Never Hurts to Ask: Getting a DRM-free eBook

I recently purchased a Kindle book from Amazon called Operationalizing Threat Intelligence. The book itself isn't important (well it is to me, but that's not the point of this post). It's a hefty book at 600+ pages, and I don't love reading textbooks on my Kindle. So why did I buy it? Because I wanted to throw it at NotebookLM and distill that knowledge into an easily-consumable format. Just one problem: Amazon got real annoying with their DRM lately.

Historically, one could just use Calibre to take any ebook, strip it of its DRM, and read it however. In this case, PDFs are a pretty good way to give context to LLMs. However, even after following multi-step processes from random websites and installing extensions I never heard of, I still couldn't remove the DRM from this book.

I got the cute idea to ask one of the authors nicely to send me the PDF via LinkedIn. He didn't reply, and that's honestly fine; he's probably busy. But maybe I could ask the publisher instead? The book contained an email address for inquiries so I fired one off sharing my Amazon order number and politely asked for a PDF. 

But how can I use an LLM to solve this for me?

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. While that metaphor doesn't quite fit here, Simon Willison recently wrote about using Claude Code with Playwright. That tickled something in my brain: Amazon lets you read Kindle books directly in your browser. Playwright lets you programmatically navigate a browser and take screenshots... Maybe I can take a few hundred screenshots and compile them into a PDF?

I fired up Claude Code, and essentially told it:

1. Use Playwright to open a browser to the eBook (I had to log in manually)
2. Take a screenshot of the current page
3. Click the button to advance to the next page
4. Check if you're at the end of the book
5. GOTO 2

And off it went! Sort of. At one point it recognized this could be scripted, so it wrote a script. And then another one. And another one... Some bash, some Python.

None of them worked. I told it to stop doing that and instead focus on iterating through the book "manually." It worked for about fifteen pages, then it went off the rails again. 

At this point I gave up and began eyeing Anna's Archive. But then I got a reply from the publisher!

In order to claim the PDF you can follow the below steps:

Visit https://www.packtpub.com/en-us/unlock/9781801814683?step=1
• Scroll down to click on 'Continue to step 2'
• Register a Packt account
• Enter your source of purchase and upload your invoice.

Once your invoice is validated you will be redirected to https://www.packtpub.com/my-account/orders to find, access and download the eBook in PDF/EPUB

I'm glad I thought to ask! I get a legitimate copy, and the publisher can measure the demand for non-DRM books in different formats. In this case, it's great to see the publisher already has a whole process available. I'm very happy with this level of support and even filled out the followup survey!