How much money and influence has Jeff Bezos? I don’t care neither but it’s definitely too much for a single person.
Since I don’t want to support such an exaggerated big company, quitting Amazon was the logical consequence.
Better late than never
After countless forms begging me not to cancel my subscriptions, I finally got rid of them.
But for now I had already “bought” 50 audio books. At least that’s what I thought, but in truth they were only borrowed for as long as my account existed.
In my opinion, after having under-proportionally supported the artists, the user should have the right to access their works in good conscience even without an Amazon account.
So I had no choice but to download and convert the files. I would like to tell you here briefly how I handled it using Ubuntu.
Disclaimer: I do claim credits for any basic idea behind the project. My work here included only puzzling the pieces together.
First part: Download your files
The easy way
Checkout: audible-downloader
The manual way
If the scripts in the repo above don’t work you could try a manual approach to download all files in batch. In order to get things done we need all download links from your audible library.
Login to your audible account using your favorite browser.
Go to your library
Make sure to set the filter to all
Scroll down to display as many items in one page as possible (e.g. 50)
open your developer console (F12 in Firefox)
gather all titles using the following JS
copy and paste the links into the bash script
Second part: Resolve your activation key
The downloaded files are encrypted by amazon within their proprietary file format aax. In order to convert the files into mp3 or ogg we need to decrypt their file format using a secret key (bound to your amazon account).
I highly recommend using audible-activator for this job. The tool fetches the key from your browsers audio player.
Third part: Conversion
After resolving your key we can now convert all the downloaded files
The easy way
You can download and apply:
But unfortunately this didn’t work out for me so I’ve tried the manual approach.
The manual approach
Download and install: AAXtoMP3
edit the shell script
and viola! We can finally delete the Amazon account.
Please let me know if you have any questions.