Apple won't let me read the ebooks I bought from them

[GrymRpr]

You seem to have been the one to say it. Not I,
Sad troll attempt on your part so, go ahead and take an aspirin cos stupid must hurt.

[GilbertWham]

Calibre is, indeed, a massive pain in the arse (WHY do I have to export books to such restricted folders? It’s fucking stupid. Stop it), but it does the job on pretty much any format, aye.

[phuzz]

Once you’ve got everything set up the right way in Calibre it’s easy enough imo. Usually my ‘getting a book’ workflow goes something like:
Buy book from online shop (usually amazon or kobo)
Load DRM’ed book in propitiatory app
Quit app, load Calibre
Click ‘Add book’ and point it at the DRM’ed file it just downloaded
(Optional: make sure the metadata on the book is correct)
Plug in eReader (either a kindle or a nook, depending on mood), select book and ‘Send to Device’

Ok, that is a few steps I suppose, but it takes less than five minutes, which is quicker than walking to the shops, and usually cheaper and more convenient.

[jenn]

Have you tried just signing in with her account in your iTunes?

[jere7my]

Regardless, it is “fixing [some]thing that involves slightly more than pressing the right button”. And once I had the new hardware I still had to restore everything to it, including my Apple ID.

Sent from my iPhone.

[PhasmaFelis]

@GrymRpr

Sad trolley attempt on your part so, go ahead and take an aspirin cos stupid must hurt.

Come on, man, that’s not even on-topic, and grade-school level besides. At least say something smug about, I dunno, Linux.

[alahmnat]

@redesigned

That’s good to hear, can i redownload the purchased aac files drm free if i purchased them pre-drm removal?

Since nobody’s answered this yet, I’ll chime in here: yep. I’ve done this myself. There used to be a pay-to-upgrade-your-files fee in place back when DRM-free tracks first hit iTunes, but that got dropped years ago. iTunes Match (assuming you can still sign up for it without Apple Music) will even work going the other way: if you’ve got low-quality rips or files that were, shall we say, “otherwise acquired”, odds are good that iTunes will match them and give you pristine, DRM-free iTunes Store files when you redownload them. Just be sure to do a backup first in case the matching process goofs, but that’s good advice regardless of your platform of choice :).

To @PhasmaFelis, if you want to make a call between epub and mobi, I would suggest going with epub. Mobi is basically Amazon’s Not Invented Here ebook format that - as far as I’ve been able to tell - only Amazon really supports. Annoyingly, the opposite is also true: Amazon’s software and readers don’t support epub at all (whereas basically everything else does, and editors for it seem much more plentiful), so you’ll be stuck converting any epub files to mobi if you own a Kindle or use Amazon’s Kindle reader on your computer.

Anybody suggesting txt or pdf for reading ebooks is a sadist .

[enso]

@Melted_Crayons

Try Amazon instead of Apple for ebooks. Check when buying a particular book if you can share it (if that matters to you; it depends on publisher agreement w/ Amazon). And Amazon lets the user delete old devices which may have held DRM content, you can direct which device the content goes to, etc.

Not to mention that you can strip the DRM from 99% of Amazon ebooks in seconds.

[enso]

@PhasmaFelis

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

The same tool that Calibre uses for the plugin you mention has a standalone app. Drag and drop your kindle ebook files on it as long as you’ve either got the Kindle app set up on the same system or you get them as books downloaded for a specific physical kindle device and you’ve entered that devices identifying code into it.

https://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/2015/10/06/dedrm-tools-6-3-4a-released/

[enso]

@RatMan

I use epub, just because it’s what I use for my own work. But mobi is good too, and probably equally widely accepted.

ePub is actually a standard and really just a specialized zipped up HTML file. Anyone can make an ePub reader (people have done it in Javascript) so I consider it a “go to” format.

EPUB 3 Community Group

[LurkingGrue]

Doctorow’s Law: “Anytime someone puts a lock on something you own, against your wishes, and doesn’t give you the key, they’re not doing it for your benefit.”

[renke]

@alahmnat

is a sadist

or masochist, depends on the preferences

[WearySky]

@redesigned

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.

Note that it only does this after you confirm that you want it to wipe the device. The problem being, of course, that many people don’t read popup messages and just click “OK” to get rid of them.

[SteampunkBanana]

That’s weird, I keep hearing about how Apple products “just work” all the time. How could a proprietary infrastructure ever work against its users?

[daneel]

They work, just.

[benzbanana]

That is because Apple’s music is DRM free. Movies, books, apps still have DRM.

(For purchased songs or albums, no idea how it works with ‘Apple Music’ the subscription service, I expect it wouldn’t)

[redesigned]

@WearySky

Note that it only does this after you confirm that you want it to wipe the device. The problem being, of course, that many people don’t read popup messages and just click “OK” to get rid of them.

yeah. the younger one is 6 and probably clicked it.

this is a problem though, when apple or amazon decide to take away something you already have. To me that crosses an even more intrusive line then refusing to give you something. They are going onto your device and removing your property, they’d argue their licensed property, but still it is creepy kinda like repo with no process for arguing your case.

@alahmnat

yep. I’ve done this myself.

cool. thanks!

[stinkinbadgers]

@WearySky

Note that it only does this after you confirm that you want it to wipe the device. The problem being, of course, that many people don’t read popup messages and just click “OK” to get rid of them.

Also that it is often confusing about what exactly will and won’t get wiped. Last iPad OS update really pushed a lot of cloud stuff, then went I went to turn it off it keeps telling me “this will delete all photos in your photostream” which led to wasting time researching if that means it will wipe the photos from the device. Because that would totally be an Apple thing to do. It pisses me off that I have to waste time with that crap, and that they make you nervous about turning off a feature you don’t want.