[HN Gopher] How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM
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How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM
Author : pixelmelt
Score : 309 points
Date : 2025-10-16 20:22 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.pixelmelt.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.pixelmelt.dev)
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| I don't suppose this is going to work well with their
| comics/graphic novels, will it?
|
| I stopped buying ebooks from Amazon some time ago and switched
| completely to Kobo (and their much-more-easily-defeated DRM), but
| Amazon's acquisition of Comixology means they've still got by far
| the best collection of digital comics on the market.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I'm sure you already know this but I've actually had a lot of
| success getting comics on hoopla with my library card.
| Obviously this completely depends on your local library but if
| you haven't it's worth looking in to! Has what I want a solid
| 35% of the time. Not the newest releases but I've gotten stuff
| that's only 6 to 12 months old without much issue
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Not my use-case. I have roughly 250 _legitimately purchased_
| graphic novels and manga purchased from Amazon over the years
| that I 'd want to backup.
|
| I have about half of them already ripped, from an earlier
| time when the Kindle4PC application was easier to crack. But
| I still grab new comics from time to time.
| boldlybold wrote:
| Comics need a full "image" for the page, so this is unlikely to
| work. Can you inspect the requests and see what you get?
|
| Or to the author: what happens to images in the ebook?
| gruez wrote:
| If all you need is an image, can't you just use browser
| automation tools to screenshot each page? After all, much of
| the content is in images so it's not like you need it OCRed
| for accessibility purposes.
| rs186 wrote:
| If you can live with lower quality image. Most people
| probably will be ok with that though.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| It will depend on the books, but the images aren't that
| high resolution in general.
|
| I've had some slightly blurry on 2.8x1.9k screens,
| especially the older ones.
| pixelmelt wrote:
| I haven't gotten images working yet, they have some weird
| obfuscation applied to them as well
| brendang_sd wrote:
| I always love a story of anger based (reverse)engineering.
| javchz wrote:
| Spite is an underated productivity tool.
| Teknomadix wrote:
| My new T-shirt
| WD-42 wrote:
| I've partaken in some SDD (Spite Driven Development) myself
| related to the Garmin ecosystem. The problem with it is once
| you stop caring, the development stops too.
| zdw wrote:
| aka "Hate driven development"
| ZebusJesus wrote:
| Well done!
| wredcoll wrote:
| I personally have bought many fewer books over the last couple of
| years, from amazon, as they've made it harder and harder to, you
| know, read the books I've paid for.
|
| Pirating books is not hard. They're probably the smallest
| possible thing that people are interested in copying with the
| broadest variation in acceptable formats.
|
| I know I'm screaming into the void, but if I'm paying real money
| why is the experience from piracy sites better?
| Insanity wrote:
| Genuinely curious to hear why you think they make it harder and
| harder to read books? I've been using my Kindle daily since
| 2017. I read on both the Kindle device (Paperwhite and
| vanilla), the iPad and iPhone app, and occasionally the web
| reader.
|
| I've never experienced issues with them that break the reading
| experience. The one issue I occasionally run into is that the
| book progress doesn't sync when I open the app and I have to
| click "sync now" which sometimes is blazingly fast and
| sometimes takes like a minute.
|
| I can't imagine migrating away from Kindle now, it's probably
| one of my favourite devices and the Kindle is my favourite way
| to read.
| cyberax wrote:
| Their devices get steadily worse. Kindle Oasis was the best
| device ever. It also had cellular connectivity so you could
| read it on a train, then put it in the backpack and switch to
| listening to the same book on your phone.
|
| All seamlessly, because Kindle used the cellular network for
| reading progress. Really a magical experience.
|
| Then they removed cellular and _buttons_ from the devices.
| And now their app is actively crashing on my Kindle when I
| try to use it to buy a book.
| radley wrote:
| I've had decent success with a Kindle device, but when I try
| to use the Kindle app on my iPhone, which is rare now, it's
| almost always a hassle. Their iPhone app updates completely
| replace the app, so everything gets reset and books have to
| be downloaded again.
|
| But the main problem is that they don't sync the "last read"
| bookmarks until you open a book. But since that book didn't
| have a bookmark, it's reset to the beginning and then synced,
| so my "last read" bookmark is now at the beginning.
| pmarreck wrote:
| that last-read bug sounds exactly like something that
| doesn't have test coverage
| wishfish wrote:
| The reading experience is fine on Kindle. Or at least it was
| the last time I used it. My main problem is how they've
| locked down the DRM. I was on Kindle for a very long time and
| didn't mind the DRM because it was easily breakable. Amazon
| was also helpful about helping you download the book file
| directly. The locks they had in place were essentially
| bathroom door locks. And they seemed chill about it.
|
| That's all changed now. I'd love to know why it's changed. My
| first thought was publisher pressure. But Kobo hasn't
| implemented harsh measures. Just Amazon has.
|
| At any rate, I'm now using Kobo for my reading. Easy to break
| DRM. And they don't assume the same level of control over
| Kobo ereaders the way Amazon does with Kindle. I have over a
| thousand ebooks. I'm able to tag books in Calibre, and those
| tags automatically show up as Collections on the Kobo. It's a
| simple thing, but Amazon never gave me such flexibility.
| Makes a huge difference for me.
|
| It's also possible to alter Kobo's UI/UX with various plugins
| without the need to jailbreak. Kobo (the company) is
| perfectly happy to let you do whatever you want with your own
| device. That's such a breath of fresh air compared to how
| Kindle is locked down.
| yesco wrote:
| To stop you from pirating ofc!
| Timshel wrote:
| To create a moat and make Kobo and others less interesting.
| renewiltord wrote:
| In general, if I don't have to pay someone to produce something
| I can provide a better experience to my customers than those
| who do.
|
| It's why archive.is is so much better to read on than a news
| site.
|
| Might as well ask "when I engage with GPL projects it's so much
| worse of an experience than if I just bundle the code and
| distribute it without a license, why?" It's often cheaper to
| not comply than to comply.
|
| But my kindle has definitely been "good enough" for me with
| Libby.
| sointeresting wrote:
| I bypassed it by buying a Kobo.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| I appreciate the author's work, and they're absolutely right
| about the Kindle app. I'm with you though, I don't want to
| fight tooth and nail with Amazon to have the ability to read a
| book without their lousy app, to back that book up, and
| otherwise legally and fairly use it. I don't want to reward
| Amazon for being aggressively anti-consumer by spending money
| on their site, at least not for this.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| Likewise, but I went with Pocketbook.
|
| I wish more people would understand that we empower those
| companies by using their products and services. Avoid when you
| can and they lose their power.
| bix6 wrote:
| Does Kobo work with the Libby app?
| sointeresting wrote:
| I believe so, haven't tried it myself.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| Yes, my wife uses it all the time
| rufo wrote:
| Even better than a Kindle - library browsing is built-in to
| the device.
| bix6 wrote:
| O wow I love that! So tired of Jeff I think I'll switch.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| I'm an owner of a Kobo, how did you do that?
|
| When I tried, the only options from Amazon were 'transfer to my
| device' and that only works if you have a Kindle. There was 0
| way to just download the stupid file and let me copy it myself.
| amatecha wrote:
| I was going to say exactly the same! Got a Kobo Clara BW a
| while ago -- great lil device. Took a while to figure out
| Calibre, but now that I understand it, it's very convenient.
| Prior to choosing an e-reader, I took one glance at Amazon's
| DRM-laden offerings and noped out from that ecosystem
| completely.
| Retr0id wrote:
| This is a great write-up in terms of content but stylistically it
| reads like the output of an RLHF'd LLM
| ethmarks wrote:
| It's extra distracting because it doesn't even read like normal
| LLM prose, but it's close enough to feel off.
|
| The frequent use of bold emphasis, lists, and subject-only
| rhetorical questions ("Those tiny m3,1 m1,6 m-4,-7 commands?
| They're micro-MoveTo operations.") are classic LLM-speak, but
| they're used in such a way that makes me doubt that OP actually
| used an LLM to write this. I think that OP's natural prose just
| happens to be stylistically pretty similar to that of an LLM.
|
| It's kind of sad that what were once signs of high effort and
| dedication (e.g. em-dashes) are now signs of low effort and
| dishonesty, despite the fact that people still use them in
| human writing.
| boldlybold wrote:
| This is a beautiful solution to a tedious problem that shouldn't
| exist in the first place! Great work.
| harshreality wrote:
| I don't know what state it's in (haven't used it in years), but
| do apprenticealf's DeDRM tools, which has been forked to
| nodrm/DeDRM_tools, still handle kindle PC app downloads?
| Tinkering with old versions of the PC app might work even if the
| current version doesn't, and there's a registry hack to disable
| kfx downloading and get azw3 instead, which worked at some
| point... it's outlined in apprenticealf's DeDRM repo, at the wiki
| link provided at the top of the repo's README, in the short
| section saying it's no longer maintained.
|
| That would provide a closer-to-original version of the ebook,
| rather than just a visually similar one.
|
| That any of this is necessary at all is absurd. Hats off to
| anyone with the patience to bypass Amazon's DRM rather than
| giving up on the Amazon ebook ecosystem entirely.
| ashton314 wrote:
| The thing that killed the download -> crack DRM workflow is
| that Amazon removed the "download and transfer via USB" option.
| I haven't bought an ebook from Amazon since.
|
| The only viable option would be to buy the book and then pirate
| a de-DRM'd copy.
| nekusar wrote:
| Why buy an ebook then? Just buy the physical if you want, and
| pirate it.
|
| Dont pay for your own hope that you can pick the lock of your
| own paid for jail cell.
| wffurr wrote:
| Then I have a physical book to deal with.
| Uvix wrote:
| It will handle downloads for older versions of the PC app, but
| the supported version won't download any books released after
| April 2025.
| digianarchist wrote:
| Also Libation for Audible books.
| 3abiton wrote:
| I could feel the anger of the author oozing through the writing.
| Great work!
| layer8 wrote:
| My main peeve with rendering in the Kindle app is that formula-
| type content (often even minor stuff like _x_ 2) is rendered as
| images that (a) are low-resolution and (b) don't invert in dark
| mode.
|
| A second peeve is that in dark mode you can only have gray on
| black, not white on black.
| harshreality wrote:
| Do the ebooks you're referring to use an image for the 2
| symbol, rather than css, unicode, or mathjax-generated mathml?
| A lot of old math books that have been converted from scans do
| that, for instance, because their OCR was okay at regular text
| but not good at superscripts, subscripts, or other mathematical
| symbols.
| layer8 wrote:
| They use an image in the Kindle version. I don't know about
| other versions, but I strongly suspect that the PDF version,
| if any, doesn't. These aren't old books, they are recent
| nonfiction books from established publishers. They surely
| don't use OCR to produce the Kindle version.
|
| I've never seen a Kindle book rendering anything as vector
| graphics. That's just not a thing in the Kindle world, as far
| as I can tell. It's either basic text or pixel images.
|
| One example I just checked is a book from MIT Press from
| 2021, where even [?]2 is rendered as an image, and also isn't
| scaled correctly with respect to the text size. It really
| puts you off reading such books in Kindle.
|
| Anyway, I guess my point is that TFA won't help with what I
| find the most annoying about the Kindle experience.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| At one point I did the same for a comic app which was getting the
| earliest releases of a manga I wanted to read; I still don't read
| Japanese but was the buyer for my translation circle. They had
| similar forms of obscure obfuscation; They scrambled the image
| into chunks, then you got a metadata that remapped it into a
| finished image. Raw, it looked like one of those slide puzzles.
|
| Over the course of a couple years they updated their scrambling;
| First to randomize the size of the regions, then to make them
| triangular instead of rectangular. It was an interesting if
| tedious challenge to reverse engineer.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Me too. When they removed the option to download books I
| liberated everything I had ever bought, moved to Kavita+koreader
| and will never buy a kindle book again.
|
| I jailbroke both kindles. And use koreader on them which now
| supports progress sync with Kavita which is amazing! So I don't
| really lose functionality.
| bmlzootown wrote:
| Since the last major jailbreak for Kindle devices was released,
| I've been using Koreader as well on my Scribe. I have progress
| syncing setup with Hardcover (Goodreads alternative) instead,
| however. Only downside is their recommendations don't seem to
| be well geared to my interests at this point, but hopefully
| that'll change in the future as more use the service.
| clumsysmurf wrote:
| I have the same problem with O'Reilly / Safari ... I don't enjoy
| using the apps and find they get in the way of the reading
| experience, plus it's a very expensive subscription. Initially,
| its hard to tell if rendering problems are just a bad conversion
| or if the text rendering engine is just buggy / borked.
|
| But there were plenty of other bugs like bookshelf management
| getting corrupted.
| whatever1 wrote:
| Your intention doesn't matter to the shareholders. Straight to
| jail.
| jojobas wrote:
| Yeah I hope his opsec is good.
| lloydjones wrote:
| I've been using https://readest.com and very much enjoying it. I
| just wish there were a "lifetime purchase" option.
| mr_sturd wrote:
| Looks nice. Shame it doesn't have OPDS support, but it's nice
| to see that it's a planned feature in their GitHub README!
| emptybits wrote:
| Hell hath no fury like an engineer angered! This was such a good
| read and epitomizes hacking:
|
| "Was it worth it? To read one book? No. To prove a point?
| Absolutely. To learn about SVG rendering, perceptual hashing, and
| font metrics? Probably yes."
| chmod775 wrote:
| For books only available through Amazon my workflow used to be
| buying it, downloading it with their desktop app, importing into
| Calibre, converting to epub and stripping DRM, then pushing it
| onto my Kobo.
|
| They broke that a while ago by making their DRM even worse, so
| now I just pirate those books.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Followed the same path.
|
| At least Steve Jobs understood how DRM should work.
| leshenka wrote:
| that's so weird. First I decide to buy my wife an ebook reader
| for the new years and then Louis Rossman makes a video on
| Kindle DRM bait and switch. Now this and people praising Kobo.
| Guess I'm buying a kobo
| themadturk wrote:
| Kobo's pretty good. Anything to avoid Kindle books.
| DennisP wrote:
| I bought one, but it didn't have any of the books I wanted.
| It seems to be nowhere near as comprehensive as the Kindle
| library.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Calibre handles kindle too (if you already have that). You
| "obtain" the books one way or another, and calibre converts
| them to a proper format and copies them directly to your
| kindle (via the usb cable).
|
| Pirated books have no DRM, usually come in an open .epub
| format, which can be converted to whatever your reader
| requires, and you end up actually owning them, even if amazon
| decides to abandon the kindle ecosystem.
| benregenspan wrote:
| Bookshop.org is supposed to implement Kobo support sometime
| this year, getting a Kobo if that happens.
| themerone wrote:
| Most Kobo books have DRM. There are a few publishers (TOR)
| and authors that are DRM free, but most of books I've wanted
| have it.
|
| This is why I have a Boox Android eInk tablet, although I
| only use it with burner accounts. They run Ancient versions
| of Android.
| mothballed wrote:
| Eventually those physical book scanning cameras are going to be
| used to read/scan DRM locked ebooks.
| semiquaver wrote:
| This is great work, but I'm not clear on why this qualifies as
| DRM at all. It sounds like the OP reverse engineered a protocol
| for rendering pages from a book to the web client. Sure, rotating
| the glyph ids every API call is annoying but it hardly qualifies
| as encryption or even obfuscation, just an extra mapping step the
| decoder needs to handle.
|
| Sure seems like whoever at Amazon wrote this didn't realize that
| it backdoors their DRM.
| palata wrote:
| > Sure seems like whoever at Amazon wrote this didn't realize
| that it backdoors their DRM.
|
| Or maybe they did, and now they will have to fix it.
| professorseth wrote:
| I was on the team that wrote this code.
|
| We knew it was reverse-engineerable, we just didn't care.
|
| Upper management seemed happy enough that it was pretty
| obfuscated, and we were happy that they didn't force us to do
| more about it.
| bitwize wrote:
| Still a DMCA violation to break, though.
| ash_091 wrote:
| > we just didn't care. Upper management seemed happy enough
|
| This is very relatable. Management want X, engineers
| recognise X is dumb and deliver something that sorta looks
| like X, management see something that looks like X and are
| happy.
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| @op there's a typo: "You can now download the books you own books
| with my code"
|
| second books seems erroneous
| rkagerer wrote:
| Don't stop there! If Amazon sues you, demand a jury trial and win
| a carve-out making it legal to unlock DRM you own.
| znort_ wrote:
| >I paid money for this book >I can only read it in Amazon's
| broken app >I can't download it >I can't back it up >I don't
| actually own it >Amazon can delete it whenever they want
|
| good that you didn't read the terms of amazon's kindle business
| model before buying that book; all that delicious rage and the
| interesting knowledge it spurred would have been lost to the
| world. tbh, i would have expected them to be more sophisticated.
| good job and kudos, enjoy your well earned book, it's yours now!
|
| sadly i have no use for this, the only few books i ever bought on
| amazon were paperback, used and in good condition. good deals.
| but the mere fact that a provider requires me to use specific
| software to access content is simply unacceptable, making a
| detailed reading of their absurdly dystopian terms and conditions
| unnecessary.
|
| i use amazon prime. for me it's very worth it just for the
| delivery savings as i live in a remote area. it includes access
| to their video streaming service. one day i decided to try it
| just to see what was there. i was immediately prompted with a
| download for some mandatory viewer/drm/codec. not going to
| happen, baby, so i just closed the tab, never bothered with it
| again and have the feeling that nothing of value was lost.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| I hate Amazon's decision to do this. It doesn't even make
| business sense. You can't tell me they're making _that much
| profit_ off of Kindles that it makes sense. The book sales have
| got to be worth more than that in the long run.
|
| A lot of authors only ever offer on Amazon now, which leaves
| those of us without Kindles (I love my Kobo) in a difficult spot.
|
| Frankly I would write it as anti-competitive. How are other
| e-reader companies supposed to survive when Amazon owns all the
| e-books and can just decide that only their e-readers are
| allowed? No one else has even a fraction of the market.
| soorya3 wrote:
| I stopped buying kindle books and back to buying physical books.
| Now I own them, I can gift them to friends or pass them on to my
| kids.
| professorseth wrote:
| I worked on the team that implemented this, years ago! (around
| 2017-2018)
|
| Upper management really enjoyed telling us (the engineers) that
| we needed to implement more DRM, and we liked complaining that it
| was dumb.
|
| Fun to see someone reverse engineer what we implemented!
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(page generated 2025-10-16 23:00 UTC)