How To: Remove Adobe DRM from ebooks — again
You might recall that I've written about this before, this is round two, as you will.
I was once again in need of removing DRM from my ebooks as the previous method I had stopped working. More specifically, I am talking about Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) DRM which is ubiquitous in the places I buy ebooks, especially English ones. So here's how to do it (again).
You'll need Calibre, I am using the Flatpak version.
If you're on Linux, I recommend doing this because it is probably the most convenient way of getting current versions.
The workflow described here was tested with Calibre version 8.14.0. On a side note, I also
tested the version present in the repos of Ubuntu 24.04 in which importing the needed plugins did not work (it is on version 7).
Furthermore you will need two plugins:
- DeASCM
- DeDRM (this is a fork of this which does not seem to be active anymore but is still quite prevalent)
Lastly, you will need credentials for ADE. Since the software does not run on Linux (see installation instructions here) this poses a bit of a problem. As far as I remember (it has been quite a while) I installed the stuff in Wine and made an account that way. Apparently this is fairly straightforward to do (see, e.g., here).
Now that you have everything, execute the following steps:
- Open the Preferences in Calibre and select "Plugins" in the "Advanced" section.
- Choose "Load plugin from file"
- Install the DeASCM plugin
- Follow the instructions here to set it up with your ADE credentials
- Install the DeDRM plugin the same way as above (note that the downloaded zip file actually contains two plugins so you need to extract the downloaded file and then choose the actual DeDRM plugin archive from within the DeDRM tools folder you just extracted)
- Download an
.ascmfile and add it to Calibre via the "Add books" button, everything else should happen automatically.
If everything went well, you now should have an .epub file in your library which is stripped of its DRM.
There are several things to note:
- There is the possibility to use anonymous ADE credentials which I've tried but I could not get it to work
- It is apparently possible to use the upstream of the DeDRM fork mentioned above but you'll need to configure it with the encryption key extracted from the DeASCM plugin
- I am not well-aquainted with the various failure modes and underlying root causes for this workflow but I found the documentation of the DeASCM plugin to be quite helpful
- It is sugested that you back up your DeASCM credentials via the plugin menu. Do so.
Happy reading!