DEDRM tutorial

What this is

DeDRM is a tool for removing DRM. Its creator, Apprentice Alf, deserves our thanks. I’ll show how to set it up with calibre.

Why this is

I don’t believe in DeDRM. I believe that if I own something, I should have full control over it. I also like being able to read on other devices without arbitrary rules about how I can read them. Plenty of company seem to disagree with me here, but luckily I don’t have to listen to them about this. And if one of them decides to wipe my books for this article, well, I have backups. No thanks to them.

Requirements

• basic knowledge of the command line
• DRMed books that you want to free.
• calibre
• DEDRM (install instructions below)

Here’s a gist if you prefer that.

Checklist of Instructions

• Download the first zip on this page to any directory.

• Unzip it.

• go to calibre
• go to Preferences (press Cmd + ,)
• Plugins (bottom left)
• load plugin from file (bottom right)
• enter the unzipped directory you made earlier
• enter the one directory that has the phrase calibre in it
• select it.
• Confirm you really want this.

• Profit

• go back to Preferences
• adding books
• automatically adding (top left)
• set to ~/books or whatever you please
• make sure check for duplicates is checked

• More profit

• go to following directory (if you’re on a Mac, else google it)

$HOME/Library/Containers/com.amazon.Kindle/Data/Library/Application\ Support/Kindle/My\ Kindle\ Content/

Copy ebooks into your auto-add directory and they’ll be stripped of DRM automatically. Every time you want to strip the DRM for new books, just repeat this step.

mkdir -p "$HOME/books"
cp *.{azw,azw3,mobi} "$HOME/books"

• Profit.