[drop_cap]A[/drop_cap]dobe isn’t exactly a beloved company these days. People begrudgingly use their stuff, because the Creative Suite is an industry standard (read: monopoly) or there are simply no worthwhile alternatives, not because anyone is genuinely excited about these tools. I’m happy to report that I (mostly) make do without Adobeware these days (shoutout to Photopea), […]
Something i have been foing for years in calibre is saving the de-drm version of all ebooks that i bought. And getting the txt version of the files.
The ebook format is basically a subset of html if you ever look into it. And as time goes on ebook readers have different ways to show these books. Most of the time, its great! Sometimes its not. Give it another 50 years and we will see what works and what doesnt. But i garentee at least the txt files will still work.
I didnt know what authors and publishers go though. Thanks for that lemmydividebyzero
Conversion from epub to txt is a highly lossy process, there’s a lot of formatting that gets thrown away.
Regardless of how individual ebook readers may display epubs a little differently, epub is an open format so I would recommend keeping it in that form at least for archival purposes.
Calibre let’s you save multiple versions of files. As long as they don’t go out of their way to delete the epub version, you can have as many formats of the same book as you want, grouped under the same item.
Yep. Thats what i do.
Does DeDRM still work? The last time I tried under Linux I was unable to get it to run. If I remember correctly, ADE was the culprit.
I’ve used libgourou successfully many times in the past year to remove DRM using my ADE key.
I angrily started doing this for every book I buy after changing reading device to a newer Kobo, and discovering that all the download links for .acsm files that my book store provides will expire after two years. I.e. after those two years it’s impossible to move them to a new device unless I remove DRM.
How do you get your ADE key?
Create an account with ADE then activate using
adept_activate -u "your.adobe.id@email.com" --output-dir ~/.adeptIIUC this eats up an activation (I think they allow at most five) so back up the contents of that directory. You should be able to bring it with you to other computers.
I banged my head on this four many hours and couldn’t get it to work directly in Linux. The key issue seemed to be that ADE and Kobo had to be installed on the same device, so I’ve resorted to using a Windows VM (VirtualBox). It works fine enough.
libgourou has no need for anything that has to do with Kobo. It’s really only three cli commands: activate (once), download acsm, de-drm. It produces an unencrypted .epub that you can open as is or copy to your Kobo device with any ordinary file operation.
It works for non amazon books at least last i tried. Works on library books…but that feels wierd. I have enough money to buy books now, so sometimes i just op for the real thing.
I have had luck reaching out to authors in the past. One even recommended yoho so that was funny.