Hello all,
First post so please be gentle
I bought the latest
Kindle. I bought one book for it and it all worked no problem (and I downloaded some books free from the Gutenberg Project). Catch is, I am not living in the US and when I looked closer I noticed that one of three issues were coming up:
1-ebooks 'not available in your region' a bit too frequently
2-ALL the books that are available generally cost $2 to even $5 more
3-not all books are available in ebook format
So we can't do anything about #3. For #1 I am going to use a US address from a family member and gift card that new account money to buy books with. Catch is, that first book that I bought on the Kindle is now 'gone' since I had to deregister the Kindle to try and use this new US account.
Thats when I got introduced to the 'joy' of drm for things you have already bought and paid for. I still have that first book of course (the file on the computer) but have no way to read it on my Kindle. This little issue has motivated me to prevent getting locked in down the road with a ton of books in a format that can't get moved to the newest/latest/greatest reader when it comes along. As such I want to learn how to get this book (and all the others I buy) 'fixed' so I can read them on whatever reader I want.
So I downloaded Skindle and extracted it (uh, did that twice before finding the .exe). Moved all the files into the same directory (c:\skindle) and brought over the book I bought to that skindle directory. I renamed it 'book.azw' from the long name that Amazon had given it with all kinds of spacing. I then ran in the command prompt module in windows 7 (haven't done this in years) this:
Code:
c:\skindle\skindle -i book.azw -o bookconvert.tpz
This gets me 'Success! Enjoy!' at the bottom of some notices about serial numbers, device pid's etc.
I go into
Calibre and it can 'add' this file but it can't convert it "because no suitable source format was found" nor can it send it to my Kindle for the same reason. And of course, I can't send the original version of the book to the Kindle having deregistered it from my international account to get to try the US account to save money - it says its unauthorized or somesuch and that I should buy it if I want to read it (uh, which I already did).
I think I must be close to 'success' but am missing a step or two. I suspect there are others this close so I posted in the sticky to try and keep it up near the top (where I found the thread).
So, what am I missing? Is this .tpz format the end goal? I opened the bookconvert.tpz with notepad in Windows and it looks like a scrambled mess but that may or may not mean its been 'fixed' yet for all I know; just wanted to add that info.
I just want to be able to have all my books rid of this problem right from the onset of buying ebooks; if I can't really get it sorted I might just give this reader away and go old school and buy books....printed on paper!
Regards and thanks.
Scott
edit....
I got it to work - I used:
Code:
c:\skindle -i b1.azw -o b2.azw
The catch...that 'fixed' the book I bought at
Amazon originally. I just bought a second book with a gift card on the US account and downloaded the file to the computer. Same process as the step I just metioned but now I get 'PID for book is xxxxxx No valid pids available, failed to find DRM key An error occurred, unable to process input file!'
So the only differences -
I downloaded it from the US on a US account
This book had a long name-with-dashes like I just wrote there; I renamed it to b1.azw in the skindle directory for ease but this is pretty much what I did before
The biggie (?) - the Device PID is different now than what it was when I did that initial conversion on my first book because I registered the Kindle to the US account; still not sure this would matter
Any ideas? I thought the python/unswindle thing no longer worked and this skindle seems to be the replacement (and so easy) - well easy, when it worked for my one book - and a second one actually that I bought for zero beforehand but forgot to mention that one converted as well.
edit edit - well, I retried to convert an original drm file (the first book) now that I have a different registered Kindle and that file still converted. Sooo uh, hmmmm???