snuggledick

joined 2 years ago
 

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.

[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 2 points 19 hours ago

According to their website it comes with /e/OS, a degoogled Android.

[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Been using mailbox.org for a couple of years and I'm quite happy with it. Don't know what "needs client app" is supposed to mean though. If you don't want to use a mail client you can use the web interface. I've used maildroid on Android with it and when it was discontinued switched to Thunderbird, both work fine with mailbox.org.

There's one tiny minor annoyance, they somehow automatically create a new "archive" folder for every year that the web interface uses when you hit the archive button but in your mail client you gotta change the preferences manually once a year. Don't know if you can change but it's such a minor inconvenience I never bothered to check.

 

Macron, who has been calling for years to direct defense spending toward EU products, said he wants to convince other European countries that are currently “buying American” to shift to local options.

[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I know, I posted it. :) I wrote the comment as reply to

Maybe there's a third program that works in yet other countries?

as 2g2g operates in a bunch of countries.

[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 3 points 1 day ago

There is a filter in the settings for vegan/vegetarian. In my experience the shops/restaurants always asked me if I eat meat/fish when filling the bag, but I also live in a very hipster area where it feels like majority of people is vegan now, might be different elsewhere. :)

[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Don't know if this is new but I just checked and you can set your diet preferences in the account settings.

I hardly believe restaurants prepare extra food in advance just to sell it a huge discount with very little or no profit. Actually whenever I went to a restaurant that participated it wasn't leftover stuff but they cooked the meal fresh just for me. I guess they're using the app as a way to advertise and draw more people in with a big discount and hope they come back again to eat there at the full price.

[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 5 points 1 day ago (4 children)

I'm using 2g2g in Germany and there are lots of participating shops here. According to their website, they're operating in all of Europe as well as Canada, Australia and the US.

[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 3 points 1 day ago

Ok but even if that was the case and they produce too much because they can sell the rest at a discount, it's not really "too much" if everything gets sold and eaten. Why would they produce less than there's demand for? I don't really see a problem as long as the food doesn't end up in a trash can.

[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

But if someone buys and eats the food then it's not wasted, is it?

[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I disagree, at least don't see that for any of the stores participating in my area. They don't like overproducing either, everything they throw away is a loss for them. But it's also difficult to predict how much you'll be able to sell on any given day. Bakeries for example usually bake only once a day in the early morning and they have to make an educated guess about how much of each item will be sold that day, but it's never gonna be a perfect guess. Sometimes they're out early, a few customers will be disappointed and the shop will make a tiny bit less profit that day, and some other times they produce a bit too much that they won't be able to sell the next day so they'd have to throw it out. I just don't see how it's greenwashing trying to avoid that by finding takers for the extra stuff using this app. If someone eats the food then it's not wasted food.

[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Sounds like any "visual bookmarking" tool would work for that. You could check out https://www.pearltrees.com/ for example (France).

 

I've been using their app for some time now and really like the concept: Basically it allows restaurants, bakeries, supermarkets etc to announce when they have stuff leftover that they'd usually throw away at the end of the day. You can browse those nearby shops in the app and reserve a "surprise bag" for a small amount, usually around a third of the regular price, but it varies. In the pickup timeframe (usally around 30-60min before their closing time) you go there, show that you've reserved the bag in your app, confirm that you've received it and happily walk home with a ton of surprise food for super cheap.

After using it for a while I can especially recommend looking for food stalls at farmers markets as they often have lots of stuff leftover that they don't want to take back home when packing up so they're often super generous. Bakeries are also great, I regularly get a week's supply of bread, buns, pastries and cake for like 3-5€.

EDIT: While it's made in Denmark the app works globally or at least all of EuropeAFAIK, definitely works fine with lots of participating shops in Germany.

 

Russia is manipulating global AI models by embedding its propaganda within them, a tactic termed "AI grooming," which raises concerns about the potential influence of these models on public opinion and the reliability of information disseminated by AI systems.

 

Direct link to the news site but the article is worth reading as well to learn what it's about. Basically a bunch of European public broadcasters teamed up to make a news site where you can find interesting news from all over Europe that you'd otherwise probably miss.