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?
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.
"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 The Financial Times' excellent iPad app has now been replaced by an equally impressive web app.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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] jrockway|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] arethuza|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rufo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmastrac|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ristretto|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nextparadigms|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mfringel|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zds|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fpgeek|14 years ago|reply
Update: Even user-agent spoofing didn't make a difference with Firefox.
[+] [-] cageface|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pieter|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fpgeek|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anghyflawn|14 years ago|reply
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?)
[+] [-] davidw|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fpgeek|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cageface|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bdickason|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] veidr|14 years ago|reply
If this gains a search feature, I cannot imagine ever launching the native app again.
[+] [-] cageface|14 years ago|reply
Any ideas what frameworks were used to build this?
[+] [-] jerrya|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pw|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fpgeek|14 years ago|reply
OP, please fix the spelling in the title. I find it very irritating.
[+] [-] pw|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bergie|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonburs|14 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] cek|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] davidw|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidw|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghshephard|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sien|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ericmoritz|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _b8r0|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eneveu|14 years ago|reply
This might just tip the scale toward the Kindle DX.
[+] [-] cageface|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmelloy|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pogos|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cek|14 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] toddmorey|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kia|14 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] JeremyBanks|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cageface|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forcer|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghshephard|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smhinsey|14 years ago|reply