Sunday, November 2, 2014

Use iBooks to read Kindle books on a Mac

Amazon has a lot more computer books than the iBook store so I've ended up with quite a few in Kindle over the years. I don't have a Kindle device, just the app for the Mac.
I don't like it. I never have liked it. It just irritates me. For a long time we had to use it because Apple in their infinite wisdom thought iBooks should only exist on the iOS devices but that changed a couple of years back so why am I not reading my Kindle books in iBooks?
Answer Digital Rights Management - DRM. The things that prevents copying even if you're coping it for yourself.

But there's a way around it.

1. Install Calibre http://calibre-ebook.com/download

This is an open source e-book management thing. It has the power to export e-books to other formats but it won't cope with DRM. We need to get rid of the DRM.

We need to add a free and open source plugin to Calibre but we install it in a slightly different way. For me it worked very easily and quickly.

2. Go to Apprentice Alf's page to download the tool. You'll need the Tools not the Alternative tools.

To download, be sure to press the Grey button and un-tick the tick box.




3. Ok now unzip the file somewhere.

4. Start Calibre.

5. Add the plug in.

  1. Select Preferences from the menu-bar.
  2. Select Change Calibre behaviour from the dropdown.
  3. Choose Plugins from the panel.
  4. Select the button: Load plug-in from file.
  5. Navigate the the unzipped files you downloaded.
  6. Open the DeDRM_calibre_plugin.
  7. Select the DeDRM_plugin.zip file.
  8. Choose Add etc and that's it.
No Add books into Calibre and will be DRM free. You can export to Epub and then add to your iBooks library.





The plugin is made by Apprentice Alf I think and there are all sorts of posts on the blog about this