professorseth's comments

Ya, your reasoning about why the text-only version was ok is what I heard as well.

As far as people being on board with this--I did not have to push it through, it was a task that management wanted done that I happily did, because I could see the value of it.

Amazon actually does a really good job with accessibility across all their products. When I was there, they had at least 2 full time employees (1 Product manager and 1 Quality assurance engineer) whose full time job was just accessibility, across all Kindle platforms and I heard the intention was to grow that team as I was leaving. They had an entire team working on accessibility for the retail website, from what I heard (though I only met one or two of those people).

However, there still was a sentiment among certain engineers that worrying about accessibility was a waste of time because it only helps a small section of the population. Thankfully Web accessibility (both in standards and in culture) has come a long way in the last 8-10 years, and I think a lot more people believe in its importance now that they did back in 2017 when I started working on this.

You ask great questions.

I definitely have regrets about my time working at Amazon. Specifically, I wish that I had pushed back more about doing certain things.

Honestly, DRM wasn't even the worst. All the unnecessary user tracking was way worse, in my opinion.

Its impossible to know for sure, because I didn't push back as much as I should have, but I really think that "well if I hadn't, the next person would've" was absolutely true in this case (knowing what I know about all the other engineers that were in the department at the same time as me). I'm not saying the other engineers were bad people, a lot of them were lovely but they definitely had different convictions than I have.

Yes and no.

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.

thanks, I think its fixed now.

It is, I promise :)

Email in bio if you have other questions about it you care to ask.

While Amazon does some shady stuff, at least _some_ of the blame here belongs on the big publishing companies.

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)

While Amazon does some shady stuff, at least _some_ of the blame here belongs on the big publishing companies.

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)

You are exactly correct.

I was on the team that wrote this code.

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.

I worked on the team that implemented this, years ago! (around 2017-2018)

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!