How I Reversed Amazon's Kindle Web Obfuscation Because Their App Sucked (blog.pixelmelt.dev)
from vividspecter@aussie.zone to technology@lemmy.world on 17 Oct 05:54
https://aussie.zone/post/25780898

#technology

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anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz on 17 Oct 06:02 next collapse

That was an interesting read.

If you wanna own your audiobooks you might wanna check out libro.fm - they allow you to download the bought audiobook without drm.
I gladly accept tips for similar sites when it comes to buying ebooks.

felsiq@piefed.zip on 17 Oct 06:23 next collapse

Kobo does drm-free ebooks when the publisher allows it, so it’s on a case-by-case basis but I have got a lot of them drm free

Ghoelian@piefed.social on 17 Oct 07:12 next collapse

Not the most ethical, but kobo is also very easily de-drm’d with calibre.

Actually no this is not even unethical, I did actually pay for those books.

anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz on 17 Oct 11:43 collapse

22 out of 22 books i checked at Kobo had Adobe DRM. :(

radieschen@slrpnk.net on 17 Oct 10:54 collapse

In case you already got some books from Audible, there’s Libation.

anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz on 17 Oct 12:11 collapse

I’ve never used it, but bookmarked the github. Cheers. :)

hummingbird@lemmy.world on 17 Oct 06:20 next collapse

I bought my first ebook from amazon

Just don’t do that. If you give money to this company, they’ll continue to go down the path they’re on. Enshitification.

plm00@lemmy.ml on 17 Oct 06:43 next collapse

That’s doable until you need a book that’s an Amazon exclusive.

HejMedDig@feddit.dk on 17 Oct 06:56 next collapse

Torrent, PayPal author

waldo_was_here@piefed.social on 17 Oct 09:21 collapse

Anna’s archive is the answer for you

The_v@lemmy.world on 17 Oct 14:56 collapse

I have “purchased” thousands of books from Amazon, but never given them money for a book.

They run free specials all the time. FreeReadFeed scans for them. It’s a great way to discover authors to purchase their books at another site or use the library apps.

jherazob@fedia.io on 17 Oct 10:31 next collapse

Spite: The greatest motivator!

Boozilla@lemmy.world on 17 Oct 11:57 next collapse

That was a fun and interesting read.

When we buy an ebook, they are selling us a “license” to use it on their terms. We technically don’t own the book. Which is horseshit. Kudos to Pixelmelt for oursmarting their obfuscation techniques.

I use Kobo and Calibre because A-Z sucks so bad. And if an ebook is exclusive to A-Z, I’ll just never read it. Fortunately 99.9% of the ebooks I’ve wanted are on Kobo.

Boozilla@lemmy.world on 17 Oct 12:24 next collapse

This is a good look under the hood on why so much mainstream software actively sucks these days. They put so many fucking resources into dark capitalist shit, and zero into making it a good user experience.

Nima@leminal.space on 17 Oct 14:12 next collapse

that was such a great read no joke. I love it when people use spite as a motivator.

Cocodapuf@lemmy.world on 18 Oct 13:34 collapse

That was a good read. I did think it was interesting that he decided to solve the randomized alphabet problem with the complex character recognition and image matching system he used. I mean, that was very clever and it clearly worked, so great! But an alternate option would have been the cryptographic method. There’s a lot of software designed to crack replacement cyphers (especially in English) it probably would have been trivial to drop those characters into one of these and have it spit out the results.

Admittedly it would likely struggle with the other three alphabets, the italic, heading and italic heading alphabets, where there may not be enough words to be certain about success.