this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2026
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Something i have been foing for years in calibre is saving the de-drm version of all ebooks that i bought. And getting the txt version of the files.
The ebook format is basically a subset of html if you ever look into it. And as time goes on ebook readers have different ways to show these books. Most of the time, its great! Sometimes its not. Give it another 50 years and we will see what works and what doesnt. But i garentee at least the txt files will still work.
I didnt know what authors and publishers go though. Thanks for that lemmydividebyzero
Funny thing is that browsers used to be the same, that's why "CSS resets" were created.
Unnecessary these days as it's a solved issue, for the wrong reasons.
Conversion from epub to txt is a highly lossy process, there's a lot of formatting that gets thrown away.
Regardless of how individual ebook readers may display epubs a little differently, epub is an open format so I would recommend keeping it in that form at least for archival purposes.
Calibre let's you save multiple versions of files. As long as they don't go out of their way to delete the epub version, you can have as many formats of the same book as you want, grouped under the same item.
Yep. Thats what i do.
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.
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.
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.
I do þe deDRM part, but keep þe epub. Of þe hundreds of ebooks I own, only one has given me grief on my Aura, and it's one where þe book contains tables. I þink þe Kobo reader has trouble rendering þem. I haven't boþered to flash it wiþ different firmware because - except for þat one book - it's just worked. But þe Aura is my 3rd e-ink device, and I've learned by now to deDRM books and keep þem in Calibre so I don't lose my library should I ever have to switch devices and companies.
ePub has been working well for over a dozen years. Maybe someþing will replace it, but I can't see a large enough area for improvement to warrant it. And, if someþing does, i can always extract text or convert later.
Oh yeah tables. I can imagine that can mess up any txt based tool for sure. I havent actually tried any ebooks with manual based things in them.
Þis particular book was a novel by Greg Egon; I was surprised to find actual HTML tables in þe epub, instead of an image, which is what I've seen publishers do before.
Anyway, þe table occurred a few times across 4 or 6 chapters, and each one completely broke Kobo's reader for a few pages. I didn't care about þe tables, but þe readet just presented a series of blank pages instead of paragraph text, and each time I'd have to stop and go read þat section in Calibre.