How To Transfer Kindle Books To Kobo Without DRM Removal?

I try to make my digital library as flexible as possible. For my e-books, this means that I’d like to be able to add Kindle books to my Kobo without removing the DRM (Digital Rights Management) first. Amazon’s DRM is designed to prevent books from being read on anything other than Kindle e-readers or Kindle apps and while there are a number of ways to remove DRM from Kindle books (some of which will be detailed below), I’m interested in methods which don’t involve breaking any laws orTerms of Service.

Some books, particularly newer ones, can be found in EPUB format at other retailers, such as Kobo itself or Google Play Books. Sometimes the book is even available at Kobo at a lower price than on Amazon, and when you buy it that way, Kobo Stores download it straight to your e-reader. The way I look at it is that instead of me doing the work of my copyright lawyer to work around Amazon’s restrictions on your behalf, I’m just buying a legal copy of the book.

For books that are restricted to Kindle, I just use the Kindle app on my phone to read them instead. If a book is Kindle-only, then I’d rather just read it on my phone or tablet instead of trying to find a way to transfer it to my eReader. The Amazon ecosystem is quite locked down, so the way to access Kindle content is via their apps. And I use my Kobo eReaders for everything else. Not ideal but there you have it.

As a side note, for people who are into playing around with their e-book collections, there are methods of stripping DRM from your books using software like Calibre with the relevant plugins. However, I would strongly advise against using these methods as they are against Amazon’s terms of service and could potentially be against the law depending on where in the world you are. To avoid any hassle, I recommend sticking to the above methods. The DRM on books is there to allow authors and publishers to get paid for their work and it can be frustrating when a book is locked in a particular ecosystem, but buying books from stores that sell in EPUB where possible is the way to go in the long run.

I use my Kobo for all of my library books as well as most of my fanfiction that I sideload. All of my commercial e-books, however, are Amazon purchases. While the sales are better on Amazon, my family and I have a shared library account so it can be a bit of a pain to purchase commercially. But it works for me, and my Kobo is my 'fun' e-reader and my Kindle is my 'serious' e-reader. This doesn't help you transfer your books, but maybe you don't need to transfer them all. Just choose a lane for new purchases.

A workflow for accessing the gray area would first start with accessing the book through the ‘Download & Transfer via USB’ link on Amazon’s book page for that book. From there, the user would have a .azw file that they can open with a tool which decrypts the DRM’d book. This output is usually in the format of AZW3 or MOBI, which can then be opened in Calibre and exported to an EPUB file, which can be added to a Kobo through the USB connection and ‘sidedloaded’ onto the user’s Kobo.

You would then use Calibre to convert that DRM-free file to EPUB, and use the Kobo’s sideload function to transfer the new EPUB file directly to the Kobo eReader. Note that what we have done here is to create a new, DRM-free file – we have not ‘transferred’ the DRM in the sense of ‘copy and paste’ from one device to another. How moral/illegal is this process is at the heart of the debate – it is a process of conversion and of creation, not of simple transfer.