Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

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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:

⟳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.

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.

This comment is encrypted with ROT-26. By reading it you have cracked it and are breaking the law.

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.

[1] A different provision 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 were some way to anonymously release software...

Releasing it is not the issue for the user, possession of the software is.

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.

Kindle (and Nook, and Adobe) DRM has been super-easy to crack for a while now. You can even set up Calibre to do it for you.

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.

Excellent. Why is Amazon suddenly going so easy on the DRM? Did they realize it's pointless? Is this a bug? That's what I'm curious about.

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.

Are you mostly buying/downloading free out-of-copyright books from the amazon store?

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.

Did you try more contemporary books, like recent best sellers and so on?

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.

Are those really much better formatted though?

Here is what I mean by better formatted:

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

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.

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.

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