Just some Punq

The Kindle is a wonderful reading device, with just a couple of small problems:

1. The copy protection (DRM) on Amazon’s books means that you’re tied forever to the Kindle, and if Amazon ever gets out of the eBook business — or stops selling the Kindle — you could lose all your books when your Kindle eventually wears out.
2. Though the Kindle supports free books from places like Gutenberg and Feedbooks, it can be somewhat annoying to manage a large collection of those books.

The solution to both, it turns out, is the wonderful eBook library manager known as Calibre.

Managing your eBook library

Calibre makes managing your eBook library easy. You can have a large library of books and easily transfer them between your computer and Kindle. This means it’s simple to have only the books you want to carry with you on your Kindle, which makes it a much more useful reading device.

Calibre works on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X — download your copy of Calibre.

Once Calibre is installed and running, simply plug in your Kindle using the USB cable that Amazon supplied for that purpose. Give Calibre a minute or two to realize that there’s a Kindle attached, and walk you through the first-time connection process.

After this, you’ll want to visit the preferences dialog, and choose the behavior section. Make sure that your preferred eBook format is set to MOBI, since Mobipocket is the underlying Amazon Kindle format.

You can now add books you’ve downloaded from free eBook providers to your Calibre library, and send them to your Kindle simply by clicking Send to Device. If you download a book that’s not already in MOBI format, you can right-click the book in your library, select Convert, and choose to make a MOBI-formatted book. This works great with HTML and ePub files… but it’s hit or miss with PDFs (depending on how much care the PDF authoring software took to preserve reasonable text flow).

You can also select your Kindle from the toolbar to see what books it has, and delete what you’re not reading, or transfer your Amazon-purchased books into your library. The Amazon-purchased books will still be protected by DRM, so they’ll only work on the Kindle you copied them from… unless you read the next section!

Removing DRM from Amazon eBooks

CAUTION: following the advice in this section may be illegal in your jurisdiction. I am not an attorney, so I cannot counsel you on this matter. Make sure you know the law before proceeding.

Amazon’s Digital Rights Management (DRM) scheme is designed to make it a little harder to easily share copies of eBooks you’ve purchased with others. This is, on its face, quite reasonable — and as long as you own a Kindle and Amazon continues to provide the ability to register Kindles and re-download the books you’ve purchased, it works reasonably well.

Unfortunately, as long as the books you’ve purchased from Amazon have DRM, you can’t decide to ditch the Kindle and buy another eBook reader — you’d lose the ability to read all your books. And, if Amazon ever shuts down the Kindle service, like Wal-Mart did with their digital music store, you’d better hope your Kindle never gets lost or broken. Once Amazon no longer provides the service, you no longer have a reasonable backup of your books.

If you want to fix this problem, there is a collection of plugins for Calibre that can help you out. Download the deDRM tools from the link provided here.

Open the ZIP file you’ve downloaded, and unpack it into a folder you can find again. Open Calibre, visit the preferences, and select Plugins. Use the Add a new plugin button to add each Calibre plugin (they are ZIP files themselves) from the Calibre_plugins directory that was inside the tools ZIP file. (Note that the tools ZIP contains a lot more than the Calibre plugins; you can ignore the other stuff.)

Once all the plugins are added, you need to configure one of them. Still in the Plugins window, expand the File type plugins category, and find the K4PC, K4Mac, Kindle Mobi and Topaz DeDRM plugin. Double-click to configure. A window will pop up prompting you for your Kindle serial number (it’s on the back, and available in your Kindle settings on the Kindle device). If you have more than one, put commas between them.

Save settings and restart Calibre.

Now, when you attach your Kindle to Calibre, you can click the Kindle icon on Calibre’s toolbar, select an eBook you bought from Amazon, right-click, and select Add to library. Calibre will automatically convert the book to a DRM-free MOBI file and add it to your library. Should you ever need to buy a different reader, you now have a MOBI file that can either be read directly by your new device, or easily converted to another popular format.