I've never had trouble before, and now I can't get any of these books DRM free.

I use Mac. I've always used Calibre with the plugins with no problem.

A friend sent me a bunch of books she'd bought and they seem to be azw1 and azw3 (one said it was Kindle Topaz in the Calibre error message)

I've also tried the one tool I can find for Mac, DRM Removal or something.

Any ideas? Or does anyone want to try and crack these?

I've never had trouble before, and now I can't get any of these books DRM free.

I use Mac. I've always used Calibre with the plugins with no problem.

A friend sent me a bunch of books she'd bought and they seem to be azw1 and azw3 (one said it was Kindle Topaz in the Calibre error message)

I've also tried the one tool I can find for Mac, DRM Removal or something.

Any ideas? Or does anyone want to try and crack these?

Only she can crack those with Calibre. You cannot. Calibre uses Kindle for Windows/Mac to access the keys for books. If she gave you her login and you logged into her account on your local machine, and then you ran Calibre, then it would work.

I do not know of ways of cracking Kindle files without having keys stored locally... it's just too hard to crack that heavy encryption.

That's weird, because I've had no problems before, until these azw3 files. Do you know if there are any Windows progz that might work? I've got Windows on my machine, I just never fire it up. But I would for these books. LOL.

I don't know if it'll work since it is not your original kindle-books, but I use the ePUBee DRM Removal tool to remove my DRM (from http://epubee.com/). I know it's called epub-removal but the latest edition also removes DRM from kindle. Personally I've got better luck using this than with Calibre. It could be worth a try... oh... I not a mac user so I don't know it will or how it can work on mac... you might know that better yourself.

I don't know if it'll work since it is not your original kindle-books, but I use the ePUBee DRM Removal tool to remove my DRM (from http://epubee.com/). I know it's called epub-removal but the latest edition also removes DRM from kindle. Personally I've got better luck using this than with Calibre. It could be worth a try... oh... I not a mac user so I don't know it will or how it can work on mac... you might know that better yourself.

Well, if you check that website you listed, it too needs you to have Kindle installed and you have to be logged in and be able to read the books on you PC. And it's even more specific than Calibre since it cannot decrypt books downloaded with Kindle 1.5 or later.

None of the apps out there can decrypt Kindle DRM using brute force (it's just impossible) and they all rely on using Kindle's keys that are updated when you purchase books from Adobe Digital Editions or Amazon.

On a Mac, there's an excellent DRM remval app: http://www.ebook-converter.com/kindle-d ... al-mac.htm but it too needs you to be logged in to Kindle and be able to view books on your machine... or be able to extract the key. Maybe OP could ask the person from which he got the books for this key...