For books only available through Amazon my workflow used to be buying it, downloading it with their desktop app, importing into Calibre, converting to epub and stripping DRM, then pushing it onto my Kobo.
They broke that a while ago by making their DRM even worse, so now I just pirate those books.
that's so weird.
First I decide to buy my wife an ebook reader for the new years and then Louis Rossman makes a video on Kindle DRM bait and switch. Now this and people praising Kobo. Guess I'm buying a kobo
True, but that DRM is relatively easy to handle, and is sort-of a standard (OK, I know Adobe handles it, but it's not a complete walled garden like Kindle). I can borrow an ebook from my library using my browser, download the DRM'ed file, fulfil it (using Adobe Digital Editions), copy to my ereader. I can buy books from Google and do the same. It's relatively straight forward to strip the DRM if you want to. Because it is reliant on a third-party service (Adobe) that has other clients/interests, it's not as likely to change as quickly or as onerously as Kindle's DRM.
Calibre handles kindle too (if you already have that). You "obtain" the books one way or another, and calibre converts them to a proper format and copies them directly to your kindle (via the usb cable).
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.
Hell hath no fury like an engineer angered! This was such a good read and epitomizes hacking:
"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."
I don't know what state it's in (haven't used it in years), but do apprenticealf's DeDRM tools, which has been forked to nodrm/DeDRM_tools, still handle kindle PC app downloads? Tinkering with old versions of the PC app might work even if the current version doesn't, and there's a registry hack to disable kfx downloading and get azw3 instead, which worked at some point... it's outlined in apprenticealf's DeDRM repo, at the wiki link provided at the top of the repo's README, in the short section saying it's no longer maintained.
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 thing that killed the download -> crack DRM workflow is that Amazon removed the "download and transfer via USB" option. I haven't bought an ebook from Amazon since.
The only viable option would be to buy the book and then pirate a de-DRM'd copy.
Me too. When they removed the option to download books I liberated everything I had ever bought, moved to Kavita+koreader and will never buy a kindle book again.
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.
Since the last major jailbreak for Kindle devices was released, I've been using Koreader as well on my Scribe. I have progress syncing setup with Hardcover (Goodreads alternative) instead, however. Only downside is their recommendations don't seem to be well geared to my interests at this point, but hopefully that'll change in the future as more use the service.
I don't suppose this is going to work well with their comics/graphic novels, will it?
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.
If all you need is an image, can't you just use browser automation tools to screenshot each page? After all, much of the content is in images so it's not like you need it OCRed for accessibility purposes.
I’m sure you already know this but I’ve actually had a lot of success getting comics on hoopla with my library card. Obviously this completely depends on your local library but if you haven’t it’s worth looking in to! Has what I want a solid 35% of the time. Not the newest releases but I’ve gotten stuff that’s only 6 to 12 months old without much issue
Not my use-case. I have roughly 250 legitimately purchased graphic novels and manga purchased from Amazon over the years that I'd want to backup.
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.
This is great work, but I’m not clear on why this qualifies as DRM at all. It sounds like the OP reverse engineered a protocol for rendering pages from a book to the web client. Sure, rotating the glyph ids every API call is annoying but it hardly qualifies as encryption or even obfuscation, just an extra mapping step the decoder needs to handle.
Sure seems like whoever at Amazon wrote this didn’t realize that it backdoors their DRM.
> we just didn't care. Upper management seemed happy enough
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.
My main peeve with rendering in the Kindle app is that formula-type content (often even minor stuff like x²) is rendered as images that (a) are low-resolution and (b) don’t invert in dark mode.
A second peeve is that in dark mode you can only have gray on black, not white on black.
Do the ebooks you're referring to use an image for the ² symbol, rather than css, unicode, or mathjax-generated mathml? A lot of old math books that have been converted from scans do that, for instance, because their OCR was okay at regular text but not good at superscripts, subscripts, or other mathematical symbols.
They use an image in the Kindle version. I don’t know about other versions, but I strongly suspect that the PDF version, if any, doesn’t. These aren’t old books, they are recent nonfiction books from established publishers. They surely don’t use OCR to produce the Kindle version.
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.
I was going to say exactly the same! Got a Kobo Clara BW a while ago -- great lil device. Took a while to figure out Calibre, but now that I understand it, it's very convenient. Prior to choosing an e-reader, I took one glance at Amazon's DRM-laden offerings and noped out from that ecosystem completely.
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.
I appreciate the author's work, and they're absolutely right about the Kindle app. I'm with you though, I don't want to fight tooth and nail with Amazon to have the ability to read a book without their lousy app, to back that book up, and otherwise legally and fairly use it. I don't want to reward Amazon for being aggressively anti-consumer by spending money on their site, at least not for this.
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.
I've partaken in some SDD (Spite Driven Development) myself related to the Garmin ecosystem. The problem with it is once you stop caring, the development stops too.
It's extra distracting because it doesn't even read like normal LLM prose, but it's close enough to feel off.
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.
>I paid money for this book
>I can only read it in Amazon's broken app
>I can't download it
>I can't back it up
>I don't actually own it
>Amazon can delete it whenever they want
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.
I personally have bought many fewer books over the last couple of years, from amazon, as they've made it harder and harder to, you know, read the books I've paid for.
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?
Genuinely curious to hear why you think they make it harder and harder to read books? I've been using my Kindle daily since 2017. I read on both the Kindle device (Paperwhite and vanilla), the iPad and iPhone app, and occasionally the web reader.
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.
The reading experience is fine on Kindle. Or at least it was the last time I used it. My main problem is how they've locked down the DRM. I was on Kindle for a very long time and didn't mind the DRM because it was easily breakable. Amazon was also helpful about helping you download the book file directly. The locks they had in place were essentially bathroom door locks. And they seemed chill about it.
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've had decent success with a Kindle device, but when I try to use the Kindle app on my iPhone, which is rare now, it's almost always a hassle. Their iPhone app updates completely replace the app, so everything gets reset and books have to be downloaded again.
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.
Their devices get steadily worse. Kindle Oasis was the best device ever. It also had cellular connectivity so you could read it on a train, then put it in the backpack and switch to listening to the same book on your phone.
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.
In general, if I don’t have to pay someone to produce something I can provide a better experience to my customers than those who do.
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 hate Amazon's decision to do this. It doesn't even make business sense. You can't tell me they're making that much profit off of Kindles that it makes sense. The book sales have got to be worth more than that in the long run.
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.
I have the same problem with O'Reilly / Safari ... I don't enjoy using the apps and find they get in the way of the reading experience, plus it's a very expensive subscription. Initially, its hard to tell if rendering problems are just a bad conversion or if the text rendering engine is just buggy / borked.
But there were plenty of other bugs like bookshelf management getting corrupted.
At one point I did the same for a comic app which was getting the earliest releases of a manga I wanted to read; I still don't read Japanese but was the buyer for my translation circle. They had similar forms of obscure obfuscation; They scrambled the image into chunks, then you got a metadata that remapped it into a finished image. Raw, it looked like one of those slide puzzles.
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.
For books only available through Amazon my workflow used to be buying it, downloading it with their desktop app, importing into Calibre, converting to epub and stripping DRM, then pushing it onto my Kobo.
They broke that a while ago by making their DRM even worse, so now I just pirate those books.
that's so weird. First I decide to buy my wife an ebook reader for the new years and then Louis Rossman makes a video on Kindle DRM bait and switch. Now this and people praising Kobo. Guess I'm buying a kobo
Most Kobo books have DRM. There are a few publishers (TOR) and authors that are DRM free, but most of books I've wanted have it.
This is why I have a Boox Android eInk tablet, although I only use it with burner accounts. They run Ancient versions of Android.
True, but that DRM is relatively easy to handle, and is sort-of a standard (OK, I know Adobe handles it, but it's not a complete walled garden like Kindle). I can borrow an ebook from my library using my browser, download the DRM'ed file, fulfil it (using Adobe Digital Editions), copy to my ereader. I can buy books from Google and do the same. It's relatively straight forward to strip the DRM if you want to. Because it is reliant on a third-party service (Adobe) that has other clients/interests, it's not as likely to change as quickly or as onerously as Kindle's DRM.
Kobo's pretty good. Anything to avoid Kindle books.
I bought one, but it didn't have any of the books I wanted. It seems to be nowhere near as comprehensive as the Kindle library.
Bookshop.org is supposed to implement Kobo support sometime this year, getting a Kobo if that happens.
What does 'Kobo support' mean? Anyone can publish an epub, which a Kobo can read. Are you talking integration into the Kobo store?
Calibre handles kindle too (if you already have that). You "obtain" the books one way or another, and calibre converts them to a proper format and copies them directly to your kindle (via the usb cable).
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.
Eventually those physical book scanning cameras are going to be used to read/scan DRM locked ebooks.
Followed the same path.
At least Steve Jobs understood how DRM should work.
Hell hath no fury like an engineer angered! This was such a good read and epitomizes hacking:
"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."
I don't know what state it's in (haven't used it in years), but do apprenticealf's DeDRM tools, which has been forked to nodrm/DeDRM_tools, still handle kindle PC app downloads? Tinkering with old versions of the PC app might work even if the current version doesn't, and there's a registry hack to disable kfx downloading and get azw3 instead, which worked at some point... it's outlined in apprenticealf's DeDRM repo, at the wiki link provided at the top of the repo's README, in the short section saying it's no longer maintained.
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 thing that killed the download -> crack DRM workflow is that Amazon removed the "download and transfer via USB" option. I haven't bought an ebook from Amazon since.
The only viable option would be to buy the book and then pirate a de-DRM'd copy.
Why buy an ebook then? Just buy the physical if you want, and pirate it.
Dont pay for your own hope that you can pick the lock of your own paid for jail cell.
Then I have a physical book to deal with.
It will handle downloads for older versions of the PC app, but the supported version won't download any books released after April 2025.
Also Libation for Audible books.
How do you actually use the code? There is no readme.
Me too. When they removed the option to download books I liberated everything I had ever bought, moved to Kavita+koreader and will never buy a kindle book again.
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.
Since the last major jailbreak for Kindle devices was released, I've been using Koreader as well on my Scribe. I have progress syncing setup with Hardcover (Goodreads alternative) instead, however. Only downside is their recommendations don't seem to be well geared to my interests at this point, but hopefully that'll change in the future as more use the service.
I don't suppose this is going to work well with their comics/graphic novels, will it?
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.
I haven't gotten images working yet, they have some weird obfuscation applied to them as well
Comics need a full "image" for the page, so this is unlikely to work. Can you inspect the requests and see what you get?
Or to the author: what happens to images in the ebook?
If all you need is an image, can't you just use browser automation tools to screenshot each page? After all, much of the content is in images so it's not like you need it OCRed for accessibility purposes.
If you can live with lower quality image. Most people probably will be ok with that though.
It will depend on the books, but the images aren't that high resolution in general.
I've had some slightly blurry on 2.8x1.9k screens, especially the older ones.
I’m sure you already know this but I’ve actually had a lot of success getting comics on hoopla with my library card. Obviously this completely depends on your local library but if you haven’t it’s worth looking in to! Has what I want a solid 35% of the time. Not the newest releases but I’ve gotten stuff that’s only 6 to 12 months old without much issue
Not my use-case. I have roughly 250 legitimately purchased graphic novels and manga purchased from Amazon over the years that I'd want to backup.
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.
This is great work, but I’m not clear on why this qualifies as DRM at all. It sounds like the OP reverse engineered a protocol for rendering pages from a book to the web client. Sure, rotating the glyph ids every API call is annoying but it hardly qualifies as encryption or even obfuscation, just an extra mapping step the decoder needs to handle.
Sure seems like whoever at Amazon wrote this didn’t realize that it backdoors their DRM.
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.
> we just didn't care. Upper management seemed happy enough
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.
Replies like this are why I love HN (assuming it’s true)
Still a DMCA violation to break, though.
> 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.
I’ve been using https://readest.com and very much enjoying it. I just wish there were a “lifetime purchase” option.
Looks nice. Shame it doesn't have OPDS support, but it's nice to see that it's a planned feature in their GitHub README!
My main peeve with rendering in the Kindle app is that formula-type content (often even minor stuff like x²) is rendered as images that (a) are low-resolution and (b) don’t invert in dark mode.
A second peeve is that in dark mode you can only have gray on black, not white on black.
Do the ebooks you're referring to use an image for the ² symbol, rather than css, unicode, or mathjax-generated mathml? A lot of old math books that have been converted from scans do that, for instance, because their OCR was okay at regular text but not good at superscripts, subscripts, or other mathematical symbols.
They use an image in the Kindle version. I don’t know about other versions, but I strongly suspect that the PDF version, if any, doesn’t. These aren’t old books, they are recent nonfiction books from established publishers. They surely don’t use OCR to produce the Kindle version.
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.
This is a beautiful solution to a tedious problem that shouldn't exist in the first place! Great work.
Your intention doesn’t matter to the shareholders. Straight to jail.
Yeah I hope his opsec is good.
I bypassed it by buying a Kobo.
I was going to say exactly the same! Got a Kobo Clara BW a while ago -- great lil device. Took a while to figure out Calibre, but now that I understand it, it's very convenient. Prior to choosing an e-reader, I took one glance at Amazon's DRM-laden offerings and noped out from that ecosystem completely.
I'm an owner of a Kobo, how did you do that?
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.
I appreciate the author's work, and they're absolutely right about the Kindle app. I'm with you though, I don't want to fight tooth and nail with Amazon to have the ability to read a book without their lousy app, to back that book up, and otherwise legally and fairly use it. I don't want to reward Amazon for being aggressively anti-consumer by spending money on their site, at least not for this.
Likewise, but I went with Pocketbook.
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.
Does Kobo work with the Libby app?
Even better than a Kindle - library browsing is built-in to the device.
O wow I love that! So tired of Jeff I think I’ll switch.
Yes, my wife uses it all the time
I believe so, haven't tried it myself.
Don't stop there! If Amazon sues you, demand a jury trial and win a carve-out making it legal to unlock DRM you own.
I always love a story of anger based (reverse)engineering.
Spite is an underated productivity tool.
I've partaken in some SDD (Spite Driven Development) myself related to the Garmin ecosystem. The problem with it is once you stop caring, the development stops too.
My new T-shirt
aka "Hate driven development"
I stopped buying kindle books and back to buying physical books. Now I own them, I can gift them to friends or pass them on to my kids.
@op there's a typo: "You can now download the books you own books with my code"
second books seems erroneous
This is a great write-up in terms of content but stylistically it reads like the output of an RLHF'd LLM
It's extra distracting because it doesn't even read like normal LLM prose, but it's close enough to feel off.
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.
>I paid money for this book >I can only read it in Amazon's broken app >I can't download it >I can't back it up >I don't actually own it >Amazon can delete it whenever they want
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.
I personally have bought many fewer books over the last couple of years, from amazon, as they've made it harder and harder to, you know, read the books I've paid for.
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?
Genuinely curious to hear why you think they make it harder and harder to read books? I've been using my Kindle daily since 2017. I read on both the Kindle device (Paperwhite and vanilla), the iPad and iPhone app, and occasionally the web reader.
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.
The reading experience is fine on Kindle. Or at least it was the last time I used it. My main problem is how they've locked down the DRM. I was on Kindle for a very long time and didn't mind the DRM because it was easily breakable. Amazon was also helpful about helping you download the book file directly. The locks they had in place were essentially bathroom door locks. And they seemed chill about it.
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've had decent success with a Kindle device, but when I try to use the Kindle app on my iPhone, which is rare now, it's almost always a hassle. Their iPhone app updates completely replace the app, so everything gets reset and books have to be downloaded again.
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 last-read bug sounds exactly like something that doesn't have test coverage
Their devices get steadily worse. Kindle Oasis was the best device ever. It also had cellular connectivity so you could read it on a train, then put it in the backpack and switch to listening to the same book on your phone.
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.
To create a moat and make Kobo and others less interesting.
In general, if I don’t have to pay someone to produce something I can provide a better experience to my customers than those who do.
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.
To stop you from pirating ofc!
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!
I could feel the anger of the author oozing through the writing. Great work!
I hate Amazon's decision to do this. It doesn't even make business sense. You can't tell me they're making that much profit off of Kindles that it makes sense. The book sales have got to be worth more than that in the long run.
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.
I have the same problem with O'Reilly / Safari ... I don't enjoy using the apps and find they get in the way of the reading experience, plus it's a very expensive subscription. Initially, its hard to tell if rendering problems are just a bad conversion or if the text rendering engine is just buggy / borked.
But there were plenty of other bugs like bookshelf management getting corrupted.
At one point I did the same for a comic app which was getting the earliest releases of a manga I wanted to read; I still don't read Japanese but was the buyer for my translation circle. They had similar forms of obscure obfuscation; They scrambled the image into chunks, then you got a metadata that remapped it into a finished image. Raw, it looked like one of those slide puzzles.
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.
Well done!