I recently had an interesting exchange with a user on Facebook in the Japanese Literature group, which I wanted to mention here, along with a partial solution to the problem that was exposed.
Until recently, it was apparently possible to download the source file of an ebook from Amazon KDP books (via “Devices and Content”) into an ePub or PDF, and then download this content to an e-reader via USB. This was helpful because it allows reading on an ebook even if there is no internet available at the time.
But it seems that it also allowed getting around DRM for ebooks, and perhaps for that reason Amazon blocked this feature on February 25 of this year (2025).
This might not seem very relevant to Japanese study, but it turns out that having access to this file allowed said file to be imported into other apps. For example, “Midori”, which allows keeping track of words you looked up for later study, and also allows exporting vocab in ANKI format. When Amazon killed the export, they also blocked all of those people who were trying to use Midori or other similar study tools.
I can’t offer any general way to get around this problem, however for those of you who have bought books from Arigatai Books that have Japanese text (like this book which is listed in both Japanese and parallel Japanese/English), I would be glad to give you the source file in whatever format you like.
If you would like to get the source file of a book you bought, please email me at selftaughtjapanese@gmail.com While this is intended mostly for books with Japanese text, I will consider doing it for English-only books on a case-by-case basis.
From what I remember, most if not all books published by Arigatai Books do not have DRM anyway, so I think it’s fair to be able to give out the source files.