How to Check for DRM in Calibre

If you, like me, are downloading all your Kindle books before Amazon take away the ability to do so on the 26th Feb 2025 and are using Calibre to keep them all catalogued, you may be wondering about DRM.

Unfortunately, it is a fact of life that some books with have DRM, which makes them unreadable on anything except the Kindle anyway. The only way you figure this out is when you go to view the books and it says it can't open them because of DRM.

There is a really quick and simple way to highlight multiple books and find out which ones have DRM without having to open all of them individually:

Attempt to convert them

If they have DRM the conversion with fail.

Steps to Check for DRM

Import the books into Calibre by highlighting the files in your Kindle download directory and dragging them onto the Calibre book listing.
If you don't already have it as a column, add the formats column to your Calibre layout - this will make those that have failed easy to see.

Click the Preferences button in the main menu
Choose "Add your own columns"
Check the box next to formats (#13 on mine) and hit save

Now select all the books that need checking in the main book listing.
Click "Convert books" from the main menu
Choose the book format you wish to convert into from the dropdown - I use ePub because it is the most universal - and hit go.
Error messages will pop up for those books that won't convert - just click the close button, we don't need to remember which ones have failed.
Now all those books which don't have the additional format in the format col are the ones with DRM. I then added a tag to all the DRM books so I can find them easily again later when I decide what to do with them.

If there is a simpler way of doing this, please LMK, but I couldn't see one inside Calibre. This was the quickest way to do it all in bulk that I could find.

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