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Comment by anonymoushn | Hacker News Reader

I have found pirating and using ebooks to be perfectly reasonable as there are no hurdles to jump over and there is no possibility that your books will disappear from your Kindle without your permission. In fact, as far as Amazon is concerned, I've never put anything on my Kindle. My main problem is that many books I want to read cannot be found in this form for as much as a year after they are published.

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Another side effect of ebooks is that public libraries now increasingly rely on the electronic versions of the books to save space,money and they started to unload physical books by thousands. Although it applies mostly to fiction, but no need to pirate these books , you can get them for $1.

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).

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.

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.

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

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

I'm no advocate of piracy but having twice been effectively ripped off by DRM I can see where you're coming from

And for as long as cracking a DRM scheme to gain your rightful property is illegal, I will advocate piracy.

I buy movies on DVD when I like the show. I also buy books. And occasionally, I also buy music.

The rub: I buy from Half Price Books and other used merchants. For some reason (PROFIT), I cant do this with ebooks and other e-media.

When I'm treated as an enemy, acted upon as an enemy and evil pirate, and charged an arm and a leg for media then proselytised to 'not pirate'... Yeah, Ill pirate.

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