You Can Remove DRM From Your Digital Books, but It’s Probably Illegal
When Amazon stopped allowing us to download copies of our Kindle books last month , I started looking for ways to keep the ebooks and audiobooks I paid for. Buying on Amazon does limit these options thanks to DRM (Digital Rights Management), which is intended to prevent piracy but ultimately has much more serious consequences for digital goods such as e-books.
Removing DRM effectively takes away Amazon’s control over what you do with your e-books. If Amazon dropped DRM, you could read Kindle eBooks in any eBook reader or app you like. Amazon won’t be able to easily track your reading habits, and you’ll be able to keep an offline backup of all the content you purchase.
This is what makes the idea of bypassing DRM attractive to many. If I had a choice, I would happily buy audiobooks on Audible and use apps like Bound or Prologue to listen to them. I think these apps are better audiobook players and have better library management than the Audible apps. It would also be a chance for me to avoid Amazon’s ability to track my listening habits. Unfortunately, such opportunities do not exist today.
What Amazon’s Terms of Service Allow You
Once you pay for an ebook on Amazon, it is licensed, not sold, to you, according to the company’s terms of service . This gives the company more flexibility in deciding what you do with the e-book you purchase. The terms of service specifically prohibit bypassing DRM and reading it on devices or apps that Kindle doesn’t officially support.
This isn’t just an Amazon problem . Janet Vertesi, a professor of sociology at Princeton University, told me via email that buying a book through Big Tech does not give you ownership of your copy. “You are not responsible for how you access or read this [ebook]. It’s similar to the difference between Spotify playlists and a home music library. You pay money to own [the e-reader], but since Amazon owns everything from the delivery pipeline to the Kindle needed to read the purchase, you have no choice.”
Likewise, Audible classifies the sale as a license purchase and further says that the audiobook should be downloaded immediately after purchase as the company cannot guarantee that the content will be available for re-download in the future. To make matters worse, Amazon prevents you from bypassing DRM on audiobook files.
“The more we buy into these closed garden ecosystems, the less choice we have… they can and do use that power to subjugate alternatives, eliminate competition, and maintain a monopoly, among other things,” Vertesi told me. She runs the Opt Out Project , a blog dedicated to helping people find alternatives to products and services produced by big tech firms.
Legality of DRM Bypass
Bypassing DRM is illegal in the US thanks to the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), but may be legal in other regions . The DMCA, among other things, makes it difficult to create a legal backup of your digital media. I reached out to Cory Doctorow , author and vocal critic of DRM, to learn more about this topic.
In an email, he explained the challenges of understanding where the border lies here. “Transferring a book from one of your devices to another ([called “format shifting”]) is not copyright infringement. However, in 1998, the U.S. Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which created a new type of copyright—copyright, which is protected by DRM itself,” Doctorow wrote. “Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, providing anyone with a “circumvention device” that violates the “access controls” of a copyrighted work is a felony (punishable by five years in prison and a $500,000 fine). This law applies even if you are not infringing copyright.
“Say I tell you that you have my permission to move a book that I wrote (and therefore am the copyright holder of) from your Kindle to another device. If a Kindle book has DRM, you are still not allowed to move it. The fact that I am the copyright owner does not affect whether Amazon – a company that did not create or invest in my book – can prevent you from moving that book outside of your walled garden… In fact, if I provide you with a tool to remove DRM (like some versions of Caliber), then I will be committing a criminal offense and Amazon could send me to prison for five years for giving you a tool to move my book from a Kindle app to a competing app. like Kobo,” he wrote.
When you download a Kindle e-book, it is available in the AZW format, while audiobooks from Audible use the proprietary AAX format. If you download them to your computer, it will be a format change, but it may be illegal if you have to bypass DRM to do so. Doctorow added: “This means that while copyright law says you can change the format of your books, music, videos, games, etc., DMCA 1201 (the ‘para-copyright act’) makes it a felony, punishable by jail time, if you have to violate the DRM first.”
Tools to Bypass DRM
Caliber offers a way to take your e-readers out of your digital gardens. It lets you download purchased books from your Kindle, convert them to any format, and read them in any app or device. For Audible, that tool is Libation , a free, open-source app that backs up your audiobook library.
I contacted Robert Macracan, the developer of Libation, to understand how the app works and why it was developed. McCrackan wrote: “…what apps like Libation do is a service to the community that I believe in. It is also [directly] against Audible’s terms of service…” Free tools like this only continue to work because developers can dedicate the time to keeping them up to date, and because Amazon hasn’t chosen to follow them. If the situation changes, it could be game over for these apps.
I can’t make recommendations for downloading these apps and using them to remove DRM for your eBooks. But they do exist, and as of this writing they appear to be working.
There’s a world beyond Amazon for digital books
If you’re truly interested in owning your digital media, you should consider purchasing digital books outside of Amazon. There are many alternatives to the Kindle and Audible stores, and some of them offer DRM-free eBooks and audiobooks. When I asked Vertesi and Doctorow about DRM-free bookstores, they pointed me to Bookshop.org (which has DRM-free options for e-books), Tor Books (which is completely DRM-free), and Libro.fm (for DRM-free audiobooks).
While Libro.fm is completely DRM-free and has a collection good enough to rival Audible’s, the picture outside of Amazon isn’t always rosy. Doctorow wrote: “Even large [ebook] stores like Bookshop.org are under pressure from major publishers to put DRM on most of the books they sell.” Likewise, Audible has been known to push authors to sign deals that offer higher royalties if they keep their audiobooks exclusive to the service.
If your favorite book is part of such a deal, your only choice is to either buy it through Audible or try to buy a DRM-free e-book and use text-to-speech tools to have an AI-generated voice read it to you. This is a clever way to convert any book into an audiobook, and it doesn’t even come close to the skills of a great storyteller, but it is a DRM-free option. If your favorite e-book is an Amazon exclusive, you can get it from your local library . Of course, you can always buy it physically: paper is not DRM protected, after all.
However, without changing the DMCA, we cannot expect real and lasting change in this area. Doctorow told me the same thing: “What we really need to do is get rid of DMCA 1201, the law that makes it a crime to change the format of your media… this is the same law that prevents farmers from repairing their tractors , prohibits independent mechanics from repairing your cars , prevents competitors from creating alternative app stores for phones and game consoles… this law is a threat!”