Friday, December 14, 2007

Kindle Hack...Out Already?

Quicker than a cat in Chinatown...Amazon's dreams of proprietary content distribution for the Kindle dissolved. Yesterday the announcement came down the wire that Igor Skochinsky, an agitator of the highest intellect and all around smartypants, has deciphered the algorithm that Kindle uses to encode their .azw files (amazon's own little format and modified form of Mobi files). Now Mobi files can be turn into Amazon files...

but the DRM info was still blocking the files from being read by Kindle. He figured this out too. Igor has done us the honor of writing a post with a link to the Python script that handles this conversion process. He tried downloading content from sites like Fictionwise, and it apparently worked out. No doubt, Fictionwise and other sites are gearing up to tap the market of hackers by supporting the hack at their sites. ..Via Engadget.

2 comments:

Chuck Gordon said...

This is the same thing as putting music that you didn't download from the Itunes store onto your Ipod. Of course Amazon doesn't care about this because it still encourages increased usage of their device which will ultimately lead to more sales for them.

samantha said...

Big deal. Wake me up when there is a way to read my books on my computer along with the hundreds of PDF articles and books I have there that I have no intention of reading on a grayscale screen.

Seriously, if Amazon put out a kindle reader for computers as they have for the iPhone their book sales would skyrocket. So they sale less kindles? The increased book sales (remember these are without any shipping overhead) would more than make up for it.