Ebook Adobe DRM Removal

Warning

Removing DRM from purchased content often violates the terms of use, and may violate the law.

Additionally, circumventing DRM for the purpose of sharing the content on peer-to-peer sites is absolutely against the law and morally bad.

This guide is strictly about removing DRM for personal use and enjoyment of products you've legally purchased.

Support the authors; pay for books.

If you haven't already made a significant investment in ebooks, then I highly recommend going the lengthier route of purchasing from sites like Ebooks.com (not sponsored) because they actually sell you the book you paid for, unlike Amazon, which sells you a license to access the book, which can be revoked at any time.

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Tor Publishing Group offers many (if not all) of their books DRM free, as noted on the purchasing page, and that's pretty awesome in my opinion.

Removing Adobe DRM

This is a simple tool to remove DRM from ebooks you've purchased, using the Calibre ereader for desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, and Linux).

GitHub - noDRM/DeDRM tools for ebooks

Installation is simple:

  1. Unzip the latest release main folder
    1. Don't unzip the two contained plugins
  2. Load the plugins into Calibre
    1. Open Calibre, select Preferences, and click "Plugins"
    2. Select "Load custom plugin from file", then navigate to the DeDRM folder and select the plugin
      1. You will have to load them one at a time
      2. Loading each one will require Calibre to restart
        1. Load one, say that you will restart later, then load the other, and restart Calibre.
  3. Get the book into Adobe Digital Editions (ADE)
    1. Sign in with your account
    2. Import the book link files into Adobe Digital Editions
      1. You cannot do this automatically, which sucks
      2. You cannot install ADE on Linux,[1] which sucks
  4. Import the books into Calibre
    1. Right-click a book in ADE and select "Show in File Explorer" (or similar)
    2. Drag the book files into Calibre
    3. The books should now be decrypted!
  5. Problems? RTFM

Removing Amazon DRM

Amazon has more of a vested interest in maintaining their walled garden; they lock authors into exclusivity deals with Kindle Unlimited, sell their Kindles at a loss to lock you in, and absolutely need you to invest in their ecosystem. They are sold at cut-throat prices to make it stupid to buy you ebooks anywhere else. And once you're on Kindle, it's just straight-up difficult to load non-Kindle content onto them.

Anyway, removing DRM from Kindle eBooks gets more and more difficult over time. When I last did this, you needed to download an old version of Kindle for PC, and then could use the DeDRM plugin with Calibre to strip the DRM. Search Reddit[2] and MobileRead[3] for the latest working approaches.

  1. You could maybe do it with Wine I guess, I'm just worried that it might flag my account and restrict access to everything I've bought. Fuck DRM. ↩︎

  2. 2024 Guide to DeDRM Kindle books. : r/Calibre ↩︎

  3. Dealing with Kindle ebooks in calibre - MobileRead Forums ↩︎