Kindle DRM Deadline is Approaching!

Sorry for the last-minute, sky-is-falling post today, but I just learned what Amazon was up to this weekend and wanted to get the word out before it’s too late.

If you’ve bought eBooks for the Amazon Kindle family of devices or apps, you should know that Amazon is disabling a key feature that makes it easy to strip the DRM from those books. On the 26th, they’re going to turn off manual downloads for your books. That means if you want to be able to remove the DRM that prevents you from using your Amazon eBooks on non-Amazon devices, you have a couple of days to do it while it’s still easy.

(If you’re comfortable living inside the Amazon ecosystem, you’re fine doing nothing. While Amazon is closing this hole, the universal truth of DRM is that someone will find another way to bypass Amazon’s latest fuckery in the future, so if you don’t have time to fool with it before Tuesday, don’t sweat it.)

Jason Snell wrote up a blog post explaining the process here, but the TLDR is that you need an older physical Kindle attached to your account (everything but the newest Kindles work) and a computer (Windows, Mac, or Linux) with bun installed so you can use this Kindle Bulk Downloader. Once you’ve downloaded the files from Amazon, you need Calibre—a really handy eBook and audiobook management application—with the current version of the DeDRM plugin. Make sure DeDRM plugin is installed and configured in Calibre before you import your books. Calibre strips DRM on import, which was the most time-consuming part of this process, so you don’t want to have to do it twice. I was able to read the docs, get everything set up, download almost 700 eBooks, import them into Calibre, and strip the DRM from them in about 20 minutes, but YMMV.

Congratulations! Your eBooks are free, and you can use Calibre convert them to ePub or a variety of other formats, suitable for use on whatever apps and devices you’d like to.

The Rest of the Post

Why are we talking about this here? I feel like I’m beating a very old drum here, but DRM tech enables vendor lock-in. It’s just another way that giant tech companies make it more difficult for us to switch to their competition. And of course, when you buy that cheap Kindle you’re Amazon’s customer, but you’re also a product that Amazon sells to their other customers, book publishers who sell books and buy ads on Amazon platforms.

That collection of books that I’d bought inside the Amazon ecosystem prevented me from moving to newer, better products. I tend to upgrade my eBook reader when the old one dies, so my current reader is about five years old. But looking at the latest hardware compared to my old Kindle Paperwhite the “upgrades” are meaningless. The new model upgrades the already-blinding backlight to be 25% brighter, the four-week battery lasts another week or two, and the new one is a smidge smaller and lighter than mine. While I’m complaining, the new one still doesn’t do the thing I really want, which is give me fine control over the backlight brightness at the dimmest end of its range. I don’t eyeblast myself when I’m reading in my pitch-black bedroom late at night. It feels like Amazon is barely investing in the product line that I’ve bought thousands of dollars worth of books in.

At the same time, there’s more competition in the space that ever before. Kobo has a comparable line of readers and supports a slightly more open ecosystem of electronic bookstores and libraries. (There’s some support for libraries to access the Kindle ecosystem, but it’s mostly limited to the US.) Kobo also works with third-party stores, including Humble Bundles. (Independent store Bookshop.org promises Kobo support later this year.) There are also a ton of weird eBook readers from companies like Boox that just run Android, and thus can use the normal Android apps for any or all of the eBook stores.

So, take a moment to free your purchases from the shackles of Amazon’s DRM and then go about the rest of your day, knowing that your next eBook reader can come from any company you want.

What’s Next?

That’s it for this quick bonus edition of What’s Next. I’ll have something else to think about later this week, but in the meantime, I’d really appreciate it if you’d take a minute and fill out this quick survey. It will help me decide which topics to spend time on for the newsletter and will give me ideas about what kind of premium subscription bonuses you all are into. Thanks!