I’ve been using the Kindle ebook reader for over a decade now, and I’ve accumulated quite a big digital library from Amazon. However, now I’d like to move away to another ebook reader, preferably Kobo, but I don’t want to leave my Kindle ebooks behind. I’d like to bring them with me.
Does anyone have any advices or tools that they can recommend that will allow me to move my Kindle ebooks over to Kobo or some other ebook reader (e.g. Nook)?
P.S. Sorry if this post has nothing to do with this community. Out of all the communities I follow, this one seemed to be the most appropriate for such a question.
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I think (but I have not tested) that if you can use the DeDRM plugins to import your books into Calibre… You might be able to use Calibre’s conversion function to make them all ePubs (which are Kobo friendly). I don’t have a Kindle but I do use a Kobo and have had to run DeDRM and some conversions to make books compatible.
Good luck!
I wrote a short guide on this method recently: https://lemmy.ml/comment/6708735
This works for me. So long as you have a Kindle device registered on Amazon, you should be able to download directly to a desktop. The DeDRM plugin mentioned removes the DRM during ingestion into Calibre and requires an actual token from Amazon which is linked to the Kindle device you downloaded from.
I use this to get Amazon eBooks into my Remarkable 2 which requires DRM free.
It’s worth noting that you don’t even need to still have the Kindle device physically with you. I had to throw mine out (I still had the original first ever model), but it’s still registered and the token is valid for Calibre’s DeDRM.
Yeah, +1 for Calibre amd DeDrm, recently I needed to jump through some more hoops since Amazon stopped delivering to that old Kindle Desktop version for PC and needed to use the Android version but generally works pretty well. I’m also surpised how many of the books I read actually don’t have DRM at all but that is obviously down to my obscure taste (mostly indie SFF).
If all else fails I just buy the book with DRM and then pirate it from the high seas, no harm done (except for the harm supporting big platforms like Amazon does 🤷♀️).
Personally I just abandoned my Kindle library when I bought a Nook. That’s not particularly helpful, of course, but it’s what I did as part of kicking Amazon out of my life entirely. I started buying my books from non-DRM sources.
I will say this: you may have paid for “licenses” for those books, but you don’t actually own them. Amazon can rip away your access to them at any time. Were it me, I’d simply pirate DRM-free copies of the same books. Though if you can successfully strip off the DRM and convert them to open-source formats, that’s just as good and carries less risk. Every time I’ve converted ebook formats with Calibre it’s done weird stuff to the text: letters incorrectly interpreted, missing punctuation, page breaks in odd places, and enough of them to be annoying. Something to consider. Maybe that kind of thing can be corrected but I haven’t yet figured out how.
