Liberating your ebooks purchased on Amazon, A.K.A. the sigh post

Wow, fist written (not dictated) post in a long time. Let's see if I can finish it.

Given the fact that Amazon is shutting down downloading your purchased ebooks, I decided to download them all before the cut in a couple of days. To me, the definitve gide comes in this toot:

rem@front-end.social, Feb 18

The first link is a tool that will automatically download the books for you; otherwise, you have to download them by hand/clickops. If your collection is big that can be tedious. The first problem is that that tool is developed in a obscure programming language called bun¹, which of course gets installed by the classic curl | bash method which... sigh. Let's just say it's not the ideal. At least the options they use in curl are not bad, but it would be nice if they used the --long-options so I don't have to peruse curl's man page to see if they're not doing anything even more crappy, like ignoring bad SSL certs or something worse.

So instead of blindly doing that, I open the script and start reading. The usual crap, but it includes this gem:

install_env=BUN_INSTALL
bin_env=\$$install_env/bin

install_dir=${!install_env:-$HOME/.bun}
bin_dir=$install_dir/bin
exe=$bin_dir/bun

In a roundabout way, it's saying that it will honor the BUN_INSTALL envvar as the root of the installation, defaulting to $HOME/.bun, which is what I was looking for; I don't want more trash in my home directory. I also run the script with tracing to make sure it doesn't do anything ugly.

mdione@ioniq:~/src/system/fsck-amazon$ BUN_INSTALL=$(pwd) bash -x ./install

I should have read it more. The bloody thing helpfully adds these lines you the .bashrc:

# bun
export BUN_INSTALL="$HOME/src/system/fsck-amazon"
export PATH="$BUN_INSTALL/bin:$PATH"

sigh So I undo that and only set the envvars on the shell I run for all this.

Ok, now to follow the bulkk tool's install instructions. The step that most time takes is:

🚚 typescript...

sigh. To be slightly fair, my internet has been crappy for a while now. I blame the PLC network between my ISP router and my home made AP.

So far only (!!!) 121MiB have been used. sigh Let's see how much will it be at the end, because the next step is:

bunx puppeteer browsers install chrome

See that last one? This is because the ony things that can use the web lately are only full fledged browsers that include a fsck-ton amount of technologies, so this thing is going to drive Amazon's site with a full fledged Chrome browser. And of course it escapes my feeble attempt to give it a jail:

mdione@ioniq:~/src/system/fsck-amazon/amazon-kindle-bulk-downloader$ bunx puppeteer browsers install chrome
chrome@133.0.6943.98 /home/mdione/.cache/puppeteer/chrome/linux-133.0.6943.98/chrome-linux64/chrome

sigh

mdione@ioniq:~/src/system/fuck-amazon/amazon-kindle-bulk-downloader$ du -sm /home/mdione/.cache/puppeteer/
585     /home/mdione/.cache/puppeteer/

So 706MiB so far.

eyeroll

To not write the auth on the disk in plain text, I just run the system with manual auth:

mdione@ioniq:~/src/system/fsck-amazon/amazon-kindle-bulk-downloader$ bun run start --manualAuth
$ bun run src/index.ts --manualAuth
✔ Enter the Amazon base URL … https://www.amazon.com/
✔ Press enter once you've logged in … yes
Got auth
[...]
Downloading complete. You can find your books in the 'downloads' folder.

An that's it. After this I cleaned up the two diredtories, making sure not to delete the downloads the tool created.

Next step is to download the Calibre plugin (I already have Calibre via the OS packages) and follow the install instructions. One of the step is to write a list of serials for the ebooks you have. I my case, it was on drop-from-the-top menu -> All Settings -> Device Options -> Device Info -> Serial Number; it's a 4 groups of 4 characters string, WWWW XXXX YYYY ZZZZ. Also in my case, the config files was ~/.config/calibre/plugins/dedrm.json. You can write it by hand or use the GUI to add new serials. For the latter, it's Calibre -> Preferences -> Plugins -> File type -> DeDRM -> Customize plugin -> Kindle eInk ebooks -> + (add serial). Just notice it wants the serial as a single 16 char string.

Last step: convert them all:

mdione@ioniq:~/src/system/fuck-amazon$ for file in downloads/; do calibredb add $file --with-library=library; done

Notice two things: when I said "making sure not to delete the downloads the tool created", I meant moving that directory into this root and deleting everything else. Second, this just DeDRMs the files, and leaves them in a different directory (library), but Calibre won't see them until you really add them.