I always find it amusing how people can be experts in copyright law, and at the same time be suitably ignorant enough to assume it's ok.

As far as I know it is legal. provided you purchased the ebook and that you only have it loaded onto 1 reader & it is for your personal use only .

Post deleted by billford

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hi,
I've been reading about drm on here and am just wondering can I remove drm to read kindle books on a kobo for MY OWN PERSONAL USE without infringing copyright law, I bought a kobo and find that most books I want are predominantly on kindle, any info positive or negative would be appreciated.

thank you

In the UK, circumventing DRM is actionable as if it was a breach of copyright under section 296ZA Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended). This amendment to the 1988 Act was introduced to implement the corresponding requirement in the EU Copyright Directive, Directive 2001/29/EC.

Kobo doesn't read Kindle .AZW format ebooks, so are you going to convert them 1st?

In reference to www.kobo.com/kobotouch/techspecs/:

Supported File Formats

eBooks: EPUB, PDF, and MOBI
Documents: PDF
Images: JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, and TIFF
Text: TXT, HTML, and RTF
Comic Books: CBZ and CBR

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

Kobo doesn't read Kindle .AZW format ebooks, so are you going to convert them 1st?

Calibre will convert non-DRM AZW to a Kobo supported format. The issue is the DRM.

Ultimately, it's best to select a reader that has the content you want available for it. I use my Samsung Galaxy Note 2 as my e-book reader these days, so I can use the Kindle app for Kindle content and Mantano for everything else. I prefer to avoid Kindle content so far as possible, because of the closed Amazon ecosystem.

I was just pointing out to OP that Kobo doesn't accept Kindle .AZW ebooks. Hope you don't mind!

In reply to a post by David_W:

the closed Amazon ecosystem.

It isn't closed! Kindle will accept ebooks from outside Amazon and they may be in non-Amazon formats like .MOBI.

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

I was just pointing out to OP that Kobo doesn't accept Kindle .AZW ebooks. Hope you don't mind!

I merely gave a solution to the potential format problem you raised, assuming the OP can overcome the DRM issue he was aware of.

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

In reply to a post by David_W:

the closed Amazon ecosystem.

It isn't closed! Kindle will accept ebooks from outside Amazon and they may be in non-Amazon formats like .MOBI.

The closure I was thinking of was of the content, not the reader platform. As Amazon do not permit third parties to use the Kindle DRM system, there is no way to use Kindle content supplied with DRM on non-Kindle devices or apps other than by circumventing the DRM.


I'd rather have DRM free content, as I believe DRM impedes the rights of a content purchaser to use their content whilst doing nothing to prevent piracy. If you're going to breach the copyright in the content, there's no further legal peril in circumventing the DRM.

If there is no alternative to DRM, but there is a choice of formats, I'd rather buy content using Adobe DRM, which works on a variety of devices and apps.