I’m fairly certain that ALL Apple Books, Music, Movies, and Apps are signed to a specific iTunes account and cannot be unless that account is authorized on the device, and that copying back files won’t work unless they were signed by the same account.
So, hey, this might be a good place to ask this: has anyone yet come up with a no-hassle way to automatically turn all my Amazon-purchased ebooks (current, and future as they arrive) into DRM-free versions? The only tool I’ve been able to find that does the transformation is Calibre, and it is bizarrely difficult to set up and use. I want a script that runs on my desktop, monitors the directory where Amazon ebooks live, and autoconverts (via Calibre if necessary) each one that arrives. Am I gonna have to write this myself?
(Also, is there any consensus as to which DRM-free ebook format is best?)
My older daughter recently got an iPhone, and it is setup as a sub account under my iTunes account, using Apple Family Sharing…I cannot back her phone up using my computer because my iTunes uses my apple account and hers is a sub account. I’ve tried authorize iTunes to use multiple accounts but no matter what I try it won’t let me back her device up.
My younger daughter had her iPod wipe all her favorite songs off because she plugged it into her mom’s computer to recharge it and iTunes was ever so helpful in saying it was a unrecognized device and wiping it.
The walled garden of apple really sucks sometimes.
2 Likes
I don’t know about consensus, but I like .txt for classics and public domain books, and PDF for when links and images matter.
Just about any device can open those two formats.
I stopped buying from Apple when all my Roald Dahl collection disappeared when I migrated to Yosemite, the contract with the publisher expired and I couldn’t download them anymore.
2 Likes
I use a Windows desktop program called epubee. The Googles can find it for you. Note that it may be illegal to use in certain places, if you care about that. It is not automatic, but it does the job. Nothing too technical, but it does involve some dragging and dropping from your Kindle folder into the app. I then convert the de-DRMed .azw or .azw3 to epub using Calibre.
I use epub, just because it’s what I use for my own work. But mobi is good too, and probably equally widely accepted.
2 Likes
Not actually correct. For example, you can buy apps on an iOS device using multiple different Apple IDs and they all can be installed and used simultaneously on the same device.
And for purchased music there has been no DRM for several years.
Actually a real problem we are dealing with IRL. I know the concept and how it should work, i’m a mobile app developer for christ’s sake. i can get the apps on the iphone no problem, iTunes won’t back up the device though because of an authorization issue of apps being purchased under her sub-account, and no amount of resetting iTunes has allowed me to add her sub account as a second authorization account under iTunes. There are definitely bugs. I’ve been round and round on the forums and with apple support. Family sharing and sub accounts commonly have these sorts of problems and no one on the forums so far has posted any fixes that work as the issue is with apple authentication and how sub accounts were grafted in half ass.
That’s good to hear, can i redownload the purchased aac files drm free if i purchased them pre-drm removal?
Hmm. Those aren’t great for casual reading, though. Plaintext loses formatting like italics and footnotes (or else requires awkward work-arounds); PDFs can’t be reflowed and are essentially useless on portable devices (and reading a novel on the desktop leaves much to be desired). I was mainly thinking epub vs. mobi, both of which preserve vital formatting and image and work well on any viewing platform. I don’t really know what the difference between those two is, though, or if there’s another, similar alternative.
3 Likes
What blows my mind about eBook DRM, particularly novels, is that it’s the easiest media to pirate via the analog hole; since the majority of the media content is plain text, you can just OCR it to get the same quality in a DRM free media. Contrast with video, which leads to inevitable quality loss because you don’t have the primitives to automatically remaster the rip. It makes the whole thing seem futile, even by DRM standards.
Probably not what @rkt88edmo meant but the former leader of the German far-wing party NPD is Holger Apfel.
The satirical group Front Deutscher Äpfel (Front of German Apples) was founded to protest against the right extremist parties.
3 Likes
You can rename book.epub to book.epub.zip and unzip the archive. Inside you will find html/xml files with the text of the book divided to smaller chunks and with subset of html tags used, metadata in an xml file and other things that book needs, such as fonts, illustrations, cover image, css files … . Mind you, you can’t just zip files after making correction and expect it to work, it has to be zipped in particular way, leaving the xml file with metadata uncompressed and at the beginning of the archive.
On my e-ink reader you can even get away with renaming odf file to book.odf.epub and it will kinda-sorta work as an epub on some of programs for reading epubs. Because odf - Open Document Format that LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org use - has similar structure.
mobi file is similar, but you can’t unzip it using standard zip program. You can take it apart using specialized tools. Older Amazon formats for Kindle (azw I think) is basically mobi with small changes to make it non-compatible with older software for reading mobi files. Amazon purchased Mobipocket company, used their infrastructure and tools and left old customers using mobi infrastructure hanging in the wind.
There is also older format .lit. It was pushed by Microsoft, until they decided to pull out of the e-book market and left customers stranded. Lit has similar structure - packed html and can be taken apart (and de-DRMed) using convertlit software.
6 Likes
Even without the DRM step, a digital camera is a quick ad-hoc step to obtain a book copy. Since I had my first digital camera, I am doing things like photographing a newspaper article I want to read later but don’t have the time at the moment, or sometimes even photographing an entire book page by page for reading later. Easier than the hassle of borrowing and returning it.
And just why should you have to jump thru such an absurd sequence of hoops? DRM is bad. End of story.
Get thee to pycrypto or its relatives, and forget about having to deal with locked books (or any other digital media)
1 Like
Shocked that you use Apple products in the 1st place Mark.
But then again, nobody’s perfect.
1 Like
Apple DRM can be removed. The software to do it is called Requiem. It’s no longer updated, but it works perfectly well as long as you point it at an older version of Itunes that has the DRM’d content downloaded to it.
Requiem 4 is the most recent version, and works with Itunes 10 but not 11. (Requiem 4 dropped support for books so if you’re going to buy any books, use requiem 3 & Itunes 10.5 instead. AFAIK, both versions can strip video DRM).
Have you ever, ever needed to use apple customer service for fixing anything that involves slightly more than pressing the right button? apple customer experience is scripted along the line of a Kafka novel, but is far less enlightening.
The only hope is gravity, anything that goes up must come down, and my hope is that I live long enough to witness apple’s self-satisfied customer bubble implode on itself at that critical juncture where your PR bears no relation to the reality of anyone’s experience.
As a technophobe, who has wasted many an hour with the user unfriendly workings of an apple id, it gives me enormous satisfaction to read that software developers suffer a similar fate in the apple to human encounter. Were apple even remotely interested in their users, as opposed to their profit margins, I can’t imagine it would be beyond their resources to actually fix the thing.
In fact, they’re sticking to it perfectly.
Godwin’s Law just states that in any online discussion, the probability of a Nazi comparison being made approaches 1 as time passes.
The stuff about automatically “losing” an argument was a later addition.
But anyone who makes a bad Nazi comparison without first looking up the spelling has definitely lost any argument that might follow.
1 Like
I have indeed. My iPhone battery began expanding after two years (when my phone was out of warranty). I walked into an Apple store and walked out half an hour later with a replacement, for free, after the employee walked me through wiping my old phone and restoring my new one from a backup. The only thing I lost were some saved passwords, and if I’d encrypted my backup I wouldn’t have lost them.
Apple’s not perfect, but I don’t see any reason to demonize them.
This is the saddest thing about ebooks. Who are you going to buy them from? Amazon? Apple? Two gigantic behemoths of corporations who dont give two shits about their customers? Barnes and Noble , who probably because one of those behemoths won’t exist in short order, but whose reader at least allowed non-proprietary formats? With all of them, they neutered most of the social joy of books.
I’ve read several books on my Nook (yes, I’m weird), that I’d love to share with my mom or other loved ones. Before ebooks, I’d just go to her place and drop it off, where when I returned to pick it up We’d kill a pot of coffee discussing it. Not so in the wonderous, and convenient future, where sharing is a crime.
Not that it matters, I haven’t touched my ereader in over a year, nor have a purchased a single eBook. It’s cheaper and more convenient to just buy books (sadly from Amazon, since there are basically no independent bookstores left in my city of 4 million people).
1 Like
