How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM
54 comments
·October 16, 2025chmod775
leshenka
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
pmarreck
Followed the same path.
At least Steve Jobs understood how DRM should work.
emptybits
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."
harshreality
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apprenticealf's DeDRM repo, at the wiki link provided at the top of the repo's README, in the short section saying it's no longer maintained.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
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.
Uvix
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
Also Libation for Audible books.
wkat4242
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.
semiquaver
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.
AdmiralAsshat
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.
pixelmelt
I haven't gotten images working yet, they have some weird obfuscation applied to them as well
boldlybold
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
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
If you can live with lower quality image. Most people probably will be ok with that though.
BolexNOLA
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
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.
whatever1
Your intention doesn’t matter to the shareholders. Straight to jail.
jojobas
Yeah I hope his opsec is good.
boldlybold
This is a beautiful solution to a tedious problem that shouldn't exist in the first place! Great work.
Retr0id
This is a great write-up in terms of content but stylistically it reads like the output of an RLHF'd LLM
ethmarks
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.
layer8
My main peeve with rendering in the Kindle app is that formula-type content (often even minor stuff like x²) is rendered as images that (a) are very 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
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
They use an image in the Kindle version. I don’t know about other versions, but I assume the PDF version, if any, wouldn’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.
sointeresting
I bypassed it by buying a Kobo.
EA-3167
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.
bix6
Does Kobo work with the Libby app?
rufo
Even better than a Kindle - library browsing is built-in to the device.
bix6
O wow I love that! So tired of Jeff I think I’ll switch.
shortrounddev2
Yes, my wife uses it all the time
sointeresting
I believe so, haven't tried it myself.
surgical_fire
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.
brendang_sd
I always love a story of anger based (reverse)engineering.
javchz
Spite is an underated productivity tool.
WD-42
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.
Teknomadix
My new T-shirt
zdw
aka "Hate driven development"
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.