this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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187
Liberate your Kindle books before leaving Amazon (Tutorial) (lemm.ee)
submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by snuggledick@lemm.ee to c/buyeuropean@feddit.uk
14 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Hey there, I wanted to get away from Amazon Kindle but of course take all my ebooks with me, I paid for them after all. Unfortunately Amazon tries really hard to stop you from doing this by introducing new file formats, DRM and encryption, disabling functionality on their website and so on, making this endeavor quite a hassle, but I finally managed to liberate my books so I can use them with other ebook readers. There's a bunch of different tutorials for this out there, but I found each of them lacks one or two crucial points that prevent it from working, so I thought I'd write up a short tutorial with all the bits of information collected from all over the web and save you some frustration and time (took me a couple of hours to make this work).

I'm not sure if this is the best community to post this to, if you know a better one please let me know or feel free to cross-post it there.

So here's how to get all your ebooks out of Amazon, strip them of DRM/copy protection and convert them to EPUB for use with other ebook readers:

  1. Install Calibre (available for Linux, Windows and Mac) using whatever method works best for your operating system. I'm using Arch Linux and running "sudo pacman -S calibre" did the trick.

  2. Download the latest release CANDIDATE! of the DeDRM plugin, NOT! the latest release! All tutorials I found referred to the stable release v10.0.3, which does NOT work with Amazon's latest DRM shit. At the time of writing this "RC1 v10.0.9" was the latest available version. You'll find it here: https://github.com/noDRM/DeDRM_tools/releases/tag/v10.0.9

  3. Download the plugin "KFX Input.zip" at the bottom of this forum post: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=291290

  4. Unzip the DeDRM release you downloaded, inside you'll find a file "DeDRM_plugin.zip" which is the actual plugin. The KFX Input plugin does NOT need to be unzipped.

  5. Start Calibre, go to "Preferences / Advanced / Plugins" and with the button "Load plugin from file" install the two plugins you downloaded. For the DeDRM plugin make sure you select the unzipped file "DeDRM_plugin.zip", not the downloaded release package.

  6. Restart Calibre.

  7. Go to your "My Devices" page on Amazon (I can't provide a direct link here because it's different for every country, but you should be able to find it). Select your Kindle device and copy its serial number. Alternatively you can look it up on your Kindle itself in the device information in the settings, however you obivously can't copy/paste it from there and I found it hard tell letter O and digit 0 apart, so the first method is probably less error prone.

  8. Back in Calibre open the plugins section in the preferences again, search for the DeDRM plugin and double-click it. In the new dialog click "Kindle eInk ebooks", then the green plus icon and paste your Kindle's serial number. The fact that you need the serial number was also missing in most tutorials, took me ages to figure that out.

  9. Optional step: Go to your "My Content" page on Amazon where all your purchased ebooks are listed. Select all and click "deliver to device" or whatever it's called in your localized Amazon, and select your Kindle. Hit sync on your Kindle device. This is to make sure that all your purchased ebooks are actually saved on the device as we're gonna copy the files from there in the next step. You can skip this if all your books are already downloaded to your Kindle or if you only want those that are.

  10. Connect your Kindle to your computer via USB. Calibre should automatically detect it. Make sure your Kindle is in "USB Drive Mode", not "Charging Mode", so Calibre can access the files on it. For me this was the default when plugging the USB cable in.

  11. In the top menu in Calibre click on "Device", this should give you a list of all books on your Kindle.

  12. Select all or some books you want to liberate, right click and click "Add books to library" in the context menu. Your books should now be all be copied to your library on your computer, but they're still in Amazon's proprietary AZW or KFX format

  13. To make them usable with other ebook readers switch back to your local library ("Libary" button in the top menu) where you should now find all the books you just copied. Again select all books in the list and click "Convert" in the top menu. In the new dialog tweak the options as you wish or just hit "OK" to start. Depending on how many books you got this may take a little while.

  14. Done! You now got a bunch of DRM-free EPUB files in your library that you can use with whatever ebook reader you want.

Few notes:

  • If you get errors like "books can't be converted because of DRM" in step 13, make sure that the correct version of the DeDRM plugin is properly installed and you configured the correct serial number and start over from step 11.

  • A bunch of sites tell you that you can download AZW directly from your "My Content" page on Amazon, but they removed that function in February 2025.

  • If you've tried this before you probably stumbled upon a tool called "epubor" quite often which is trash and tries to make you pay for liberating the ebooks you already own, it doesn't offer anything that Calibre doesn't do for free.

all 16 comments
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[โ€“] casmael@lemm.ee 4 points 3 months ago

Sweet thanks I have a bunch of kindle books from back in the day and Iโ€™ve been meaning to get them off the kindle o7

[โ€“] ClassyHatter@sopuli.xyz 4 points 3 months ago

The Amazon address for most Europeans is https://www.amazon.com/mycd. If you have bought your e-books from your "local" Amazon, just replace "com" with the correct letters (de, es, ...).

[โ€“] Goendhir@lemm.ee 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for this. I'm going to give it a try once I'm home. I missed the deadline to download my ebooks from Amazon but luckily I still had them on my Kindle. I installed the necessary Calibre plugins but it failed with the DRM conversion error. Going to give it another try with your guide.

[โ€“] snuggledick@lemm.ee 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Good luck! Remember that after fixing the plugins and serial number you gotta repeat from step 11 because as far as I understand it the DRM is removed during the copying from the device, not during the conversion to EPUB, but I might be wrong. Let us know how it worked out!

[โ€“] ClassyHatter@sopuli.xyz 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

DeDRM removes the DRM when a book is added to the library. It should show error, if it fails to remove it. But, it's a good idea to convert files, as that makes sure there are no DRM protected files in your library (you can't convert or open DRM protected files), and you need to convert them eventually anyway. I do recommend keeping the original file in case the conversion ends up creating somehow broken result. It's easier to fix them by starting from the original and changing some settings, instead of trying to fix a poorly converted file.

[โ€“] snuggledick@lemm.ee 2 points 3 months ago

I didn't show any errors when I was using the older version of DeDRM and/or had not configured the serial number, it just silently did nothing apparently and I only got an error when attempting to convert to epub.

[โ€“] Manalith@midwest.social 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Any chance anyone here knows the way if you only used the Kindle app and not a physical device? I found one piece of software that looks to work with a slightly older version of the Windows app, but requires something like $40 for a license to decrypt full books. I'll pay it if I have to, but thought I'd check.

[โ€“] ClassyHatter@sopuli.xyz 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)
  1. Install Calibre and DeDRM. No need to worry about serial number
  2. Locate your Kindle books on your drive, and delete them (or move to other location)
  3. Install Kindle for PC 2.4.0. You need to search the internet for this. Be careful with malware.
  4. Launch it, and disable automatic updates somewhere in the settings of it
  5. Download all your books using it
  6. Locate the books again
  7. Drag each book to Calibre. Use the search field of Explorer to make this part easier (*.azw, *.azw3, *.kfx)
  8. Confirm that they were DeDRM'd successfully. For example, by converting all of them to EPUB.

E: Updated the Kindle for PC version. Also: Don't use epubor.

[โ€“] kasbru@feddit.dk 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Thanks a bunch for doing this.

I am at step 11, and ge the following error message: "calibre, version 7.26.0 Not Implemented: The following books are in KFX format. KFX is a virtual book format, and cannot be transferred from the device. Instead, you should go to your "Manage my content and devices" page on the Amazon homepage and download the book to your computer from there. That will give you a regular AZW3 file that you can add to calibre normally. Click "Show details" to see the list of books."

I have no clue, what I am doing wrong. I have tried redoing it, but the same message appears. Any ideas on what I have done wrong? I downloaded the DeDRM_tools_10.0.9.zip file in step 2, i did not state whether it is the candidate release (I have no clue what this means).

[โ€“] snuggledick@lemm.ee 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

This sounds like you're missing the KFX plugin from step 3.

[โ€“] kasbru@feddit.dk 3 points 3 months ago

I am a dummy and did not do everything in your guide. Thanks :)

[โ€“] andriesh@feddit.nl 2 points 3 months ago

Thanks. This was really helpful.

[โ€“] Yingwu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 months ago

Great guide! I'll share it on my community !drm@lemmy.dbzer0.com :)

[โ€“] Not2Dopey@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 months ago

Very well written and very helpful. Thank you so much for posting this. I'm going to try it this weekend.