HISTORICAL, SEE UPDATE LINK: Quick notes on how to de-DRM Kindle books on Windows 10.

The text below is obsolete. Instead, go to the 2021 edition!

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Here is how to de-DRM the books you damn well paid for. You can also convert them to ePubs if you like.

The Kindle software for PC doesn't work in WINE and I couldn't be bothered with the faff to set up DeDRM standalone, so I used arkady's old Windows 10 laptop that was sitting around spare.

You can install Windows 10 in a VM, e.g. VirtualBox! You don't need to authenticate it. Just download the ISO from Microsoft and authenticate at your leisure, or maybe never. I gave it 2GB RAM. Taylor Swift says set UAC to full.

WHAT YOU NEED:

• Kindle for PC
• Calibre
• DeDRM

STEPS TO SET THIS UP:

1. Rather than the old AZW format, Kindle now tries to download in its new KFX format by preference, so we have to nobble that — DeDRM has only just started on supporting it. Per this page, open a CMD window and run:

   ren %localappdata%\Amazon\Kindle\application\renderer-test.exe renderer-test.xxx

2. Open the DeDRM zip file. Inside that you will find a folder called "DeDRM_calibre_plugin" and inside that you will find a file called "DeDRM_plugin.zip". Get that second zip file (don't unzip it).

3. Open Calibre. Open "Preferences". Go to "Plugins". Click "Load plugin from file". Load the "DeDRM_plugin.zip" from the previous step. Close Calibre (so that it'll load the plugin next time it starts).

4. Open the Kindle app, log yourself in, download your books. (You need to log into the Kindle app to generate your DRM key that DeDRM then uses.)

   Go into Tools->Options->General and untick "Automatically install updates when they are available without asking me."

5. Open Calibre again, ready for the next step.

6. Open Windows Explorer. Under your username, you should have a folder "Documents\My Kindle Content". This should have several folders, each with an ebook in them. Go to the search box at top right, and search here for ".azw", which will conveniently list them all.

7. Select all the .azw files, and drag them to the Calibre window. This should load them all, readably.

8. If you want to convert to ePub: Select all the new books in Calibre. Right-click, select "Convert books->Bulk convert". Just use the defaults, you can do it again if you want to fiddle with stuff. If not: You can leave the de-DRMed books in .mobi or .azw format, as quite a lot of ebook readers are fine with these.

You now have a pile of .epub/.azw/.mobi files in various subfolders of "Documents\Calibre Library". You can search for ".epub" or whatever here if you want to select them all and drag them to some convenient place.

If you're on a Mac, try this page (and this one to fix the KFX problem). If you're on Linux, I don't know what to do while the Kindle app doesnt run in WINE.