183
Your EPUB Is Fine. Kobo Disagrees. Blame Adobe - André Klein Dot Net
(andreklein.net)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2026
183 points (98.9% liked)
Technology
85779 readers
3675 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Does DeDRM still work? The last time I tried under Linux I was unable to get it to run. If I remember correctly, ADE was the culprit.
I've used libgourou successfully many times in the past year to remove DRM using my ADE key.
I angrily started doing this for every book I buy after changing reading device to a newer Kobo, and discovering that all the download links for .acsm files that my book store provides will expire after two years. I.e. after those two years it's impossible to move them to a new device unless I remove DRM.
How do you get your ADE key?
Create an account with ADE then activate using
adept_activate -u "your.adobe.id@email.com" --output-dir ~/.adeptIIUC this eats up an activation (I think they allow at most five) so back up the contents of that directory. You should be able to bring it with you to other computers.
I banged my head on this four many hours and couldn’t get it to work directly in Linux. The key issue seemed to be that ADE and Kobo had to be installed on the same device, so I’ve resorted to using a Windows VM (VirtualBox). It works fine enough.
libgourou has no need for anything that has to do with Kobo. It's really only three cli commands: activate (once), download acsm, de-drm. It produces an unencrypted .epub that you can open as is or copy to your Kobo device with any ordinary file operation.
It works for non amazon books at least last i tried. Works on library books...but that feels wierd. I have enough money to buy books now, so sometimes i just op for the real thing.
I have had luck reaching out to authors in the past. One even recommended yoho so that was funny.