{ "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1", "title": "drm on Honeypot.net", "icon": "https://www.gravatar.com/avatar/d0e26881a0f918e9d92c7f32c2e3aa9a?s=96&d=https%3A%2F%2Fmicro.blog%2Fimages%2Fblank_avatar.png", "home_page_url": "https://honeypot.net/", "feed_url": "https://honeypot.net/feed.json", "items": [ { "id": "http://kirk.micro.blog/2026/08/22/we-dont-need-no-stinking.html", "content_html": "

We don’t need no stinking DRM

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I found a book in Amazon Kindle format that I wanted to read. I couldn’t find it anywhere else, and I had some Amazon credits, so I bought it. The problem is, I don’t have a Kindle and don’t want one. I knew that Calibre has plugins to repair DRM-infected Kindle files but found that Amazon made changes to their apps last month that ruined that method. There’s a commercial DRM disinfectant for Macs that I downloaded to test, but it asked for some wild permissions and wanted me to disable SIP. LOL, no. Finally, I took to sailing the seas looking for a usable EPUB, figuring that I already bought a copy and of course it’s morally OK to seek someone else’s assistance in format-shifting my purchase to one I could use. This particular book — I learned of it from the back of a 2600 Magazine — was niche enough that it wasn’t even available that way.

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I am not easily dissuaded.

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First, I looked up the specs of my Kobo Libra 2 reader. Its screen is 1264x1680 at 300 DPI.

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Next, I downloaded the Kindle app for my Mac. I opened the book I had just bought and adjusted the window size until the rectangle of text displayed on my screen was slightly smaller than the Kobo’s screen.

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Then I wrote a Keyboard Maestro macro to take a screenshot, save it to an incrementally numbered PNG file, turn the page, wait one second for the page-turning animations to finish, and then repeat the process a few hundred times.

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Now that I had screenshots of each page, I used ImageMagick to crop the Kindle app’s window decoration off them, with a script running command lines like:

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$ magick kindle-001.png \\\n    -crop 1248x1597+342+182 +repage \\\n    -background white \\\n    -gravity center \\\n    -extent 1264x1680 \\\n    prepared/page-001.png\n

Finally, I combined them all into a single PDF with a command like:

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$ img2pdf --imgsize 300dpi prepared/page-* --output mybook.pdf\n

…and tagged it appropriately with:

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$ exiftool \\\n    -Title="My Book" \\\n    -Author="Jane Smith" \\\n    mybook.pdf\n

The resulting book looks good with crisp text. Although it’s a bunch of screenshots bundled together, it’s still only about 40MB in size and that’s tolerable here.

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It would be nicer to have the book as a native EPUB. Since that wasn’t an option, my stubborness won and I made my own version.

\n", "date_published": "2026-08-22T10:12:56-07:00", "url": "https://honeypot.net/2026/08/22/we-dont-need-no-stinking.html", "tags": ["reading","geek","drm"] } ] }