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.

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Kenwood’s Foray into PMPs

posted by Andrew Harris D55

[images courtesy of Kenwood]

Kenwood’s leap into the competitive market of portable media players (PMPs) is a slim, minimally design, and visually attractive offering. The Kenwood “Media Keg’s” claim to fame is the high attention to sound quality that is synonymous with Kenwood, plus they don’t skimp on the output end. The headset is an ear canal type, not cinchy “earbuds” so once the unit is paid for you don’t have to replace the supplied equipment in order to get the full enjoyment of the player. Music/Data transfer is drag and drop or uses Windows Media Player. Supported file formats are MP3 & WMA with DRM compliancy. The “Kegs” will come in 1&2 Gigs capacities (M1G/M2G)and two design configurations (D55/D50). The D55’s seem to be a more seamless in their look and come in sliver, black, and red…D50's D50

are a bit bubblier and are available in red, white, and blue. The new PMPs’ prices are listed as “open” by Kenwood. Contrary to what the color line up would suggest the U.S. market availability has not been announced, but Kenwood’s new PMPs are being rolled out in Japan this month. Looks like you’ll have to get on Facebook and hit up your Japanese friends if you want to be an early catcher of one of these.

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Amazon MP3 Dumps DRM

[Image courtesy of Amazon]

posted by Andrew Harris

Competing directly with the iTunes' market share, everyone chasing those guys, Amazon today announced the public beta release of "Amazon MP3". Offering up 2 million downloadable songs, half are being priced lower than itunes at $0.89 each, the rest at $0.99, full albums will be offered at between $5.99-$9.99. Amazon's most competitive feature of the new offering, besides higher bitrates, is the lack of copyright restrictions. So you can play Amazon MP3 music purchases on any machine, player, or device that can read MP3. ("Oh and apple takes a hard right hook to the jaw")...some indie labels will be breaking the ties that bind and going DRM free for the first time with Amazon.

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