Pirating books is not hard. They're probably the smallest possible thing that people are interested in copying with the broadest variation in acceptable formats.
I know I'm screaming into the void, but if I'm paying real money why is the experience from piracy sites better?
I've never experienced issues with them that break the reading experience. The one issue I occasionally run into is that the book progress doesn't sync when I open the app and I have to click "sync now" which sometimes is blazingly fast and sometimes takes like a minute.
I can't imagine migrating away from Kindle now, it's probably one of my favourite devices and the Kindle is my favourite way to read.
All seamlessly, because Kindle used the cellular network for reading progress. Really a magical experience.
Then they removed cellular and _buttons_ from the devices. And now their app is actively crashing on my Kindle when I try to use it to buy a book.
But the main problem is that they don't sync the "last read" bookmarks until you open a book. But since that book didn't have a bookmark, it's reset to the beginning and then synced, so my "last read" bookmark is now at the beginning.
That's all changed now. I'd love to know why it's changed. My first thought was publisher pressure. But Kobo hasn't implemented harsh measures. Just Amazon has.
At any rate, I'm now using Kobo for my reading. Easy to break DRM. And they don't assume the same level of control over Kobo ereaders the way Amazon does with Kindle. I have over a thousand ebooks. I'm able to tag books in Calibre, and those tags automatically show up as Collections on the Kobo. It's a simple thing, but Amazon never gave me such flexibility. Makes a huge difference for me.
It's also possible to alter Kobo's UI/UX with various plugins without the need to jailbreak. Kobo (the company) is perfectly happy to let you do whatever you want with your own device. That's such a breath of fresh air compared to how Kindle is locked down.
I'm either old and stubborn or principled, but I want to use my current phone and "system" I've been using to read ebooks for the last 15 years.
(It's possible that kindle unlimited is a cheap enough system to make dealing with amazon software, but amazon is annoying enough that so far nothing has convinced me to buy into it)
It’s why archive.is is so much better to read on than a news site.
Might as well ask “when I engage with GPL projects it’s so much worse of an experience than if I just bundle the code and distribute it without a license, why?” It’s often cheaper to not comply than to comply.
But my kindle has definitely been “good enough” for me with Libby.
I wish more people would understand that we empower those companies by using their products and services. Avoid when you can and they lose their power.
When I tried, the only options from Amazon were 'transfer to my device' and that only works if you have a Kindle. There was 0 way to just download the stupid file and let me copy it myself.
There is a library built into the kobo you can purchase from, which I do for newer books. However, I've been on a classics kick and I pirate them tbh. Dumas doesn't mind.
The frequent use of bold emphasis, lists, and subject-only rhetorical questions ("Those tiny m3,1 m1,6 m-4,-7 commands? They're micro-MoveTo operations.") are classic LLM-speak, but they're used in such a way that makes me doubt that OP actually used an LLM to write this. I think that OP's natural prose just happens to be stylistically pretty similar to that of an LLM.
It's kind of sad that what were once signs of high effort and dedication (e.g. em-dashes) are now signs of low effort and dishonesty, despite the fact that people still use them in human writing.
My guess is that they wrote in combination with LLM output, so they didn't copy/paste from a single prompt step, and did a good job of putting their own motive and ideas in the blog, but ultimately the AI tone still penetrates through
That would provide a closer-to-original version of the ebook, rather than just a visually similar one.
That any of this is necessary at all is absurd. Hats off to anyone with the patience to bypass Amazon's DRM rather than giving up on the Amazon ebook ecosystem entirely.
The only viable option would be to buy the book and then pirate a de-DRM'd copy.
Dont pay for your own hope that you can pick the lock of your own paid for jail cell.
Feels jank to pay for the book AND pay to free it, but that's the world we live in.
A second peeve is that in dark mode you can only have gray on black, not white on black.
I’ve never seen a Kindle book rendering anything as vector graphics. That’s just not a thing in the Kindle world, as far as I can tell. It’s either basic text or pixel images.
One example I just checked is a book from MIT Press from 2021, where even √2 is rendered as an image, and also isn’t scaled correctly with respect to the text size. It really puts you off reading such books in Kindle.
Anyway, I guess my point is that TFA won’t help with what I find the most annoying about the Kindle experience.
Over the course of a couple years they updated their scrambling; First to randomize the size of the regions, then to make them triangular instead of rectangular. It was an interesting if tedious challenge to reverse engineer.
I jailbroke both kindles. And use koreader on them which now supports progress sync with Kavita which is amazing! So I don't really lose functionality.
But there were plenty of other bugs like bookshelf management getting corrupted.
"Was it worth it? To read one book? No. To prove a point? Absolutely. To learn about SVG rendering, perceptual hashing, and font metrics? Probably yes."
They broke that a while ago by making their DRM even worse, so now I just pirate those books.
At least Steve Jobs understood how DRM should work.
Pirated books have no DRM, usually come in an open .epub format, which can be converted to whatever your reader requires, and you end up actually owning them, even if amazon decides to abandon the kindle ecosystem.
This is why I have a Boox Android eInk tablet, although I only use it with burner accounts. They run Ancient versions of Android.
I run Storyteller app on it and have my ebooks & audiobooks synced up perfectly like whispersync but better.
I’m paying for BookFusion, to have synced cross-platform reading. It’s expensive, but seems to be one of the few cross-platform synced readers that supports the EPUB Media Overlays from Storyteller.
Have you experienced ghosting with your Boox tablet? I’d like to get one, but I know that ghosting would bother me.
I personally know people who pirate books, but pay hundreds of dollars a year for streaming services or battle pass type video games. It blows my mind. Books are so cheap people!
I recently bought the complete Storm Archives series by Brandon Sanderson on ebook for $10. That's over 100 hours of entertainment. It's literally a ratio of 10 CENTS per hour of entertainment.
At least you can transfer movies around different services. It’s a shame you can’t with books.
I've been downloading every book whose title I see mentioned anywhere. I've got the last 20 years or so of the NYT Book Review Notable Books (100 per calendar year), the Book of the Month Club list, etc. Why go to the library, when I can have one of my own?
The library ebook lending solutions tend not to avoid the DRM problem either.
Consider that maybe buying Amazon Kindle books is giving more support to DRM schemes like the one described in the article than it is to authors and publishers.
What is your definition of “cheap” and how many books do you consume compared to movies and TV shows on streaming services? You also haven’t stated which categories of books are cheap and are better value for you. Others may not have an interest in Storm Archives or something that’s interesting to you. There may be people interested in reading a lot of nonfiction alongside some fiction. Individual interests vary a lot.
Someone using only one streaming service may probably be getting thousands of hours of entertainment over one year.
Such comparisons also don’t account for regional price variations and availability.
I, too, do not buy ebooks that I cannot strip the DRM from. I would face a dilemma were I to have need of a book that I cannot get as either a physical copy or a DRM-free electronic copy, but I have not faced that situation yet.
I have spent over $2000 this year on books.
- Brandon Sanderson's books are actually relatively inexpensive, despite their popularity
- Brandon sanderson ebooks are available without DRM. Interestingly, this is actually more common for fantasy and SF than other genres.
Other books are more expensive and more likely to be locked behind DRM for digital books.
I know someone who wrote a (technical) book and how hard it is to get sales in the age of easy internet piracy.
I understand the desire to use the books as you please, but please remember that buying the book and downloading a pirated copy for your own use are not mutually exclusive choices.
You can still purchase the book to support the author even if you're not using the exact same file to read it. As the other commenter said, books are extremely cheap relative to the value and/or entertainment time they provide.
I think this is the problem that should be addressed.
Musicians went through a similar process in reverse order: first Napster ("piracy") then streaming services (analogous to Kindle/Amazon, where a huge 3rd party inserts themselves between content creator & consumer). Eventually some musicians twigged that they were getting screwed every way, so they set up ways for fans to pay them directly or via a less money-hungry intermediary (e.g. Bandcamp).
Not a perfect solution by any means, but if book authors feel their situation is bad enough, they could look into how musicians are dealing with it.
I'm probably not alone in thinking I'd far rather pay an author directly than Amazon or book publishers.
"Bookcamp", anyone?
There was a time I could go to Borders, Barnes and Noble, Crown Books, and a couple of independent bookstores. Now I can go to Barnes and Noble and the remaining independent store.
Seems like there should be some sort of new coop structure where a writer can engage with editors, graphics people, and marketers on a fee for service or sales percentage basis. Without the agent/publisher gatekeepers.
I haven't done that in a while though, so I'm not sure if they closed that loophole.
One of the big publishers put heavy pressure on Amazon to patch this exploit or else they would pull all their content from the platform (or so I was told).
(I worked at Kindle 2017-2019, and was on the team that wrote the code that OP reversed engineered)
For one thing, DRM also works in Amazon's favour (reselling multiple copies)
For another, DRM is a pretty big sticking point for copyright holders, music, text, whatever. It's the one big thing that publishers all think that their business model depends on
Personally, I buy more music now than any other time in my life: high quality sources playable on all my devices.
There are also plenty of good free books from indie authors like me (www.rodyne.com) that don't make it to Amazon. I also normally check out smashwords (www.smashwords.com) for their free books or sales, and download about 30 books - about 5 are usually worth keeping, which is about in line with Kindle books I pay for. Also worth signing up for your local library for the best-sellers, they often have partnerships to allow you to loan ebooks.
Sure seems like whoever at Amazon wrote this didn’t realize that it backdoors their DRM.
Or maybe they did, and now they will have to fix it.
We knew it was reverse-engineerable, we just didn't care.
Upper management seemed happy enough that it was pretty obfuscated, and we were happy that they didn't force us to do more about it.
This is very relatable. Management want X, engineers recognise X is dumb and deliver something that sorta looks like X, management see something that looks like X and are happy.
Email in bio if you have other questions about it you care to ask.
Amazon would need to drop this feature to seriously lock down their books
second books seems erroneous
good that you didn't read the terms of amazon's kindle business model before buying that book; all that delicious rage and the interesting knowledge it spurred would have been lost to the world. tbh, i would have expected them to be more sophisticated. good job and kudos, enjoy your well earned book, it's yours now!
sadly i have no use for this, the only few books i ever bought on amazon were paperback, used and in good condition. good deals. but the mere fact that a provider requires me to use specific software to access content is simply unacceptable, making a detailed reading of their absurdly dystopian terms and conditions unnecessary.
i use amazon prime. for me it's very worth it just for the delivery savings as i live in a remote area. it includes access to their video streaming service. one day i decided to try it just to see what was there. i was immediately prompted with a download for some mandatory viewer/drm/codec. not going to happen, baby, so i just closed the tab, never bothered with it again and have the feeling that nothing of value was lost.
A lot of authors only ever offer on Amazon now, which leaves those of us without Kindles (I love my Kobo) in a difficult spot.
Frankly I would write it as anti-competitive. How are other e-reader companies supposed to survive when Amazon owns all the e-books and can just decide that only their e-readers are allowed? No one else has even a fraction of the market.
Upper management really enjoyed telling us (the engineers) that we needed to implement more DRM, and we liked complaining that it was dumb.
Fun to see someone reverse engineer what we implemented!
One (niche) way to overcome not being able to download books from Amazon anymore is to get ebooks from a library that supports Overdrive/libby. (Some of?) Those support downloading DRM files directly from the app, which you then can run through Adobe + Calibre. Obviously, this is contingent on book availability and your ability to get a proper library card. But works for me for 90% of the books that I need.
It has direct integration with borrowing books from the library.
It has direct integration with Instapaper.
You can drag a file onto the device after mounting it over USB.
You can replace the endpoint for the store with a Calibre Web endpoint to directly sync your books from a personal server.
You can pretty easily modify the device however you see fit.
For me the library integration on the device itself was a major selling point. I have no complaints after switching four years ago!
I wondered if he was just tuning to the best algorithm for his corner case, but it's one of the algorithms in a decent OCR package anyway?
You'd only have to do a few hint/confirmations.
https://linuxsecurity.com/news/government/sklyarov-hearing-s...
Not a civil issue, like libel or fraud, but the sort of talk that can get a policeman to come and drag you off to jail. If you've ever wondered why DRM is so roundly hated by engineers of a certain age, it's because not only it dumb makework that they are required to implement, not only is it extremely irritating to discover it interfering with your own computer, but if you do effectively point out how dumb, irritating, and eminently circumventable it is, they made it against the law to even tell anyone.
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/licensing-scheme-fair-use...
> they made it against the law to even tell anyone.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
The law says “no person shall circumvent” DRM, and later prohibits the distribution of “technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof” to break DRM. It’s worded pretty carefully to avoid prohibiting more traditional forms of speech like this post, and as far as I’m aware has never been used in the manner you suggest.
These sorts of code are usually pretty short, right? It isn’t as if it needs to be maintainable or have a nice GUI.
Reality is moving away from states, and is now moving faster than legacy "laws" can ever hope to catch up.
That's a big part of what's fueling the wave of abandonment of DRM. I mostly play bluegrass - and given the lineal connection between traditional music and internet freedom, it probably comes as no surprise - but every serious bluegrass album is DRM-free now. Every grammy winner in the bluegrass and americana categories since at least 2020 has been DRM-free.
> Defendants then linked their site to those "mirror" sites, after first checking to ensure that the mirror sites in fact were posting DeCSS or something that looked like it, and proclaimed on their own site that DeCSS could be had by clicking on the hyperlinks on defendants' site. By doing so, they offered, provided or otherwise trafficked in DeCSS.
The appeal was mostly about whether the DMCA and/or the specific injunction in question violated the First Amendment, and the court found that it didn't.
(Universal City Studios vs. Reimerdes at the district court level, Universal City Studios v. Corley at the circuit)
REDACTED
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C1
Found not guilty, but he was charged and tried.
Not necessarily. Being found not guilty just means that the facts of that specific case, as determined by the jury, did not fit a guilty verdict. It doesn't mean that someone who did a similar or analogous thing couldn't be prosecuted under the same law and found guilty.
Not necessarily. A cynical modern legal strategy is to bombard people with frivolous legal actions that only the well-heeled can afford. Defendants can argue that claims are baseless or frivolous, but to make that argument, they must hire a lawyer and appear in court.
To see my point, look at the number of frivolous prosecutions now being launched by ... ah, never mind, I don't want to get political.
But individuals have been successfully prosecuted for "aiding and abetting" violations of the DMCA, where speech was a material element of the proscribed behavior. Oh, and -- IANAL.
Even accidentally releasing a demo or preview with DRM should invalidate copyright on that software/movie/book/whatever.
I wouldn't go that far. 18 months is long enough though.
This doesn't make for a good anti-DRM argument because the concern can simply be addressed by requiring a DRM-free copy to be deposited at the library of congress (or similar[1]) so it can be released in 150 years (or whatever) it actually becomes public domain.
Moreover how would you even define what "DRM" is? Is spotify refusing to provide a .mp3 file download for their streaming service a "DRM"? What if they implement streaming via webrtc, to make it extra-annoying to manually download? For games, is it "DRM" to add mandatory online requirements even for single player? What if there's an ostensible reason for the online requirement, like if the gameplay is computed server-side a-la world of warcraft?
[1] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/decss-haiku.txt
I do remember trying to learn CSS for web definitely made me feel like it was a Cascading Style Scrambling
> Even the maintainer of the DeDRM plugin has gone underground, refraining from issuing an official new release out of concern that Amazon will simply slap it down.
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?p=4516384#p...
> This works for most Kindle books currently, but Amazon is cracking down hard on the workarounds lately. So free any books you need to asap.
https://github.com/apprenticeharper/DeDRM_tools/discussions/...
One of the big publishers put heavy pressure on Amazon to patch DRM exploits or else they would pull all their content from the platform (or so I was told).
(I worked at Kindle 2017-2019, and was on the team that wrote the code that OP reversed engineered)
I doubt he would’ve done that intentionally to make his indignant point.
https://github.com/PixelMelt/amazon_book_downloader
Kind of expected, but I was surprised at how quick that was.
PLEASE MAKE THE LAST PAGE READ BE THE KINDLE SCREEN DISPLAY WHEN POWERED OFF
END OF TRANSMISSION
I actually wrote the code to make this work with screen readers, back when I worked for Kindle in 2018.
I even got to test it out with a few Amazon employees who were blind, which was a really cool experience!
We added some hidden divs which had the plaintext version for screenreaders. For whatever reason, upper management was ok with the plaintext being scrapable, as long as the formatted version couldn't be scraped.
> To read one book? No.
> To prove a point? Absolutely.
> To learn about SVG rendering, perceptual hashing, and font metrics? Probably yes.
The dedication on this endeavor is admirable. I quite enjoyed reading it even though certain things were new to me (structural similarity index).”
Posting the code on some code sharing platform (not GitHub, where it could probably be taken down quickly) could be a logical next step.
> So let me get this straight: I paid money for this book
One can say that no DRM doesn’t bring issues but one can also say that there is a very polarized approach from the post author on what he believes he is entitled to depending on the situation they bring themselves to.
drm copyright arrays lie in the html/css layer, which stops the user from accessing raw text.
This is one of my biggest problems with DRM. It restricts what software you can consume the media on.
I bought a collection of books from Kobo without realizing it was protected by DRM, then realized I could only read them with the kobo reader, which is also really buggy. I really wanted to use a different reader app, but couldn't.
https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Amazon_altering_the_content_of...
AdmiralAsshat•7h ago
I stopped buying ebooks from Amazon some time ago and switched completely to Kobo (and their much-more-easily-defeated DRM), but Amazon's acquisition of Comixology means they've still got by far the best collection of digital comics on the market.
BolexNOLA•6h ago
AdmiralAsshat•6h ago
I have about half of them already ripped, from an earlier time when the Kindle4PC application was easier to crack. But I still grab new comics from time to time.
BolexNOLA•4h ago
makeitdouble•4h ago
Most local ebook stores will put undue barriers on who can purchase what because of generic region policies and/or their publishing contracts being country limited. Amazon will accept any valid credit card from anywhere as long as you create an account on the dedicated store. It's digital goods so you can also fill in any random address if needed.
boldlybold•6h ago
Or to the author: what happens to images in the ebook?
gruez•6h ago
rs186•6h ago
makeitdouble•5h ago
I've had some slightly blurry on 2.8x1.9k screens, especially the older ones.
pixelmelt•6h ago