The product itself does the job, after a fashion. But the selling practices and pricing are very deceptive.
There is no free trial version for a start, you then get sent to a sales page, which displays an "official" price ($25) but it isn't clear that you can only use the software for one year and then you have to pay again (for a measly 10% "discount") or buy a "lifetime" license ($50).
The payment receipt I received from Avangate (2checkout) did not specify that I had purchased a one-year license and my 2checkout account shows that the license is non-recurring and still active after more than one year. But Epubor support refused to rectify the matter, claiming that I had purchased a one-year license and that I must now buy a lifetime license for $45. (They didn't even mention that the discounted price for this license is permanently $35.)
Also be aware that it is a Chinese company based in Wuhan. It does not comply with EU, USA, Australian, Canadian consumer or privacy laws.
And because they are a Chinese company, there is no way to prevent them from selling your email and private information to spammers or list builders.
So you are taking a huge privacy and safety risk by installing this software on your computer.
(This obviously applies to most software companies registered in places like China or Russia, say.)
Epubor Ultimate will NOT remove azw3 drm encryption. There solution is to have you revert to an older version of the Kindle app - which is not possible if you are running OS Catalina. Neither will their KFX converter. I had forgotten why I never used Epubor and stupidly bought it again.
The price quoted here is for a 1 year license, a lifetime license costs $54.99. This version will not handle books created by the latest version of Kindle (#1.26), something which Epubor has chosen not to make clear here. The user must downgrade to any earlier Kindle (#1.23) which uses a different path to its book library thereby requiring work to find the #1.26 library. The on-line support appears to know little about Macs. And the free download only decrypts some of the text which makes it hard to judge how good the conversions are.
While this app could convert (and strip DRM) from many of my older Kindle books, it failed to convert more recent purchases. The app detected the failure and gives the user the opportunity to send feedback (presumably to improve the app). It's likely that Amazon changed/improved their encryption scheme. In any case, as of now, this app has become mostly useless.
I wanted to convert a Kindle .azw file to a .pdf file. I tried every app I could find and none, including Epubor, could remove the DRM. All but one, Epubor, had no customer support. So, I filed a ticket with Dpubor.
Their customer support operation is the best I have encountered in my 50 years working on computers. They fixed the bug that prevented them from removing the DRM, and converting the .azw book to a .pdf file. However, the .pdf file was not correctly formatted.
As a temporary work around, I used Epubor Ultimate to create a .azw3 file which Calibre could read and produce a correctly formatted .pdf file.
I look forward to Epubor creating correctly formatted .pdf files from Kindle .azw files.
The bottom line is that Epubor customer support is a five star operation. They even introduced me to TeamViewer so they could access my computer to speed up the diagnosis and fix of the problem.
Epubor understands the value of good customer support both to customers and to developers.
The developer's advertisements notwithstanding, the current version of the software cannot handle Kobo DRM. When I reported this the asked for MY Kobo account so they could test their own software!
Sheesh! You'd think they could at least open their own Kobo account!
Cheers. I noticed that you, the developers of this application use GPL v2 libraries, and linking against them. The thing is that linking a GPLv2 library in your closed source application, it will become a derivative work according to the clause 0 of the GPL v2 License. So, that means that this application should be licensed under GPL v2. That also means you need to have a way to give the source code when requested (to others, there is no problem selling software with GPL v2 license, except it's open source.
So, who may i contact to obtain the source code?
Even if you disregard my comment, you should at least comply to the most easy parts of the licenses used here; to give Credits to the copyright holders, that most of the libraries used demands according to the licenses.
To give one example. You use older versions of libpoppler, that goes under GPL v2. As it states in the README file, that are not present in your build:
”Please note that xpdf, and thus poppler, is licensed under the GPL, not the LGPL. Consequently, any application using poppler must also be licensed under the GPL.” .
Also, you claim this is 5x faster than other eBook converters, which i find very hard to believe, as the underpinnings is almost the same as Calibre, alas reorganized and boosts less features. An as it seems, there are plenty of apps clones and look almost the same as this, both on Windows and Mac and do the same stuff. Also, the webpages for the products, including yours almost always is built the same way, uses the exact same ”selling texts”. But more interesting, most webpages (including yours) also have a link page with links to ”friends” or ”recommended software” that for some reason always include Wondershare.
As your software and the identical clones uses the exact same strategy as the applications by Wondershare that goes under different brands and names, you may not be surprised that i believe that you may belong to this category. The company on your page, that holds the ”copyright”, don't even exist.
But it gives a feeling that it's based in Europe or Japan. However, the traffic from the site mostly comes from a large Chinese Social Media site (think Facebook), and somehow, the ones ”reviewing” this app, and some of the Wondershare ones (including the Wondershare owned clone Brands iSkySoft and so on), seems to be the same persons. On some occasions, they reviewed or gave tips on other software, but always with a ”but these are slower or not as good as product X”. This is a pattern you see on english based sites and forums also.
It's not that hard to see which of the users that are fake ones. Somehow cute when you see the use of Shutterstock photos added to the ”profile” of the raving reviews.
And the fact that you, the ones that made this app and others, hide who owns the domain via the GoDaddy service Domainbyproxy don't really feel like a good thing to do, as it feels like you are hiding something.
Ok, I can't even download this tool – Download is very slow (5-10 KB/s) first, and then it stops after a couple hours with a timeout related error message.
That’s very frustrating as you have only three day to activate the app after purchase/receiving the license!
Also irritating: The download-page says the file is only 967KB, but it starts downloading a 57.6 MB zip-file.
Since it still can't remove DRM from iBooks purchases, it's really no different from the free tools you can install for Calibre, is it? Didn't think so.
