Backing Up Your Kindle Ebooks
Fuck you amazon.

What with amazon planning to remove the ability to download the books you’ve purchased, now is probably a good time to download them all to back them up.

As far as I know, everything in this process is perfectly legal. All this is doing is letting you use the books you’ve already purchased via amazon on non-kindle ebook readers.

I’m assuming you have access to an actual kindle eink device for these instructions. If you don’t have a physical kindle device I think there’s a workaround using an old version of the kindle for PC software.

Most of this information is just an expanded version of what’s in the DeDRM readme and other online guides I used the first time I went through this setup process.

Part 1: Downloading Them

You can go to: https://www.amazon.com/hz/mycd/digital-console/contentlist/booksAll/dateDsc/

And on each book click, “more options” then “Download & transfer via USB” however this is a huge pain the ass to do for more than a few at a time.

Instead we’re going to use this helpful script someone made: https://github.com/treetrum/amazon-kindle-bulk-downloader

I am going to include instructions for windows because I assume if you’re on linux you can figure it out yourself.

  1. Go the that URL and click the “<> Code” dropdown then click “Download ZIP”.

  2. Unzip that file somewhere.

  3. Open a command prompt (Start -> type “terminal” or “cmd”)

  4. Past the following into the command prompt and hit enter:

     powershell -c "irm bun.sh/install.ps1|iex"

    This installs “bun” which is a toolkit for JavaScript apparently.

  5. After in installs, open the folder you unzipped things into, and click, “File -> Open Windows Power Shell” in the upper left corner.

  6. Type, “bun install” and hit enter. This will install all the dependencies the script wants.

  7. Once that’s done, type:

     bun run start --manualAuth true --baseUrl "https://www.amazon.com"

    And then hit enter.

  8. A window will pop up, log into amazon in that window. Once you have, come back to the powershell terminal and hit enter.

  9. All your stuff should now download. You should now have a bunch of azw files in the /downloads/ subfolder.

Part 2: Turning AZW into EPUB

AZW files can mostly only be opened by actual kindles. Also currently those files can only be opened by one specific kindle device, I think.

To fix those problems, we’re going to use Calibre.

  1. Download and install Calibre: https://calibre-ebook.com/download_windows

  2. We now need to install two different plugins for Calibre. One to open some of the Amazon specific file formats, and one to remove the DRM attached to the kindle files.

  3. At the top of Calibre click the dropdown on the Preference button (the icon is crossed screwdriver & wrench) and select “Get plugins to enhance calibre”

  4. In the Filter By Name box on the right, enter “KFX”

  5. Select KFX Input and click Install

  6. After installing, restart Calibre.

  7. Go to this link: https://github.com/noDRM/DeDRM_tools/releases/tag/v10.0.9

  8. Click and download “DeDRM_tools_10.0.9.zip”

  9. Extract the zip file somewhere helpful

  10. Click “Preferences” (the button, not the drop down), select “Plugins” at the bottom, select “Load Plugin From File”, navigate to wherever you extracted things in the prior step, select “DeDRM_plugin.zip” and click open.

  11. Click “yes”, then restart calibre.

  12. Go back to “Preferences>Plugins”. Check the “Show only user install plugins” at the top, and the expand “File type” to see “DeDRM”.

  13. Click on DeDRM, then click “Customize Plugin” near the bottom.

  14. Get your kindle eink’s serial number. On amazon.com go to “Account & Lists” then “Digital Services and Device Support” then “Manage Content & Devices”, then “Devices” at the top, then click Kindle, and click on the eink kindle in the popup. On that page you should see a Serial Number. Copy that number.

    (You can also get this number directly from the actual kindle device by going to Settings > Device Options > Device Info.)

  15. Click “Kindle eink ebooks” and then enter your physical kindle’s serial number.

If all has gone according to plan, you can now drag all those downloaded files into Calibre, and it will automatically remove the DRM as they’re imported. They’ll still be azw files, but without DRM you can now convert them (probably to EPUB) to use with whatever devices you want.

If you want to do them all at once, hit CTRL-A and then click the dropdown next to Conver books and select “bulk convert”. Output format in the upper right corner should be “EPUB” (probably) and all the default settings are probably okay. The main one to change is under “Page setup” and “Output profile” selecting the ereader device you plan to use will probably help. Selecting “Kindle” under “Input profile” is also probably helpful, but to be honest I haven’t really mucked around with these settings much.

Doing a bulk convert of your books, if you have a lot of books, will probably take a while.

*****

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