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by criddell 1685 days ago
That workaround gets you the text but it's missing a lot of the recent typographic improvements. It's fine for extracting text for TTS, but isn't ideal if what you are trying to do is maintain a DRM free archive of books you've purchased.

It's like saying you can break BluRay DRM by recording the screen with your phone camera.
1 comments
sbst32 1685 days ago
What kind of typographic improvements do you have in mind?
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criddell 1685 days ago
Stuff like drop caps, kerning that isn't terrible, hyphenation, and better word spacing. None of it matters if you are feeding the text to a speech synthesizer, but it can make a difference when reading.
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salamandersauce 1685 days ago
Some of that stuff you can get back by using an ePub version and reader from the AZW3 file which can typically be done using KindleUnpack. Some of it is less the file format and more the rendering engine used and they simply haven't bothered to backport it to their AZW3 renderers. Amazon does AFAIK precompute some stuff like hyphenation but not everything.
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sbst32 1685 days ago
The point is the KFX format does have all that natively.
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salamandersauce 1685 days ago
And my point is that some of it not native (it's handled by the renderer) and it's possible to get back or similar enough (precomputing hyphenation).
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criddell 1685 days ago
If you're willing to do a bunch of work, you may be able to recreate something close to the original KFX. AFAIK you won't get kerning though. That seems to be tied to the renderer used for KFX files.

The other part is that there isn't a single definitive KFX file for a title. If you have an Oasis and I have a Paperwhite and we both download the same book, I believe we get different KFX files. There's no reason to doubt that there will be future Kindle devices that are even better with respect to typography and so you will need to re-download your library for that device.

Today, KFX can sometimes be De-DRM'd but it's gotten to the point where it's a cat and mouse game. It works for a while then Amazon changes something and breaks it. I don't doubt that essentially uncrackable DRM is achievable.

The real fix is legislative.

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