Both methods are easy. It's then a case of using FFmpeg with an -activation_bytes parameter to convert to MP3 or whatever (or just remux into an M4A/M4B without transcoding). Tutorial here:
There are a bunch of other tools (both commercial and free) which use the above techniques but add either a nice CLI or GUI. The original was Inaudible itself, which can be found on your favourite torrenting site. Alternatively you can grab it from here, but I'm not sure how up-to-date it is:
The creator presumably gets a very small cut. If you want to pay the creator, why not send the full price, or some amount, directly to them?! I'm sure they would appreciate that.
In England: format shifting isn't a criminal offence (unless you do enough of it to affect business, or you do it as part of a business). The rights holders could sue to recover the cost of the media, but it's confusing what that would be. It keeps going into and out of law -- sometimes it's allowed, sometimes forbidden. I have no idea what the status is now. There's potentially something there about circumventing a technical measure, but again that's not a criminal offence.
There are exceptions if you're making something accessible.
Copyright infringement is generally a criminal act if the act of copying provides an expectation of any type of monetary gain, where monetary is broadly defined to be anything of value [1][2].
So removing the DRM on something that you already have a license to consume? Not a copyright infringement crime. Sending a copy of the DRM free product to a friend who hasn't bought a copyrighted version? Yes a copyright infringement crime. Removing the DRM that limits your ability to consume the product unless you buy a specially licensed version of the product, when you haven't paid for it, yes a copyright crime.
Removing the DRM is a DMCA violation though, even if you have no intent to distribute. The doctrine of first sale was gutted for digital content because Congress is in the pocket of big companies.
When the Learning Disabilities Association complained that the DMCA prohibited people with disabilities from removing DRM to enable their products to work with assistive tools, no change was made to the law as it was deemed the law does not prohibit DRM removal in this case. The Entertainment Software Association stated [1]:
> In addition, DIYAbility’s initial comments do not provide sufficient information to know whether what it would like to do would actually violate Section 1201, rather than, for example, being permitted by Section 1201(f).
Here's a link to section 1201(f) of the Circumvention of copyright protection systems references reverse engineering [2].
> It seems faster/easier just to pirate from the get go.
Others have pointed out that authors won't get paid that way. But I also disagree that it is faster or easier to pirate. First you have to have a decent source (or multiple sources) to search for the books, hope that they are decent enough quality, hope that they have enough peers that you don't have to wait a day to download the book, etc. By contrast, on Audible you press one button to buy and another to download. Even when you take into account any DRM removal, the necessary time and effort are much lower.
I don't consume audio books so I certainly don't pirate them but most of the cost of piracy is frontloaded into 5-10 minutes finding a decent resource and then is as easy to use as any other resource.
This actually mirrors the time where someone who was interested in audiobooks would take to find a source to shop for audiobooks, create an account, confirm the email validation, enter payment info and start buying.
As a test I entered stephen king audiobook into my torrent client's built in search engine and got 210 results any of which can be added with a click. The worlds most well known piracy site is even better listing a torrent with 70 people with 68 different audio books by king among many other torrents.
There's a script on github to get the encryption key for your account by letting it sign in for you.
Then from there it's easy to get ffmpeg to turn the DRM aac to a mp3