Anybody having luck removing DRMs?

Now that I’ve moved on to reading novels in Italian, I’d love to be able to read them in Lingq, but this has been a frustratingly hit and miss matter for me. For a while Epubor was working for me, but then I had some problems with it and when I went for help I discovered that the business was located in Wuhan and hasn’t been heard from in a while. I have never been able to get the Calibre method to work. Tips? Success stories?

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Yes, the old Calibre method stopped working, at least for me, a couple of years ago and I haven’t been able to find an alternative procedure. These days I combine my reading in Lingq (either normal lessons or texts without DRM, easy to find in Russian, e.g.) wiht Google play, for those languages for which free texts are scarce, in my case, mostly Indonesian/Malay. Google Play provides you with a built-in dictionary so it kind of works for reading, especially if supplemented with Google translator. It’s no Lingq, though

What kind of problems did you have with epubor? I am using it just fine to remove drm from google play books. I just make sure to open the ePub file with adobe digital editions, then open epubor and that file appears under “adobe”. I can then remove the drm and convert it to any type of file I want. I don’t know how it would work for other websites, like ibs, feltrinelli or mondadori. As far as I know, ibs ebooks are protected by adobe drm, so it’s technically the same as google play books.

There are articles out there about removing DRM from Kindle books, so I’d just google those words – it’s doable, but it’s a moving target, so it will depend on what version of OS and what version of Kindle and Calibre software you have. It’s also doable on Google Play books, but you do have to jump through some hoops in both cases.

I’m using a workaround that’s been in place since 2016, and I just stopped updating my Calibre and I have to keep an old alternate version of the Kindle software in a folder. I’m hoping this keeps working long enough for me to complete Advanced 2 in Spanish, then I can “graduate” to just reading on Kindle.

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Thank you all. My problem with Epubor is that I can sometimes make it work and sometimes not. I’ve read at least a 1000 pages in Italian (Elena Ferrante) so I can make it in Kindle with Google translate at my side. Then I save all the words I looked up and enter them into Lingq. The books I want to read aren’t out of copyright so there not free, and I’m happy to pay for it. I just want to be able to read it in Lingq and engage with those yellow words.

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I seldom find Calibre fails, but it’s necessary to keep updating the plug in for DRM to keep up with the changing standards.

As far as I know the best plug-in is DeDRM from Apprentice Alf, it’s open source here: GitHub - apprenticeharper/DeDRM_tools: DeDRM tools for ebooks

… but there is also a web site with information somewhere.

Note that the readme and how-to instructions are worth reading since there are tricks which work when simply loading the file normally will not (e.g., download a file from Amazon “for USB transfer” instead of directly into Kindle reader, or use an OLDER version of Adobe to avoid newer DRM methods.)

Perhaps it will make more sense if you know that these plugins frequently work by waiting for the official reader to decrypt the file rather than by decrypting the file directly on their on.

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The remove DRM plug on Calibre works pretty well on my PC. I work with books from KOBO, the name of the plug is OBOK. Another, more laborious way is to take pictures of the pages and let OCR do its work.

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Right, using LingQ as an assisted reader is far easier and quicker than using a secondary dictionary, even with good popups (on my phone & pad) like Linguee, Oxford, and Google Translate (app) or in some of my ebook readers.

Reading without LingQ is doable, even with paper books, but having the reader support is terrific benefit.

Also, note there are services on the Internet which will take a “dead tree book”, cut the spine for you, scan and OCR the entire thing. It’s not free, but it isn’t exhorbitant for the occasional important book.

I mostly used it for biographaphies of Mohammed that were only available in print and in Arabic.

Even Arabic OCR’d very nicely.

I can research the one I used (some years ago) if anyone needs it. The price was comparable the an expensive book itself. (Maybe $25 for a normal size book, I forget.) They will also return you “cut book” for an extra postage and handling fee but I never bothered.

It’s easy enough for me to find since my habit was to buy the books on Amazon and have them shipped directly to the OCR service. No extra shipping or delay.

Have you tried the Calibre method on recently purchased books? I don’t know of any way to get such books to import into Calibre successfully.

No, I haven’t tried it in some months, but yes, in the past year certainly.

Have you tried the various ideas suggested to solve problems and are you using DeDRM with the latest update?