

The Amazon Kindle Cloud Reader is live - cek
http://read.amazon.com

======
jrockway
So is this the end of DRM on Kindle books? Because it works fine in Chromium,
which I have full access to the source code for. That means I can make it do
anything, including dump out the text that I'm looking at.

I dug around a little bit and found that it's storing its data in a sqlite
database in ~/.config/chromium/Default/databases/https_read.amazon.com_0/2
(there's an index of what's in what database in ../Databases.db). I did a
"select * from fragments", found some things that look like data URLs
representing images, pasted them into my browser and yup... those are the
pictures from the book I'm reading. So, DRM fail.

As for the text of the book, I see some words from the book surrounded by
garbage. So if this is encryption, it's pretty bad. Excerpt:

⟳As➁⨋0⫪⟳I➁⨋0⬀⟳exit,➁⨋0⭂⟳I❪➖⨋0⭍⟳⡿❪➖⨋0⮥⟳m➁⨋0⮻⟳⢞⥞ys➁⨋0Ⰸ⟳⢵refu

"As I exit, I'm careful..."

Next step is to look for the source code that implements this and see what
those garbage characters are doing.

~~~
arethuza
Doesn't having _some_ encryption, even if it is trivial to break, mean that
the DMCA applies if you are in the US turning this activity into a criminal
act?

~~~
recoiledsnake
Isn't violating copyright(except for fair use) already illegal? If you
photocopy a book fully and give it your friend, you're already violating
copyright and can receive a takedown notice[1], regardless of the anti-
decryption clause of the DMCA.

[1] A different provision of the DMCA

~~~
camiller
IIRC/IANAL, violating the copyright without commercial intent (you are not
selling it) is still a civil law violation although DMCA takedown provisions
still apply. Breaking DRM elevates it to a criminal charge.

I think that is the case, but correct me if I am wrong, it has been awhile
since I studied this.

~~~
jrockway
If only there were some way to anonymously release software...

~~~
camiller
Releasing it is not the issue for the user, possession of the software is.

~~~
jrockway
If only there was some constitutional amendment that promised people the right
"to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against
unreasonable searches".

This means: if you have some circumvention device whose presence cannot be
detected from outside your home: too bad for the government. They can't do
anything about it.

------
nextparadigms
_"Optimized for iPad: shop the integrated Kindle Store for Tablets"_

I was expecting this for a few months now, especially after Apple wanted to
introduce that policy of theirs where they wanted a %30 cut. Amazon is not
taking any chances with Apple anymore. Good for them. All content providers
should use web-apps.

~~~
mfringel
Web apps sacrifice offline operation. I can't say I'd be totally sanguine
about that, specifically with content providers.

~~~
Derbasti
This one doesn't. It works just fine offline.

------
zds
The innovation in web apps that Apple spurred by their payment restrictions is
going to be good for everyone. The Financial Times' excellent iPad app has now
been replaced by an equally impressive web app. Amazon's Kindle Cloud Reader
is almost as responsive as the native app. I'm almost ready to switch to it.
Should be interesting to see how this affects the number of books they sell.

------
fpgeek
Wow, they support Chrome and Safari, but not Firefox. Time to spoof my user
agent and see if it really doesn't work or not...

Update: Even user-agent spoofing didn't make a difference with Firefox.

~~~
cageface
Looks like they're using Web SQL for local storage. Mozilla foolishly (IMO)
rejected this standard so they'd have to reimplement the storage layer with
IndexedDB to get this working on FF.

~~~
wycats
WebSQLDB isn't really a "standard". The standard is "whatever version of
sqlite safari happened to ship with" which is really not a tenable long-term
solution.

~~~
cageface
Sure it is. Pick a version. Call it the spec and fork SQLite if necessary. You
can't possibly argue that this would be more work than inventing a new,
untested data storage model from scratch. This approach is exactly what ran
the W3C aground in the first place.

~~~
ootachi
Why not just say "WebKit is the HTML5 spec", then? It'd be less work than
coming up with an HTML5 spec from scratch.

------
pieter
Nice. Now, if they'd just drop their surcharge for ordering ebooks in mainland
Europe I might actually use it. Paying $3-%5 extra per book just because I
live somewhere else doesn't make sense with ebooks.

~~~
fpgeek
Don't complain to Amazon about their ebook prices. Since "agency pricing",
they're (mostly) not allowed to set them anymore. Beyond agency pricing, some
European countries (e.g. France, Germany) have tried to regulate the prices of
ebooks themselves. Sadly, Amazon is stuck just as much as you are.

~~~
shangaslammi
This specific complaint is about Amazon though. Even if a publisher sets the
exact same price for every region, Amazon sometimes adds their own "Whispernet
tax" of about $2 + VAT. They seem to be gradually phasing it out now, but for
the longest time, there were e.g. no free books outside the US, because even
books listed as "free" actually cost a minimum of $2 + tax.

~~~
xxpor
This is because all kindles in mainland Europe all have (edit) AT&T SIMs in
them. It costs Amazon SIGNIFICANTLY more for you to use whispernet, because
you are constantly roaming. The reason you pay the tax if you buy it on
something other than the kindle itself is because at some point you could sync
it on to your kindle, though archived items.

~~~
shangaslammi
Sure, except that even Kindles that are wi-fi only had to pay the extra $2,
not to mention those reading only on the PC or mobile app. It was a stupid
system, but as I said, they are fortunately phasing the whole thing out now,
and many books already have pricing parity (well, excluding VAT, but that's
not Amazon's fault).

------
veidr
Wow. For reading, that is incomparably better than the (admittedly horrid)
Kindle for Mac native application.

If this gains a search feature, I cannot imagine ever launching the native app
again.

~~~
cageface
Agreed. This is impressive. There are fewer and fewer reasons to write native
apps it seems.

Any ideas what frameworks were used to build this?

------
fpgeek
They're highlighting their new iPad-optimized Kindle Store for Tablets. That
is clearly a shot back at Apple for the recent "eBookstore Armageddon". Given
how close they were to releasing their web app, I'm a little surprised that
they didn't play more hardball with Apple, though.

~~~
cageface
This is one more reason why I'm happy I'm not locked into a single-platform
store like iBooks.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Sadly, I think many will miss your irony.

~~~
cageface
No irony intended, actually. Although the emphasis on the iPad here shows how
successful Apple has been at making this a one-platform market either way.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Double irony, then. Whether you read on the web or a Kindle e-reader or on
your iPhone, you're still locked to the single Kindle platform.

I must admit that my many Kobo purchases aren't much better. I'm not locked to
the Kobo platform, but I am locked to Adobe DRM.

~~~
cageface
I can now read Kindle books on any computer with a reasonable browser. I can't
even read iBooks on my Mac. I prefer O'Reilly-style DRM-free PDFs, but at
least I don't have to own an iDevice for the rest of my life to read my
ebooks.

------
jerrya
It's a very nice app. Thank you Amazon.

I hope O'Reilly and Safari Books Online take note. I use Safari but its web
app to read the books is so slow as to make the whole experience painful and
doesn't provide nearly the value it could.

It also seems to be very Microsoft IE optimized and basically lets you read
one and only one book at a time, regardless of whether you have a post 2005
tabbed browser or not.

~~~
pw
Yeah, I was sorely disappointed when I tried Safari. Great selection, but the
interface is horrible. And they make it very hard to cancel your subscription.
I expected better from O'Reilly. (It's actually a joint venture between
O'Reilly and Pearson, which explains a lot. Still, it's a blight on O'Reilly's
otherwise stellar reputation.)

------
fpgeek
Wonder why they decided to change the name from "Kindle for Web"?

OP, please fix the spelling in the title. I find it very irritating.

------
pw
This is wonderful. My one gripe with Kindle books was that I couldn't access
them from my Ubuntu workstation. Because of that, I actually purchased a
second copy of some titles from the Google eBookstore or resorted to pirating
a PDF.

It doesn't look like you can highlight passages, though. And the lack of copy
and paste, while understandable, will surely be grating in a desktop
environment.

~~~
bergie
I've been running Kindle for PC on Wine, but this web app is definitely nicer.

------
jonburs
The misspelling in the title is quite intentional -- cek is Charlie Kindel,
former GM of Windows Phone Developer Experience (see
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2860646>).

It should also be said that he's a great guy that I've known for more than a
decade. Anyone who's interested in taking part in an early stage Seattle
startup should definitely send him a message.

Well, on LinkedIn or Twitter or Google+ I guess -- Charlie, please add contact
info to your HN profile!

[Edit] Looks like the title spelling has been corrected...

~~~
cek
When I posted this link to twitter I did intentionally mis-spell it (my tweet
was "Oh, wow. The Amazon Kindel (er, Kindle) Cloud Reader is live:
<http://bit.ly/pBoMhS>.

But, When I pasted it here to share on HN, I removed the "(er,...)" and MEANT
to fix the original. My apologies for not doing that. Glad someone at HN was
able to fix it.

@jonburs - My contact info IS in my HN profile, not sure why it's not showing
up.

------
davidw
So... you can't cut and paste from it. Anyone want to dig in and look at how
it's implemented? They must be fairly confident that people aren't going to
use it to rip books off.

~~~
ghshephard
<http://www.free-ocr.com/>, or, I guess any OCR tool will do a job. But then -
people could always have done (and probably did) that with a physical book,
so, I'm not sure whether it would be worth it to make it more difficult to do
with the digital book.

~~~
corin_
Well if someone created the software to do it, you could rip digital books
automatically - not quite as easy to do with paper books, what with having to
scan all the pages (possibly after first unbinding the book).

~~~
MatthewPhillips
You can pretty easily create a page-flipper with an arduino board.

------
eneveu
I've just bought my first e-books with this week's Pragmatic Programmer 40%
sale ( <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2861479> ). I'm now interested in
buying an e-reader. Still hesitating between Kindle, Nook, iPad, or an Android
tablet...

This might just tip the scale toward the Kindle DX.

~~~
cageface
I consolidated from a Kindle and iPad to just the iPad for travelling but I
miss the Kindle. It's smaller and more comfortable to read and I prefer it for
everything but books with a lot of equation or diagrams.

------
iuguy
It's interesting to see Amazon working around the iPad's artificial
limitations in this way. jrockway's comment about the sqlite database is
particularly interesting. I'm not convinced that it would be particularly
feasible to implement DRM in a cross browser way without causing serious
performance problems (although I await to be unpleasantly surprised).

------
cek
There are rumors Amazon is bringing out a color Kindle that is more an iPad
like tablet than a book reader, likely based on Android.

Given the (apparently) great HTML5 work that went into building the Cloud
Reader, I wonder what we'll see for UI in the color Kindle. Will there be a
suite of apps that are all HTML5?

------
pogos
This is so cool. I can now read kindle books on my ubuntu laptop without
setting up kindle for pc + wine ugliness.

------
toddmorey
Would anyone like to guess why search has been omitted in the web version?
Also, for reference / technical books, it would be nice if the authors could
mark certain blocks of content to allow copy and paste. It feels weird to have
to retype all the code examples from a digital publication.

------
kia
WTF??? They don't support two most popular web browsers.

Firefox 5: "Your web browser isn't supported yet. Download Chrome or Safari
below."

IE9: "Your web browser isn't supported yet. Download Chrome or Safari below."

~~~
JeremyBanks
They're using the Web SQL database to store the books on the client. This has
never been supported by Firefox. Alternatives are becoming available, but it's
not surprising that they started with the most established client-side
database. It's also the only one supported by Safari, and since it seems like
tablet support is one of their goals, that's important.

~~~
ristretto
That is not an excuse for them, they should have a non-offline alternative for
ie9 & FF

~~~
JeremyBanks
They probably will. They don't need to support everything off-the-bat,
particularly since it doesn't seem like desktop browsers are even the primary
target.

------
forcer
It shows only books downloaded to the 1st Kindle associated with particular
account. Anyone knows how to display books from all Kindles on that account?

~~~
ghshephard
Shows books associated with all of my devices. Or, to be more accurate, all of
the books I have purchased, in archive or on a device, are present. Including
seven (7) unique copies of the Amazon Kindle Guide.

------
smhinsey
I would love to see this synchronize with the "collections" feature on the DX
(not sure if all models have it). Otherwise, this is excellent.

------
estel
The only thing I've found missing are keyboard shortcuts to navigate the book?
Or am I just trying the wrong keys?

~~~
maguay
The left and right arrows on the keyboard work for me in Safari, though only
after first clicking the next arrow on-screen.

------
tord_f
Shame that the dictionary is missing.

------
RexRollman
At least now I will be able to read Kindle books on my CR-48 (Chromebook).

------
stevelaz
Woot! Finally, we can now read kindle books on Linux. Thanks amazon.

------
ComputerGuru
s/Kindel/Kindle/

It's a pretty grating misspelling. Thank you.

------
jenquiqui
That logo looks really ominous

------
stralep
The Amazon KINDEL Cloud Reader is live...

~~~
stralep
OK... It's fixed now

