I’d like to buy a French comic I can’t find online from any store that sells French Bande dessinée (Amazon, fnac or anything else) and then ask for a refund so I can keep a nice *.cbz or *.cbr file on my hard drive.
Any guide out there on how to properly de-DRM comics? I’d like something easy if possible I’m tech and computer savvy enough but not “coding” savvy
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Unrelated but have you looked on Anna’s Archive? They have a bunch of Bande dessinée on there that may be what you’re looking for.
Yeah, I’ve looked everywhere but if you’d like to look yourself it’s “Saint-elme” tome 5 (volume 5) by Lehmann and Peeters. All 4 first books are on Anna’s and elsewhere but tome 5 was published fairly recently (January) and a French forum sharing bande dessinées has a “6 months rule” about sharing newly published works (honestly I don’t understand why but who am I to discuss their rules) so it will be available at some point but since vol 5 is the last one, I want to read the end now.
Thanks anyway :)
make sure to upload it if you ever succeed
Do you know what format the comics come from Amazon (and if they actually have DRM)? I’m not sure if I’ve ever done it with comics but ebooks from Amazon usually worked well with DeDRM for Calibre:
https://github.com/nodrm/DeDRM_tools (hosting piracy stuff on Github 😘)
Last time I did it I had to use a Kindle app on Android to get the file which was kind of a hassle but it worked in the end.
If you get it into Calibre, you can just convert it to zip in Calibre, export the zip, remane the file ending to cbz, done.
Where do you want to buy it from? If it’s some obscure shop that has its own encryption scheme, it may be hard to find any solutions. If it uses Adobe encryption, you can probably get away with using the DeDRM tools. Whether it’s a PDF or EPUB, you should be able to extract the images. EPUB is easiest, since it’s just a zip file, just like cbz. I’ve had de-DRMed EPUB files that I opened directly in a comic reader and they worked perfectly fine. The image file names were already sequential.
If it’s some other scheme that hasn’t been cracked yet, though, and you don’t care about having the original files, I’ve had success using this method for automating screenshots. I think this is a great option if you just need “good enough” image quality to store something without DRM, as it will work on pretty much anything. And tbh, the image quality of digital comics isn’t that great anyway.
I got booted a long time ago because it’s impossible to keep a decent ratio on there (I downloaded two books, never stopped seeding them, and got banned), but Bibliotik has a lot of up-to-date tools on removing DRM from various types of ebooks. I would start by trying to find someone with access to Bibliotik.
I didn’t know this source so I’ll have a look.
Thanks
Edit : oh, seems private no? Do you know how could I get an in?
I would check over at [email protected] to see if at some point Bibliotik is taking applications.
They generally post about open sign ups for various private trackers over there. Good luck!
Bib is notoriously hard to get an invite to.
MAM is a books-focused private tracker that’s a lot easier to get started on. They have open signups scheduled weekly.
