We don’t need no stinking DRM

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.

I am not easily dissuaded.

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

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.

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.

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:

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

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

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

…and tagged it appropriately with:

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

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.

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.

I’m halfway through reading “Lonesome Dove”, and it struck me how much “Cyberpunk 2077” is basically the same kind of story. The people leading rough, savage lives on the edge of society carry pistols instead of cyberdecks, but the themes of survival at all costs and an attempt to eke out some kind of normalcy are the same.

If Dove were written now, I think we’d call it horsepunk.

Currently reading: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole 📚

I deliberately know nothing whatsoever about this book, except that people liked it.

Finished reading: Accelerando by Charles Stross 📚

Alright, so this was not the best written book I’ve stumbled across. It was alright, but Strunk & White cried a few times along the way. But the world building and imagination and prediction accuracy? Fantastic. It’s not high art, but art nonetheless.

I’m on a bus reading “Accelerando” on a cheap Chinese ereader hacked with open source firmware. Siri in my ears periodically interrupts with a spoken summary of a Slack message from the company lawyer and I shake my head to dismiss it; I’ll be at the office soon anyway. The two guys in Patagonia vests next to me are one-upping each other with AI opinions that aren’t quite based in reality.

Just a regular commute in the Bay Area.

Currently reading: Beowulf: A New Translation by Maria Dahvana Headley 📚

Finished reading: The Random Universe by Andrew H. Jaffe 📚

Currently reading: The Random Universe by Andrew H. Jaffe 📚

I have no idea what I’m getting into.

Finished reading: Class Clown by Dave Barry 📚

Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology

By hiding the eyes, mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sunstaring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws.

This is now online for free reading. It’s a must for young cyberpunks who want to understand their history.