Can you help me email a kindle book?

September 5, 2018 10:55 PM

With Kindle books, is there still a way to access a file that can be transferred and read?

I have a friend in the Middle East who asked me to download an ebook off of amazon and send it to them. I bought the book, and when I went to use the "send as a gift" option, it said "Sorry, you purchased an item that we cannot email." So I downloaded the book to my iMac and downloaded the Kindle app for desktop, figuring it would store the file somewhere on my computer. I found where it's supposedly stored, but it doesn't look like a readable file.

This is the book, so you can see why it appears to be an emergency to get it to them quickly.

posted by miss lynnster to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Somewhere there'll be a file with a .mobi extension, that's the book. It's not immediately human-readable (unless you've got a reader, the kindle app or a program like Calibre).
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 11:23 PM on September 5, 2018 [1 favorite]

Best answer: You can install Calibre and the de-drm plugin.
A quick howto from here:

Install calibre. Install the DeDRM_plugin in calibre. ... Restart calibre. In the DeDRM_plugin customisation dialog add in any E-Ink Kindle serial numbers and your B&N account email address and password. Remember that the plugin only tries to remove DRM when ebooks are imported.

posted by trig at 11:23 PM on September 5, 2018 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Flasco:

No files with a .mobi extension in the folder. There's just this:

One Amazon .voucher file
One .azw file (118KB)
One .mbpV2 file (123 bytes)
One .phl file (1KB)
One .azw.res file (12KB)
One .azw.md file (62KB)
posted by miss lynnster at 11:36 PM on September 5, 2018

Response by poster: Trig:

This is all a little over my head... but I have a Mac, does that plugin work with Mac? And does it work with Amazon files? (See above what files Amazon seems to have downloaded.)
posted by miss lynnster at 11:38 PM on September 5, 2018

Response by poster: I think I figured it out!!! I googled what Trig was talking about and came across this page and followed its instructions. I had to delete the current version of Kindle because the new version had some kind of extra encryption, but that seemed to do the trick! Fingers crossed. :)

Thank you both!!! :)
posted by miss lynnster at 11:58 PM on September 5, 2018 [4 favorites]

For a Kindle book with the newer encryption (that's azw as opposed to the older mobi), you can loan a book to someone for two weeks.

You have to do it from the Amazon website, not inside the Kindle or app. Amazon has documented the process.
posted by Jesse the K at 11:29 AM on September 7, 2018

@ Jesse the K - have you found this to be an option on most of your books? I used to be on a site called lendle.me (where you could request to borrow Kindle books) and the availability was terrible, so I just stopped visiting it. The publishers had locked down the books so they couldn't be borrowed.
posted by getawaysticks at 5:18 PM on September 7, 2018

I wish I had definite answers--I've only been the lucky recipient of loans.
posted by Jesse the K at 5:10 PM on September 15, 2018