Removing security on Amazon purchased e-books

[any ANONYMOUS forum user]

Removing security on Amazon purchased e-books (should work on others with same security).

To remove the security restrictions from Amazon e-books you need the following tools:
- Acrobat professional 6 (7 does not work)
- Any hex editor (I use 010 Editor)

After you download you book place a copy in a folder so that you do not damage the original file.

Open the PDF in the hex editor and do a search for the term print
The result will be something like the following

<Print First="0" Interval="-1" Max="0">0</Print>

Change any of the 0 to a 1 or 1 to a 0 (change a 0 to a 1 or a 1 to a 0) and you should have something like this

<Print First="1" Interval="-1" Max="0">0</Print>

Save the file

Open the same file in Acrobat Pro (you may get a flash of a box saying it is rebuilding it but ignore this)

Go to security and select the display the security setting dialogue. (you should see that many of the setting probably say not allowed) and in the security method (which should say ADOBE DRM) change to NO SECURITY

This will Bring up a box which asks 'Are you sure you want to remove the security from this document?' Press OK. Then OK again.

All the settings should now change to ALLOWED but you must do the following steps to get a document you can transfer or share (Do not
hit print or anything else or the restrictions will return).

Go to Document, Pages, Extract (Making sure you are on the first page of the document) and a security box will come up with the following: 'Pages extracted from a secure file will lose there security settings: Is it OK to continue?' Press Ok.

You only then need to extract all the pages and the resulting file is free of security.

Then go to File, Save As and save the document which will be the name of the document you opened with Pages from at the front. Congratulations you now have a document free of security restrictions.

July 2005