this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2025
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[–] anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 83 points 4 days ago (2 children)

That was an interesting read.

If you wanna own your audiobooks you might wanna check out https://libro.fm/ - they allow you to download the bought audiobook without drm.
I gladly accept tips for similar sites when it comes to buying ebooks.

[–] felsiq@piefed.zip 30 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Kobo does drm-free ebooks when the publisher allows it, so it’s on a case-by-case basis but I have got a lot of them drm free

[–] Ghoelian@piefed.social 33 points 4 days ago

Not the most ethical, but kobo is also very easily de-drm'd with calibre.

Actually no this is not even unethical, I did actually pay for those books.

[–] anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 8 points 4 days ago

22 out of 22 books i checked at Kobo had Adobe DRM. :(

[–] radieschen@slrpnk.net 18 points 4 days ago (1 children)

In case you already got some books from Audible, there's Libation.

[–] anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 2 points 4 days ago

I've never used it, but bookmarked the github. Cheers. :)

[–] Boozilla@lemmy.world 39 points 4 days ago

This is a good look under the hood on why so much mainstream software actively sucks these days. They put so many fucking resources into dark capitalist shit, and zero into making it a good user experience.

[–] hummingbird@lemmy.world 43 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I bought my first ebook from amazon

Just don't do that. If you give money to this company, they'll continue to go down the path they're on. Enshitification.

[–] plm00@lemmy.ml 9 points 4 days ago (2 children)

That's doable until you need a book that's an Amazon exclusive.

[–] HejMedDig@feddit.dk 20 points 4 days ago

Torrent, PayPal author

[–] waldo_was_here@piefed.social 14 points 4 days ago

Anna's archive is the answer for you

[–] The_v@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago

I have "purchased" thousands of books from Amazon, but never given them money for a book.

They run free specials all the time. FreeReadFeed scans for them. It's a great way to discover authors to purchase their books at another site or use the library apps.

[–] Boozilla@lemmy.world 21 points 4 days ago

That was a fun and interesting read.

When we buy an ebook, they are selling us a "license" to use it on their terms. We technically don't own the book. Which is horseshit. Kudos to Pixelmelt for oursmarting their obfuscation techniques.

I use Kobo and Calibre because A-Z sucks so bad. And if an ebook is exclusive to A-Z, I'll just never read it. Fortunately 99.9% of the ebooks I've wanted are on Kobo.

[–] Nima@leminal.space 17 points 3 days ago

that was such a great read no joke. I love it when people use spite as a motivator.

[–] jherazob@fedia.io 14 points 4 days ago

Spite: The greatest motivator!

[–] Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

That was a good read. I did think it was interesting that he decided to solve the randomized alphabet problem with the complex character recognition and image matching system he used. I mean, that was very clever and it clearly worked, so great! But an alternate option would have been the cryptographic method. There's a lot of software designed to crack replacement cyphers (especially in English) it probably would have been trivial to drop those characters into one of these and have it spit out the results.

Admittedly it would likely struggle with the other three alphabets, the italic, heading and italic heading alphabets, where there may not be enough words to be certain about success.