The Amazon Kindle Cloud Reader is live
read.amazon.com
read.amazon.com
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
as long as you download single books and not packs of .doc files, the formatting is probably better on pirated books in my experience.
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 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"
Are those really much better formatted though?
Table of Contents always included
No funny characters scattered throughout the text
No missing paragraphs or words
Graphics on the same page as their captions
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.
EDIT: formatting
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.
[1] A different provision of the DMCA
I think that is the case, but correct me if I am wrong, it has been awhile since I studied this.
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.
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.
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.
Google Books also has an 'available offline' option, BTW. I can't quite decide which I prefer.
Update: Even user-agent spoofing didn't make a difference with Firefox.
The problem is that to set up a service like that would cost money and... you'd end up having to pay to use it, so you're back at square one.
I hope they will get this right without a hack in the future.
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.
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:
As you can see, one of the books is more than twice as expensive from Europe. The same happens with all books in the Kindle store, as far as I know.
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.
(E.g. your example book shows up as $4.03 from Switzerland).
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.
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.
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 must admit that my many Kobo purchases aren't much better. I'm not locked to the Kobo platform, but I am locked to Adobe DRM.
If this gains a search feature, I cannot imagine ever launching the native app again.
Any ideas what frameworks were used to build this?
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.
OP, please fix the spelling in the title. I find it very irritating.
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.
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...
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.
You could already do the same with the Kindle app on the PC at any rate.
There are also scripts for breaking the encryption on Kindle files already.
This might just tip the scale toward the Kindle DX.
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?
Firefox 5: "Your web browser isn't supported yet. Download Chrome or Safari below."
IE9: "Your web browser isn't supported yet. Download Chrome or Safari below."
Mozilla is reaping the benefits of their nonsensical stance here.
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.
The WebSQL version requires you to check that the table you want to insert into exists, and if not create it, then perform the insert.
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.
Yeah, right.
It's a pretty grating misspelling. Thank you.