Quote:
Originally Posted by nabsltd
I'm a little fuzzy on what people find difficult about Calibre and NoDRM.
Is it: - Calibre itself is too complicated?
- NoDRM install?
- No DRM config?
Once you install Calibre, install the NoDRM plugin, and do some relatively simple configuration (NoDRM will automatically detect an installed Kindle for PC or Adobe Digital Editions, and it's easy to find the serial number of your Kindle if you want to enter that), adding an eBook downloaded from Amazon is as easy as adding an eBook without DRM. |
It
can be complicated, and I feel like the ebook enthusiast community can be really abrasive/condescending towards non-tech people that need help. I got it setup without too much trouble, although even for me, it wasn't immediately clear that the decryption was happening at import time into Calibre and not via a manual invocation of the plugin.
I had to set it up for my wife and my mother, as well. On my mother's PC, the python script to extract the key didn't work for whatever reason, so we had to go the Serial Number route (as an aside, the average end-user has no idea what a "python script" is, so advising to click a tiny executable that pops open a cmd prompt to run a little script-let could look
alot like malware to the uninitiated). My wife had it working for some time, then we had to do the DeDRM -> NoDRM migration when she updated Calibre. That went smoothly, but it was a "scary" moment for her, because she didn't want to break it.
It is not terribly difficult for me, but I'm a guy who does tech for a living and uses Linux as his primary computing platform--I'm used to this kind of stuff. Other people aren't. Some people just wanna read their books on their platform of choice. And I frequently see the attitude here (and elsewhere, e.g. on Reddit) of people struggling with the instructions and instead being greeted with, "Why is this so hard for you, you brainless moron?" Then we wonder why people are willing to pay $50 for a program that makes the process "easier"...