Amazon Kindle book lending quietly goes live

Re:Amazon Kindle book lending quietly goes live by w1ntermute on Thursday December 30, 2010 @03:27PM (#2053500)

Anyone know why it takes so long? Shouldn't it be possible to crack the DRM on Kindle (or other) ebooks and pirate them? I thought the reason it was so hard to pirate books in the past was because they had to be scanned (and preferably OCRed).

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Re:Amazon Kindle book lending quietly goes live by CWuestefeld on Thursday December 30, 2010 @04:24PM (#2053643)

Kindle was cracked at least a year ago.

I haven't actually used it, but from what I read it's not a crypto flaw allowing the data to be extracted, but more analogous to the "analog hole". The existence of on-screen readers allows software to be written that walks through the book a page at a time, and rips the content in that way.

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Re:Amazon Kindle book lending quietly goes live by pangram on Thursday December 30, 2010 @07:38PM (#2054054)

It's a bit cleaner than that -- it gets the decryption key from the reader with the Windows debugging APIs, and then removes the DRM. You're left with the original ebook.

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Re:Amazon Kindle book lending quietly goes live by w1ntermute on Thursday December 30, 2010 @07:45PM (#2054072)

Ah, that's good to hear. Using the analog hole leaves you with a pretty poor copy of most digital files.

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Re:Amazon Kindle book lending quietly goes live by w1ntermute on Thursday December 30, 2010 @05:28PM (#2053786)

Don't you lose the formatting then? That's not really an optimal solution.

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