Removing E-manga DRM
For this guide I’m going to cover removing Kobo’s DRM specifically, but these steps are probably applicable to other ebook sellers. There are many reasons why you would want to remove the DRM, namely to put it in a more accessible program (especially in Kobo’s case) or archive it for yourself.
You’ll need:
You will need an Adobe account, this doesn’t cost anything but they’re definitely going to try and upsell you. Just be careful, keep in mind that you don’t need to give them money to register an account. It’s worth downloading all of these beforehand and making sure you’re signed in.
Alf’s tools are plugins for Calibre, they have a guide here on how to install it. I didn’t need to manually set my keys, but you may—I don’t know what it’s dependent on.
Downloading
Go to Kobo, under ‘My Account’ > ‘My Books’. This is a list of all the things you’ve bought, find the one you want and click the 3 dots underneath it, then click ‘Download’. This is not an ebook file, it’s more like a download link specifically for ADE.
Open it in ADE, and wait for it to download. It may take some time, as I mentioned in my buying e-manga guide these aren’t small like ebooks are. If you open it in the ADE reader, the pages might be tiny and unreadable, I don’t know why it does this but it doesn’t effect the end product. Don’t worry too much about it.
Calibre
In ADE, find the manga and right click it, then hit ‘Show File in Explorer’. Make sure you only have one selected, ADE likes to randomly select extra books and it won’t dump you in the right directory if you have multiple selected. You should see an .epub file here!
Now open Calibre, you can drag and drop the .epub file into Calibre, it’ll read it and it should remove the DRM. Open it to check, if it looks like a mess of symbols/anything weird then make sure you installed Alf’s tools correctly, and that your ADE is linked to an Adobe account. If it’s just tiny then don’t worry about it, so long as you can see the images and see that they’re the correct images it’s fine.
Getting Files
In Calibre, underneath the cover of the book is a section that says ‘Path’ and ‘Click to open’, click it and it will open up where the DRM removed .epub file is located. Copy it somewhere safe, and rename it so it’s a .zip file instead of a .epub file.
Open the .zip file, and navigate to /item/image/, here is where all of the images are located! Extract these wherever you want and you can view them. They’re the same size as the original, this process doesn’t affect them or their quality at all. You’re now free to do what you wish with them!