen. But this is a worst case scenario. If you are making the PDF yourself from scratch, you can make the text arbitrarily bigger and margins arbitrarily narrow.

Landscape advances a strip at a time with page turn gestures, 3 strips in this case.

(I'm not actually going to read this book like this, just experimenting)

If it's OCRed, you can use dictionary lookup and search, even highlight and annotate. None of this syncs, and the only way to export is to find them in My Clippings.txt.