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Amazon Kindle Proprietary Format Broken

Posted by kdawson on from the let-a-thousand-e-books-bloom dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Register reports that the proprietary document format used by the Amazon online store and Amazon's Kindle has been successfully reverse engineered, allowing these DRM-protected documents to be converted into the open MOBI format. Users of alternative e-book readers rejoice." Here are the hacker's notes on the program he is calling "Unswindle," and here is the (translated) forum where the Kindle challenge was posed and answered.

2 of 203 comments (clear)

  1. Convert everything you have quick by Mr.+Freeman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'd suggest converting every book you own really fucking quick. No telling how long it will take Amazon to make a similar format that will take another year or so to break. You can bet that once they do, they'll remotely switch everyone's ebooks over to that new format and then push a firmware upgrade to ensure compliance.

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  2. Re:Old old story. by AndGodSed · · Score: 5, Insightful

    the THEY you are referring to are the uninformed masses. THEY have the buying power and THEY generally trust the large corporations more than they trust the informed among us, because there is a mentality of "If I saw it on TV (or amazon.com for that matter) it MUST be more trustworthy than the neighbourhood geek"

    Sigh... we geeks really have to work on our marketing... we need an image consultant!

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