One step behind
In the thread below, Uncle Al asked if I had a solution for Amazon books (specifically their ability to delete items already in your collection). The answer WAS yes – a program called BookFab (you may remember DVDFab, from the same company).
Six weeks ago, when you downloaded a file, it went into a specific directory, usually \Documents\My Kindle Content. If you downloaded the app with BookFab running, it would find the book and convert it to a DRM-free pdf. This was important to me because, as I mentioned before, my favorite Kindle reader is a reMarkable tablet and it won’t read native Kindle format.
BookFab gave you three goes and then made you pay. I immediately paid and downloaded all the titles I wanted to store locally.
Last Fall, with firmware revision 5.18.5, Amazon tightened its DRM on Kindle devices and eliminated the Download & Transfer via USB option. It closed most common workarounds for backing up books outside the Kindle ecosystem.
A couple of months ago, the Kindle for PC icon turned gray and renamed itself Kindle Legacy. That began the countdown. Eventually, they killed it and replaced it with a new Kindle app that can only be downloaded from the App Store and uses much stricter DRM.
Bastards.
So far, nobody’s broken it. But our friends at DVDFab are Chinese – meaning clever and they don’t give a fuck about American IP. I have faith.
I notice on their discussion forum, they released a new version today, but comments are closed. I read the release notes and it doesn’t mention Kindle, but I suspect they’re actively working on it.
p.s. While I was writing this, I clicked the Kindle Legacy icon to see what would happen. Nothing. For about ten minutes. To my surprise, it’s just loaded and shows books I bought recently. I don’t suppose it works as before, but I’m surprised it works at all. And it cheerfully informs me “Announcing the new Kindle app! Switch to the new Kindle app today, featuring drag-and-drop import, drag to multi-select, and app-wide dark mode.”
It’s a trap!
August 4, 2026 — 5:26 pm
Comments: 2
Robot school
The robot is teaching me how to edit Epub files.
The thing that surprised me most when I first learned about EPUBs is that they are not really a document format at all. They’re more like a miniature website zipped into a single file.
The thing that surprised me. ChatGPT is such a card! Anyhoo, it’s right – an Epub file is a bunch of xhtml and css and image and media files all zipped together – literally! If you rename a book.epub file into book.zip, you can open it and poke around in it.
I may have mentioned it before. What I didn’t know before is that the best way to edit them is using an open source tool called Sigil (pictured above). It makes it really easy to see the structure of the file and edit the various components directly.
Why was I doing this? I have downloaded a series of Victorian books which are behaving badly on my preferred Kindle reader (which is, for the record, a Remarkable tablet).
(Oh, who am I kidding? I just like to dissect files and Frankenstein them).
August 3, 2026 — 6:57 pm
Comments: 5