Improving Pixelmelt's Kindle Web Deobfuscator
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
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The post discusses improvements to PixelMelt's Kindle Web Deobfuscator, a tool to bypass DRM on Kindle ebooks, sparking debate on DRM, copyright, and the legality of such tools.
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Oct 19, 2025 at 8:11 AM EDT
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Anyone have any advice on how to bypass Kobo DRM? I can only buy ebooks without DRM (typically through ebooks.com) for my kindle running Koreader so this would be amazing.
Basically, install Calibre, install the correct plugin, give it your Adobe ID, done. You can load a purchased .ascm file into Calibre and the plugin will download and decrypt the ePub.
The original blog post[0] doesn't share a link to a full codebase that I can see, and I can't find anything with a quick google. (Although it may have been removed subsequently?)
I assume code snippets in a blog post, and/or a repository without an explicit license, are covered by copyright, hence the caution; can anyone advise when/how it would be reasonable to take someone's concept, rework the code (as appears to have been done here) and then reshare?
[0] https://blog.pixelmelt.dev/kindle-web-drm/
Normally, I'd be comfortable sharing snippets under the UK's copyright "Fair Dealing" exemption - but my changes are so tightly integrated into the original code that it doesn't seem right.
Additionally, as I say, my changes are fairly trivial. Read a JSON file, scale an image, stitch it together. It's the sort of thing you can throw together in an afternoon.
As for how much you need to change for it to be reasonable to share, it does rather become a "Ship of Theseus" problem. You'll need to be guided by your own ethics and the laws of your country.
Given you're in the UK, Ship of Theseus ≃ Trigger's Broom :)