You Can Remove DRM From Your Digital Books, but It's Probably Illegal

When Amazon stopped letting us download copies of our Kindle books last month, I began looking for ways to preserve e-books and audiobooks that I've paid for. Buying from Amazon really limits those options thanks to DRM (Digital Rights Management), which is designed to prevent piracy, but ends up having far bigger consequences on digital goods like e-books.

Eliminating DRM effectively removes Amazon's control over what you do with your e-books. If Amazon were to go DRM-free, you'd be able read Kindle e-books on any e-book reader or app that you like. Amazon wouldn't be able to easily track your reading habits and you'd be free to keep an offline backup of all of your purchased content. 

That's what makes the idea of bypassing DRM appealing to so many. Given the choice, I'd love to buy audiobooks on Audible and use apps such as Bound or Prologue to listen to them. I think these apps are superior audiobook players and are better at library management than Audible's apps. It'd also be a chance for me to escape Amazon's ability to track my listening habits. Sadly, those options don't exist today. 

What Amazon's terms of service allow you to do

Once you pay for an e-book on Amazon, it has been licensed, not sold to you, according to the company's terms of service. This gives the company a lot of leeway in deciding what you do with a purchased e-book. The terms of service explicitly forbid bypassing the DRM and reading it on devices or apps that Kindle doesn't officially support.

This isn't just an Amazon problem. Janet Vertesi, a sociology professor at Princeton University, told me via email that buying a book through big tech doesn't grant you ownership of your copy. "You are not in charge of how you access or read that [e-book]. It is like the difference between Spotify playlists and having a home music library. You pay money to own the [e-book], but because Amazon owns everything about the delivery pipeline and the Kindle necessary to read the purchase, you don't get to exert any choice."

Similarly, Audible classifies a sale as the purchase of a license, and goes on to say that you should download the audiobook immediately after purchasing, as the company cannot guarantee that content will be available to redownload in the future. To make matters worse, Amazon forbids you from bypassing DRM on the audiobook files.

"The more we buy into these closed garden ecosystems, the fewer choices we have…they can and do use this power to subdue alternatives, eliminate competition, and maintain monopoly, among other things," Vertesi told me. She runs Opt Out Project, a blog dedicated to helping people find alternatives to products and services made by big tech firms.

The legalities involved in bypassing DRM

Bypassing DRM is illegal in the US, thanks to the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), but it may be legal in other regions. The DMCA, among other things, makes it difficult to create a legal backup of the digital media you own. I reached out to Cory Doctorow, an author and vocal DRM critic, to learn more about this subject. 

In an email, he explained the complexities involved in understanding where the boundary lies here. "It isn't a copyright infringement to move a book from one device you own to another ([aka 'format shifting']). However, in 1998, the US Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which created a new kind of copyright—a copyright that protects DRM itself," Doctorow wrote. "Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, it's a felony (punishable by a [five]-year prison sentence and a [$500,000] fine) to give someone a "circumvention device" that defeats an "access control" for a copyrighted work. This law applies even if you don't violate copyright.

"Say I tell you that you have my permission to move a book I wrote (and am thus the copyright holder for) from your Kindle to another device. If the Kindle book has DRM, you're still not allowed to move it. The fact that I am the copyright holder has no impact on whether Amazon—a company that didn't create or invest in my book—can prevent you from moving that book outside of its walled garden...In fact, if I supply you with a tool to remove DRM (like some versions of Calibre), then I commit a felony and Amazon can have me sent to prison for five years for giving you a tool to move my book from the Kindle app to a rival app like Kobo," he wrote.

When you download a Kindle e-book, it's available in the AZW format, and audiobooks from Audible use the proprietary AAX format. If you download these to your computer, that is format shifting, but it may be illegal if you had to circumvent DRM to do it. Doctorow added, "that means that even though copyright law says you can format shift your books, music, videos, games, [etc.], DMCA 1201 (a "paracopyright law") makes this an imprisonable felony if you have to break DRM first."

The tools that let you bypass DRM

The Calibre app allows you to read and manage DRM-free e-books you've purchased. Credit: Pranay Parab

Calibre offers a way to take your e-books out of digital walled gardens. It lets you download purchased books off your Kindle, convert those to any format you like, and to read them on any app or device. For Audible, that tool is Libation, a free and open-source app that backs up your audiobook library. 

I contacted Robert McRackan, the developer of Libation, to understand how the app works, and why it was developed. McRackan wrote, "…what apps like Libation do is a service to the community that I believe in. It's also in [direct] contradiction to Audible's terms of service…" Free tools like these continue to work only because the developers are able to dedicate time to keeping them up-to-date, and because Amazon hasn't decided to go after them. If that changes, it could be game over for these apps. 

I can't offer guidance on downloading these apps and using them to remove DRM for your e-books. But they do exist, and, as of this article, they appear to work.

There's a world beyond Amazon for digital books

If you're truly interested in owning your digital media, you should consider looking beyond Amazon for digital book purchases. There are many alternatives to the Kindle store and to Audible, and some of them offer DRM-free e-books and audiobooks. When I asked Vertesi and Doctorow about DRM-free storefronts for books, they pointed me to Bookshop.org (which has DRM-free options for e-books), Tor Books (which is entirely DRM-free) and Libro.fm (for DRM-free audiobooks).

While Libro.fm is totally DRM-free and has a collection that's good enough to rival that of Audible, the picture outside of Amazon isn't always rosy. Doctorow wrote, "Even great [e-book] stores like Bookshop.org are pressured by the big publishers to put DRM on most of the books they sell." Similarly, Audible is known to push authors into signing deals that offer better royalties if they keep their audiobooks exclusive to the service.

In case your favorite book is a part of such a deal, your only choice is either buy it through Audible, or try to purchase a DRM-free e-book and use text-to-speech tools to have an AI-generated voice read it to you. This is a hacky way to convert any book into an audiobook, and it doesn't come anywhere close to the skills of a great narrator, but it's a DRM-free option. If your favorite e-book is an Amazon exclusive, you can get it via your local library. Of course, you could always buy it physically: Paper is DRM-free, after all.  

However, without changing the DMCA, we can't expect to see real, lasting change in this space. Doctorow said as much to me: "What we really need to do is get rid of DMCA 1201, that law that makes it a crime to format shift your media...it's the same law that stops farmers from fixing their tractors, blocks independent mechanics from fixing your car, stops rivals from setting up alternative app stores for phones and games consoles...this law is a menace!"