Hackers break Kindle DRM

This was posted as a comment on the original article. No idea if it’s true or not, but it’s an interesting insight:<p><i>As one of the engineers who worked on Kindle, I'd like to point out that most people at Amazon are pretty anti-DRM themselves - it's the PUBLISHERS who insisted on it, and we put in DRM so as to keep THEM happy, because without publishers, there are no books to sell. We knew full well that the device and DRM would be hacked eventually - the hope was that we could just stay ahead of them for long enough to prove the feasibility of selling books in this way to publishers.</i>

Exploit code is here - <a href="http://pastie.org/753699" rel="nofollow">http://pastie.org/753699</a>

OK, but it's been broken for ages. There is a simple python script floating around that you can run on Kindle books to turn them into .html files. The decryption key is just your Kindle's serial number (which I believe is available via USB, so typing it in is not strictly necessary).<p>If you don't have a Kindle, that might be a problem though. But I think Amazon lets you "register" a Kindle, so you can just make up a serial number, buy books, and decrypt them.<p>Basically, the DRM scheme is just a joke to keep publishers happy. If your eyes can see something, it can be copied.

It's ironic, if there were a reliable way to break the DRM, I'd be incented to buy lots of Kindle books at even above the paperback price.<p>right now I just can't stand the idea of paying almost as much as a real book for something that I can't share and will die with my kindle in a couple of years.

Many Kindle books, especially technical ones, are in the so-called Topaz format with embedded fonts which nobody has been able to reverse-engineer or break DRM for. I don't know if this breakthrough changes that---doesn't seem like it.

Still waiting for an e-book torrent site.