How to remove DRM protection from EPUB ebooks
Barnes & Noble uses its own DRM scheme for some EPUB books. It's a variant of the Adobe ADEPT scheme, and all the Adobe SDK users will get access to it eventually. The problem is that many consumers can’t read B&N books on their ebook readers.
How to Remove DRM from Adept ePub.
Quote:
step 1: generate an encryption key from the book-purchaser's name + credit card #
step 2: hope that they don't like giving that information out to strangers.
It would be very bad form for an application to keep user CC#s just sitting around on disk, so the Windows version of the Barnes & Noble Desktop Reader application (BDReader) just holds on to the generated key and not the source info. A wise decision, for which I congratulate them. It then stores this key in plain text in a sqlite3 database. An... interesting... decision, for which I thank them. Update: and then it turned out the key-generation algorithm was pretty easy too...
Software to remove DRM from B&N EPUB ebooks:
A Windows-only key-retrieval script: ignoblekey (version 2)
An any-platform key-generation script: ignoblekeygen (version 2)
And an any-platform book-decryption script: ignobleepub (version 2)
Download these scripts here: NookDrmRemoval.rar
You need the decryption script and one of either the key-retrieval or key-generation scripts. They produce the same output. The key-generator works on any platform. The Windows key-retrieval script can get access to your credit card (despite being an open-source script).
If you get the following error after running ignoblekey.pyw
"Error: Problem decoding key; unexpected DB format?"
you can
either find and delete your 'ClientAPI_v012.db' file then re-authorize BDReader with your account information,
or just use the key-derivation script (ignoblekeygen).
Both ignoblekey and ignoblekeygen will produce the same output when they work correctly.
I downloaded the scripts on my Mac, and was able to successfully generate the key. But when I tried to decrypt the .pdb books I've downloaded I ran into two problems.
1. I can't select any input file unless the extension is .epub
2. Once I renamed the book I downloaded from B&N's site, it says the file isn't zipped. (I tried zipping the book, but I couldn't select the zip file as an input.)
What am I doing wrong?