So is this the end of DRM on Kindle books? Because it works fine in Chromium, which I have full access to the source code for. That means I can make it do anything, including dump out the text that I'm looking at.
I dug around a little bit and found that it's storing its data in a sqlite database in ~/.config/chromium/Default/databases/https_read.amazon.com_0/2 (there's an index of what's in what database in ../Databases.db). I did a "select * from fragments", found some things that look like data URLs representing images, pasted them into my browser and yup... those are the pictures from the book I'm reading. So, DRM fail.
As for the text of the book, I see some words from the book surrounded by garbage. So if this is encryption, it's pretty bad. Excerpt:
Doesn't having some encryption, even if it is trivial to break, mean that the DMCA applies if you are in the US turning this activity into a criminal act?
It's like the difference between trespassing vs. breaking and entering. If you have to turn a doorknob, it's trespassing. But picking a lock is breaking and entering. If you can read the plain text in Notepad, I don't think it counts. From http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/dltr/articles/2009dltr003.h...
The anti-circumvention provisions of §1201 were intended to "encourage[] technological solutions" to piracy by providing legal sanctions against the circumvention of such technology. Realizing that "what may be encrypted or scrambled often may be decrypted or unscrambled," Congress thought it necessary to provide an alternate form of protection to those willing to invest in (and implement) "effective" technological measures. Section 1201 "does not mandate the adoption of any . . . technological protection;" it merely "takes those technological measures that win adoption because of their efficacy and confers [statutory] protection on them." If, as Congress suggested, the circumvention of a technological measure designed to protect a copyrighted work truly is "the electronic equivalent of breaking into a locked room in order to obtain a copy of a book," providing a legal remedy if the lock fails seems entirely reasonable and appropriate.
Isn't violating copyright(except for fair use) already illegal? If you photocopy a book fully and give it your friend, you're already violating copyright and can receive a takedown notice[1], regardless of the anti-decryption clause of the DMCA.
IIRC/IANAL, violating the copyright without commercial intent (you are not selling it) is still a civil law violation although DMCA takedown provisions still apply. Breaking DRM elevates it to a criminal charge.
I think that is the case, but correct me if I am wrong, it has been awhile since I studied this.
If only there was some constitutional amendment that promised people the right "to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches".
This means: if you have some circumvention device whose presence cannot be detected from outside your home: too bad for the government. They can't do anything about it.
This is just a simple LZ compression scheme with a per-book, static dictionary. It's trivial to decompress, although that exercise is left to the reader.
To be fair, you can find tons of kindle books for free in torrents and on the internet anyway, amazon doesnt stop you even from copying them to your kindle. I m sure amazon and even the authors are aware of those limitations and are focusing on a better experience readers would be willing to pay for.
Kindle user here. Started out by downloading a handful of books from various authors whom were recommended to me. After seeing how poorly formatted some pirated books were, I downloaded some samples of other books, and the formatting was great.
Went and bought a whole whack of books right after that. I pirated the first book in Song of Fire and Ice (Game of Thrones) and bought the rest because I loved the book so much.
So yes, Amazon has played this arena VERY well, in my opinion.
I've used both a Kindle and Nook and found the formatting of books in stores to be poor for the majority of books (but not all). I get out-of-copyright classics (or public domain books) now from places like Feedbooks and Manybooks which do a much better job of quality control on the formatting. Feedbooks.com is my favorite but they only have a few thousand books.
When I had a Kindle, I first mostly bought free or very low cost books from the Amazon, though I checked out excerpts of more expensive books sometimes. Virtually none of them contained waypoints, and only a small fraction had table of contents when warranted. Graphics were terrible across the board (captions on a different page, not appropriately sized, etc. - try reading a Curious George sample to see how terrible it is).
If Amazon wants me to invest hundreds of dollars in buying books on their store, they're going to have to do a better job - perhaps some minimum quality guidelines.
I peeked at a few but didn't buy. Many books are just a long novel with no graphics. For such books, the Kindle store is fine as there are no issues with graphics or missing TOC or waypoints. But when I peeked at books that should have table of contents, quite a few of them didn't - even recent popular books.
I didn't do an exhaustive survey by any means, but the few full-priced (at least somewhat) popular contemporary books I checked out on both Kindle and Nook were better done (on average) on the Nook, as table of contents were more often included with Nook books.
To me - the fact that I should have to examine quality when paying $10 for a book is inexcusable. In a physical book store I don't have to worry about these things.
EDIT: replaced "chapters" with "table of contents"
I tried to get into out-of-copyright classics but I just can't read them. Call me stupid or uncultured but I prefer a good fiction book that is light hearted and will get me through my commute.
As for light-hearted fiction books - there's plenty. I just finished reading all 14 books in the Wizard of Oz series to my son (on my Nook). Zane Grey published a lot of Westerns as well as a few about baseball (I like the baseball ones). There's also some high quality public domain science fiction from authors such as:
Harry Harrison (only a few that he forgot to copyright)
Cory Doctorow
Peter Watts (Blindsight is awesome, Starfish is good too)
And if you like any of these, Feedbooks always suggests related titles at the end of the book that you might also like. On Kindles, these are live links for one click downloads.
Frankly, I'm amazed that the quality and organization of Feedbooks is so much better than the Nook and Kindle stores. Obviously there are far fewer titles though.
I found I could not count on these things for books in the Amazon or Barnes and Noble stores for low cost or free books. Even more expensive books often lacked table of contents (when one was appropriate - for books with chapters or short stories). More expensive books often lacked appropriate handling of graphics - Nook is bad, Kindle is worse.
Feedbooks almost always has table of contents when appropriate, and never has missing paragraphs, funny characters, etc. Though once (out of around 50 books) I encountered a chapter that was the duplicate of the previous chapter.
kindle user here. started out by downloading a handful of books from torrent. after seeing how poorly formatted some were, i started buying books from the kindle store. after the third or fourth book i bought, i realized amazon doesn't do any better a job than the pirates do.
as long as you download single books and not packs of .doc files, the formatting is probably better on pirated books in my experience.
Depends on the book! A lot of my Chuck Palahniuk pirated books were so poorly formatted that I just decided to buy the damned thing after viewing how good the sample was.
I've had quite the same experience. Downloaded some books, started reading it, and after enjoying the book so much, the little formatting errors were too much and decided to buy the book.
I think Amazon has mostly learned the mistakes of the record labels made. They realize if they go hog-wild on the DRM that the public are just going to go the torrents.
The rest of the publishing industry occasionally forgets and does dumb stuff (like get pissy over the text-to-speech function in order to protect their audiobook profits).
In fact, I won't be surprised if DRM is eventually dropped from eBooks you buy.
The textbook renting service Kindle introduced last month depends quite heavily on DRM.
I verified recently that I can "rent" a book for, say, 30% of its "buy" price, remove the DRM, and be left with a DRM-free book (not limited to a month rental).
It's padlock DRM, cheap, easy and keeps out the vast majority of casual piraters by being more of a hassle than just paying the usual $10. Biggest bang for the buck. People who are really cheap or poor would just go to the library and get it for free in some form or torrent it anyway and you wont get any money from those people.
Agreed, put your resources toward a much better user experience as opposed to preventing people from accessing your content.
DRM is something you have to constantly bandaid as people break it, and it's always broken quicker than you can push out fixes for the most part, so it's just futile.
"Optimized for iPad: shop the integrated Kindle Store for Tablets"
I was expecting this for a few months now, especially after Apple wanted to introduce that policy of theirs where they wanted a %30 cut. Amazon is not taking any chances with Apple anymore. Good for them. All content providers should use web-apps.
The innovation in web apps that Apple spurred by their payment restrictions is going to be good for everyone. The Financial Times' excellent iPad app has now been replaced by an equally impressive web app. Amazon's Kindle Cloud Reader is almost as responsive as the native app. I'm almost ready to switch to it. Should be interesting to see how this affects the number of books they sell.
Looks like they're using Web SQL for local storage. Mozilla foolishly (IMO) rejected this standard so they'd have to reimplement the storage layer with IndexedDB to get this working on FF.
WebSQLDB isn't really a "standard". The standard is "whatever version of sqlite safari happened to ship with" which is really not a tenable long-term solution.
Sure it is. Pick a version. Call it the spec and fork SQLite if necessary. You can't possibly argue that this would be more work than inventing a new, untested data storage model from scratch. This approach is exactly what ran the W3C aground in the first place.
Nice. Now, if they'd just drop their surcharge for ordering ebooks in mainland Europe I might actually use it. Paying $3-%5 extra per book just because I live somewhere else doesn't make sense with ebooks.
Don't complain to Amazon about their ebook prices. Since "agency pricing", they're (mostly) not allowed to set them anymore. Beyond agency pricing, some European countries (e.g. France, Germany) have tried to regulate the prices of ebooks themselves. Sadly, Amazon is stuck just as much as you are.
This specific complaint is about Amazon though. Even if a publisher sets the exact same price for every region, Amazon sometimes adds their own "Whispernet tax" of about $2 + VAT. They seem to be gradually phasing it out now, but for the longest time, there were e.g. no free books outside the US, because even books listed as "free" actually cost a minimum of $2 + tax.
This is because all kindles in mainland Europe all have
(edit) AT&T SIMs in them. It costs Amazon SIGNIFICANTLY more for you to use whispernet, because you are constantly roaming. The reason you pay the tax if you buy it on something other than the kindle itself is because at some point you could sync it on to your kindle, though archived items.
Sure, except that even Kindles that are wi-fi only had to pay the extra $2, not to mention those reading only on the PC or mobile app. It was a stupid system, but as I said, they are fortunately phasing the whole thing out now, and many books already have pricing parity (well, excluding VAT, but that's not Amazon's fault).
Strange. When I got my Kindle, it sounded like the "Whispernet tax" only applied when you bought books on the Kindle (so they were actually using Whispernet) outside of your home country. In other words, I'd be charged for Whispernet when using my US Kindle in Europe, but there would be no charge when I'm home (and there would be no charge if I bought via amazon.com and transferred via USB).
I had expected that the converse was true as well (a European would be charged for Whispernet in the US, but not in their home country and not when using USB). Since that isn't the case, I agree that sucks. I'm also more than a little surprised since it doesn't seem plausibly related to any actual cost Amazon bears.
FWIW, I'm in the UK and I've never heard of this whispernet tax before. Free books have been free ever since I got it (November). That might be related to there being a distinct "UK" edition of the kindle.
If you are in the EU but outside the UK (and I think Germany), you have to order books from Amazon.com. A free book costs $2 to deliver over whispernet
Well, if you're buying a classic book that's "free", you can often find the exact book that Amazon's "selling" at Project Gutenberg. Download to computer, copy to Kindle, done.
Of course that's not the easiest way, and you can't do it "on the go", but a little preplanning will get you a bookshelf of books already queued up.
As far as I understand you have more surcharges to fear from European authorities than from Amazon.
Signed - unhappy person living in Norway, where the government is enforcing VAT (which is 25%) on all digital services bought abroad, including ebooks and Apple Store apps. Which is especially lame given that actual books are exempt from VAT (I love actual books, but why the unequal treatment?)
I'm from Germany and I have heard from people who have registered their account with a address in the united states and a valid credit card which is also registered to a guy living in the united states. If you can do this you can buy from the american kindle store and you are paying for the same books less money than european customers.
I hope they will get this right without a hack in the future.
Hmm, I am from Germany, too. I don't have a Kindle, but I use the Android and other Kindle Apps and I have purchased several books and even a magazine subscription using my german credit card (and never gave them an additional address in the states). Also, I can sign into Amazon.com using my german Amazon account, I don't remember when they changed this, but at some point it just worked. I am not going to move to the German Amazon Kindle Store, as for example that magazine subscription is not available in the German Kindle store. To me, that is the real problem at hand (besides the fact that they shouldn't expect you to pay the same amount of money for a digitally distributed version as you would have to pay for the dead tree version, but that's a totally different issue, which has already been discussed a lot).
There's no problem in using the Kindle store from other countries -- you're just paying $3-$5 dollars more for exactly the same thing as you'd get if you are registered in the US.
You can check this by going to the same kindle page with an account with a US-based address, or a proxy in the US. For example, here are the prices for two ebooks, one from .nl and one through an anonymous proxy:
I think sometimes it's not that people are cheap, it's just that the internet's been out for almost 20 years and these legal barriers that screw the customer don't need to exist.
Say what you like about bittorrent, at least it's egalitarian.
The surcharge has nothing to do with which country's store you use. Users in UK/Germany/Switzerland/Austria (and Lichtenstein?) do not have to pay the extra fee regardless of whether they use .com, .co.uk or .de. Users in other European countries pay it no matter what.
(E.g. your example book shows up as $4.03 from Switzerland).
I'm in Pakistan where Amazon doesn't even sell Kindles or books. The way I bypass that is to go to my Amazon account on their website, and set my country as US.
I have been buying books from the American kindle store and paying using a non-US credit card and it works just fine, have been doing so for over a year.
It works even with a US delivery address in your account that is separate from a possibly non-US billing address. You can simply switch back and forth the country in your profile to optimize for catalog availability and pricing.
They're highlighting their new iPad-optimized Kindle Store for Tablets. That is clearly a shot back at Apple for the recent "eBookstore Armageddon". Given how close they were to releasing their web app, I'm a little surprised that they didn't play more hardball with Apple, though.
No irony intended, actually. Although the emphasis on the iPad here shows how successful Apple has been at making this a one-platform market either way.
I can now read Kindle books on any computer with a reasonable browser. I can't even read iBooks on my Mac. I prefer O'Reilly-style DRM-free PDFs, but at least I don't have to own an iDevice for the rest of my life to read my ebooks.
I was expecting a similar experience to this on my desktop as well. Loved the web app but wish the store was also optimized and didn't just dump me onto the main AMZN site ;(
I hope O'Reilly and Safari Books Online take note. I use Safari but its web app to read the books is so slow as to make the whole experience painful and doesn't provide nearly the value it could.
It also seems to be very Microsoft IE optimized and basically lets you read one and only one book at a time, regardless of whether you have a post 2005 tabbed browser or not.
Yeah, I was sorely disappointed when I tried Safari. Great selection, but the interface is horrible. And they make it very hard to cancel your subscription. I expected better from O'Reilly. (It's actually a joint venture between O'Reilly and Pearson, which explains a lot. Still, it's a blight on O'Reilly's otherwise stellar reputation.)
This is wonderful. My one gripe with Kindle books was that I couldn't access them from my Ubuntu workstation. Because of that, I actually purchased a second copy of some titles from the Google eBookstore or resorted to pirating a PDF.
It doesn't look like you can highlight passages, though. And the lack of copy and paste, while understandable, will surely be grating in a desktop environment.
The misspelling in the title is quite intentional -- cek is Charlie Kindel, former GM of Windows Phone Developer Experience (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2860646).
It should also be said that he's a great guy that I've known for more than a decade. Anyone who's interested in taking part in an early stage Seattle startup should definitely send him a message.
Well, on LinkedIn or Twitter or Google+ I guess -- Charlie, please add contact info to your HN profile!
[Edit] Looks like the title spelling has been corrected...
When I posted this link to twitter I did intentionally mis-spell it (my tweet was "Oh, wow. The Amazon Kindel (er, Kindle) Cloud Reader is live: http://bit.ly/pBoMhS.
But, When I pasted it here to share on HN, I removed the "(er,...)" and MEANT to fix the original. My apologies for not doing that. Glad someone at HN was able to fix it.
@jonburs - My contact info IS in my HN profile, not sure why it's not showing up.
So... you can't cut and paste from it. Anyone want to dig in and look at how it's implemented? They must be fairly confident that people aren't going to use it to rip books off.
http://www.free-ocr.com/, or, I guess any OCR tool will do a job. But then - people could always have done (and probably did) that with a physical book, so, I'm not sure whether it would be worth it to make it more difficult to do with the digital book.
Well if someone created the software to do it, you could rip digital books automatically - not quite as easy to do with paper books, what with having to scan all the pages (possibly after first unbinding the book).
It's interesting to see Amazon working around the iPad's artificial limitations in this way. jrockway's comment about the sqlite database is particularly interesting. I'm not convinced that it would be particularly feasible to implement DRM in a cross browser way without causing serious performance problems (although I await to be unpleasantly surprised).
I've just bought my first e-books with this week's Pragmatic Programmer 40% sale ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2861479 ). I'm now interested in buying an e-reader. Still hesitating between Kindle, Nook, iPad, or an Android tablet...
This might just tip the scale toward the Kindle DX.
I consolidated from a Kindle and iPad to just the iPad for travelling but I miss the Kindle. It's smaller and more comfortable to read and I prefer it for everything but books with a lot of equation or diagrams.
There are rumors Amazon is bringing out a color Kindle that is more an iPad like tablet than a book reader, likely based on Android.
Given the (apparently) great HTML5 work that went into building the Cloud Reader, I wonder what we'll see for UI in the color Kindle. Will there be a suite of apps that are all HTML5?
Would anyone like to guess why search has been omitted in the web version? Also, for reference / technical books, it would be nice if the authors could mark certain blocks of content to allow copy and paste. It feels weird to have to retype all the code examples from a digital publication.
They're using the Web SQL database to store the books on the client. This has never been supported by Firefox. Alternatives are becoming available, but it's not surprising that they started with the most established client-side database. It's also the only one supported by Safari, and since it seems like tablet support is one of their goals, that's important.
They probably will. They don't need to support everything off-the-bat, particularly since it doesn't seem like desktop browsers are even the primary target.
WebSQL was abandoned because Mozilla refused to support it for (IMO) spurious reasons. IndexedDB support is uneven at best in modern browsers. Amazon chose (rightly, again IMO) to use something that works and is available now.
Mozilla is reaping the benefits of their nonsensical stance here.
I wouldn't say the reasons were entirely unfounded. The biggest one seemed to be that Mozilla did not want to reverse engineer SQLite to conform to the spec (and yes, that was in the spec.) It did seem a little backward for a big feature of HTML5 to suddenly die, but hey, it's all a work in progress, and IndexedDB looks mighty fine.
SQLite was the spec. Instead of extracting a spec from a working implementation of a bedrock internet technology they've gone old-school W3C blue-sky and designed a half-assed NoSQL spec instead.
I've supported Mozilla in all their battles over patent-encumbered technologies in web specs but in this case they've fragmented the HTML5 spec for no good reason.
"SQLite was the spec" was the problem. No arbitrary version of any arbitrary vendor's software should be the core of a web-wide spec, no matter whether it's open source or popular or loved by millions.
The HTML5 authors & editors have already spent years reverse engineering and describing the behavior of existing browsers as part of that spec.
I'm sure everyone was overjoyed at the prospect of starting the same process for every quirk and bug of that specific version of SQLite, and bumping the spec every time the project released a new version. Or, alternately, living with a fork of that specific version of SQLite forever.
Seriously, that's an awesome way to write and maintain a spec. How about you do the web a solid and give it a shot? Come back when you've got something.
So inventing a completely new, untested set of storage semantics, and implementing them across browsers, is easier than picking a version of SQLite and forking it if necessary?
The backend for IndexedDB in Chrome is LevelDB, which is what Google uses internally for most of their webapps. That certainly shows that it's not just a half-assed NoSQL spec.
It shows only books downloaded to the 1st Kindle associated with particular account. Anyone knows how to display books from all Kindles on that account?
Shows books associated with all of my devices. Or, to be more accurate, all of the books I have purchased, in archive or on a device, are present. Including seven (7) unique copies of the Amazon Kindle Guide.
I dug around a little bit and found that it's storing its data in a sqlite database in ~/.config/chromium/Default/databases/https_read.amazon.com_0/2 (there's an index of what's in what database in ../Databases.db). I did a "select * from fragments", found some things that look like data URLs representing images, pasted them into my browser and yup... those are the pictures from the book I'm reading. So, DRM fail.
As for the text of the book, I see some words from the book surrounded by garbage. So if this is encryption, it's pretty bad. Excerpt:
⟳As➁⨋0⫪⟳I➁⨋0⬀⟳exit,➁⨋0⭂⟳I❪➖⨋0⭍⟳⡿❪➖⨋0⮥⟳m➁⨋0⮻⟳⢞⥞ys➁⨋0Ⰸ⟳⢵refu
"As I exit, I'm careful..."
Next step is to look for the source code that implements this and see what those garbage characters are doing.