If you’re keeping up with my Tweets, you know I made my first impulse purchase on the Kindle yesterday night. The fact that Kindle makes buying books so ridiculously simple forces me to make the comparison to buying songs from iTunes (except, I don’t buy songs from iTunes… I’ll talk about this in another post).
This isn’t like those other “hacks” that people keep talking about getting your own eBooks on the Kindle, but to download from the Kindle Store; free, copyrighted material.
Disclaimer: This is all for educational purposes only. I’m NOT responsible for what you do with your Kindle with this knowledge. And I can only hope that Amazon figures this out faster than the rest of the Kindle freaks like me. If you know someone who can fix this bug inside Amazon, please let them know.
The hack
Steps are as follows:
- Buy the book
- Lie and say you’ve accidentally purchased the book
- Turn off the wireless just after the book has been downloaded
I don’t know, but you probably should wait on the screen that has the accidental purchase link until the book has finished downloading… I didn’t really think about this, but my download is fast enough on the awesome 3G network anyway. (Go Kindle GO!)
A couple of seconds after I turned on the wireless, the books did disappear. To get around this, simply make a copy of the file on your computer.
As a sidenote, while I was messing around with moving .azw and .mbp files the book that was downloaded seems to be about twice as big as the sample… I wonder why this is the case. I can only think that there’s some compression going on.
I had to see if there was some kind of remote killswitch on the DRM, and turns out… there isn’t. After the original downloaded copy was erased by Amazon, Amazon was satisfied it seems. I turned on my wireless again and as I expected, I was able to use my Kindle on wireless while reading my “free” book.
Dear Amazon,
Fix it. I don’t even know who to talk to, but I’ll try to forward the link to this post to some people I see on Twitter.
huh. That does seem like a problem, that the file is deleted and not a license key that allows use of the file.. Then again, tying it down like FairPlay and most other DRM schemes do just bogs it down – what if you need to restore a book to a new/different Kindle (or some to-be-made device) and can’t obtain a license from Amazon – no connectivity or a problem with their servers. (Situation does seem to be a stretch, but the basic idea of DRM being too restrictive and degrading the user-experience is pretty general.)
One could argue for making this deliberate – making DRM as least restrictive as possible. Since it shouldn’t be hard to track strange behaviour occurring on any given Kindle, and give this fact, this could just be the trade-off they made.