Reading Kindle books on the mac

Hello everyone.

A few weeks ago I posted a reply on a Forum in which someone was asking about how to convert Kindle files to other formats. My initial reply has gotten so much feedback, in the form of private messages, that I have decided to post my ideas, around the topic, in a more visible and easy to find place.

Before we get started I need to make two disclaimers.

First of all I want to be a little careful, since part of what you have to do is strip the DRM from the books, which is something that the Apple Vis admins might not like us talking about in too much detail. With this in mind, I am going to say the same thing I said in my reply; if you would like more info on this subject you can private message me and we can talk about it that way.

The other disclaimer is that the process I am about to outline consist of several steps, and therefore is mildly complicated.

You might ask what the point of converting Kindle books is, if the process is somewhat involved; Let me explain. I am in my last semester of college and I have accessed a fair portion of my books by buying them on kindle and then reading them on my mac. I personally believe that if we, as blind people, can pay to access our books, like everyone els does, then we should. I do enjoy services like bard and book share, but I have moved to Kindle for most of my text books, because I have not appreciated getting books for free while watching my classmates spend thousands of dollars on their required texts.

There is, however, one major draw back to moving to Kindle for text books. Thanks to Kindle’s amazingly inaccessible desktop app, there is no way of reading Kindle books, on your mac, without stripping away their DRM. I wish this was not the case, and the moment Kindle comes out with an accessible mac app my DRM removing days will be over. As it currently stands though, I am not about to pull out my phone during class and use it to read along when we are covering material in the text book. The need to read on my mac is what made it necessary to figure out the process I am about to explain. If you too want to read Kindle books outside of the IOS app I hope you find my thoughts useful.

Step 1. First things first, setting up the mac kindle app.

This is actually pretty strait forward, but its finicky because the app is totally inaccessible. All the app really wants is for you to enter your amazon email address and password, so it can sink with your account.

Upon first opening the app the keyboard focus should land in the email address field, so simply type your address in. After doing this, hit tab, which should take you to the password field. When you type in your password, hit enter, and you should be ready to go. Remember that when doing this you will get no feedback what so ever. If you don’t think it has worked right you might try closing the app and starting over.

After your logged into your account there is not really anything els you have to do with the app, although I do believe it needs to be open for the next step.

Step 2. downloading books to the app.

As far as I can tell, your books won’t download to the app automatically, but this is not a big deal, sense you can send them to the app through the Amazon web site. Navigate to the site with your browser of choice and click on the link that says your amazon dot com. Instead of the word “your” it should say your username, so in my case it says, Tree’s amazon dot com.

After clicking on this link click on the link that says “manage your content and devices”. This is the page you want for sending the desired books to your mac kindle app. The interface of this page is not ideal and a little hard to figure out, so if you have trouble with it I can try and walk you through the exact process. In a nutshell what you want to do is,
select a book,
select the deliver option.
Choose where you want the book to be delivered, your mac.
Of course if the mac app was accessible you could do this step without going to the amazon web site, but its not. so thats that.

Step 3 locating the books in the finder.

I explain this step in order to be thorough, but the DRM remover tool, that I use, does not require you to find the kindle books in the finder . As stated above, to find out more about this tool simply send me a private message.

The location of the books has changed from time to time, so if the info I am about to give does not seem right simply do some google searching and you can find the answer.
First you need to show the library folder, which might be hidden by default. There are several ways to do this, but I like to just hit shift command g, to go to a folder, and then type in ~/library, and hit enter.
After you get to the library you should be able to find the amazon books in the following location. the finder Library/Containers/com. amazon.Kindle/Data/Librar y/Application Support/Kindle/My Kindle Content.

Step 4, ripping DRM

As I already explained I am not sure if I should really go into this step. I will just say that if you google ripping DRM from kindle books, the main thing you are going to read about is an app called Caliber. This app is very inaccessible, and it is pretty much impossible to use it, trust me I have tried. There are alternative options out there though.

I hoped this has made sense and can help people; remember you can private message me if you have any questions.
Thanks,