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How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

blog.pixelmelt.dev

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Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#81

Post by askvictor »

themerone wrote: post #77
leshenka wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#82

Post by semiquaver »

professorseth wrote: post #73
semiquaver wrote: post #53

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 bac…

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.

Replies like this are why I love HN (assuming it’s true)

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#83

Post by askvictor »

benregenspan wrote: post #74
leshenka wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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?

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#85

Post by lifter3101 »

Unrelated to this article. But somewhat related to parts of the discussion here.

One (niche) way to overcome not being able to download books from Amazon anymore is to get ebooks from a library that supports Overdrive/libby. (Some of?) Those support downloading DRM files directly from the app, which you then can run through Adobe + Calibre. Obviously, this is contingent on book availability and your ability to get a proper library card. But works for me for 90% of the books that I need.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#87

Post by pixelmelt »

professorseth wrote: post #71

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!

That's amazing! Well done, it was a fun challenge

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#88

Post by MarsIronPI »

bitwize wrote: post #75
professorseth wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Still a DMCA violation to break, though.

This is why the DMCA needs to die. It's absolutely ridiculous.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#89

Post by cheschire »

semiquaver wrote: post #53

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 bac…

What are you talking about? Rotating glyphs is like... the ORIGINAL encryption.

https://cryptii.com/pipes/caesar-cipher

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