Get your books out of Apple Books

Software
1

Hi Folks, Is there anyway to get your “paid for books” out of apple books to use on anything you choose, after all I have paid for them and should be free to choose where I want to read them?

2

I followed this tutorial to de-DRM purchased ePubs. The app, ePubee DRM Removal, feels dated but handles the job reasonably well.

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3

Your question is why I decided years ago to stay with the Kindle app because it is cross platform and I’ve found the books to be a little less expensive on Amazon.

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4

Calibre might be able to do this (apparently there could be an issue if the book was created with iBooks Author).

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5

Calibre itself doesn’t remove DRM. There are Calibre plugins that will remove the DRM from Kindle ebooks, Adobe Digital Edition ebooks, and Kobo ebooks, however. To the best of my knowledge there isn’t a plug in for Apple Books.

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6

I’m not speaking from an authoritative position here so I may be completely off base, but it’s my understanding that not all Apple books are DRM’ed.

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7

The actual files for the books live (or can live) on your Mac. So if they’re not DRM’d, you may want to go check out that folder and see what’s in there.

For me it’s

/Users//Library/Mobile Documents/iCloud~com~apple~iBooks/Documents

Poke around in there and see what you turn up.

If they’re DRM’d, keep in mind that technically it’s not kosher to break the DRM, as you haven’t actually “bought” anything - you’ve just licensed the book in the format that works with iBooks, to be used with iBooks. So in the future, if you have the option to buy a non-DRM copy from an author or other source vs. getting the one from Apple, you may want to consider that. I’ve seen some books where it was available both ways. :slight_smile:

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8

I know that it is possible to read DRM-free epub format ebooks in the Apple Books iOS and macOS readers—I do so myself from time-to-time. I don’t know if books can be sold in the Apple Books store DRM-free. For a while Apple insisted that any books sold in the Apple Books store had to carry Apple’s proprietary DRM.

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