Amazon makes spending money easy…perhaps too easy, and before you know it you’ve spent hundreds to thousands of dollars buying books, music and videos on demand. However, all of this content is locked in the Amazon system, so even though you bought it, in reality Amazon owns it and they dictate if / when you get access. Besides the obvious privacy issues, this isn’t such a bad thing per say, until either A) you lose Internet and access to all your content, or B) Amazon decides you did something wrong and shuts your account down. I’ve seen it happen, and there isn’t much you can do about it. So, it might not be a bad idea to take the time to rip your digital content from Amazon’s cold hard grasp. It’s not that hard to do.
Audible (easy):
- Download OpenAudio
- Go into your Audible through the browser > Library > Download
- Open OpenAudio > Import > choose book you downloaded in step 2
- Actions > Convert to mp3
Kindle (windows instructions – involved):
- Download and install calibre
- Download DeDRM Plugin
- Open calibre’s Preferences dialog. Click on the “Plugins” button. Next, click on the button, “Load plugin from file”. Navigate to the unzipped DeDRM_tools folder and, in the folder “DeDRM_calibre_plugin”, find the file “DeDRM_plugin.zip”. Click to select the file and select “Open”. Click “Yes” in the “Are you sure?” dialog box. Click the “OK” button in the “Success” dialog box.
- Install kindleforpc…1.17 (if you have a newer version installed, uninstall it and remove all downloaded books…calibre cannot break encryption after 1.17 so you’ll need to start from scratch).
- Log into the kindle app to activate
- Go to Tools > Options and disable Automatic Updates
- Download a book
- Open Calibre and select Add books
- Browse to kindlw d/l directory and choose a book
- Convert Books
- Choose your format, like EPUB or PDF
Easy peasy lemon squeezy.
