Hacking DRM Is Real

When is a DRM secure and unhackable? When can anyone say that a device is unbreakable? History is littered with stories of people who broke the code, un encrypted it and ulocked the secured.

This week we read of hackers in Isreal who claim to have broken the protection built in to Amazon's Kindle for PC. They did it not to access or share the files but as part of a competition and challenge. We can all buy ‘broken’ iPhones and services to unlock mobiles. We remember well the instructions on how to break Adobe’s ACS4 DRM that were openly available to those who were prepared to search for them. Apple iTunes DRM restrictions were openly broken it effectively forced them to think again and drop them.

A hacker blog posts include hacks for: Adobe ADEPT DRM for PDF, Adobe ADEPT for epub, Barnes & Noble’s own-flavour DRM for epub, and Amazon Kindle’s DRM, plus revision for how to crack the ensuing Mobipocket file and transformation into epub.

The Kindle for PC uses a separate session key to encrypt and decrypt each book. However once the hack software is installed, proprietary Amazon ebooks can be converted into the open Mobi format which are fully open and available to copy, transfer and enjoy for free. The code is downloadable and ironically called ‘unswindle V5-rci’ and is used in conjunction ‘darkreverser's mobidedrm’. It appears that unswindle’s creator is determined ti update and fight Amazon blow by blow into the future.

So as we move forward we have to look both at soft and hard DRM options. The hard DRM is down to players such as Adobe and may only be applied to highly commercial files, whilst soft DRM is applied to the others. Soft DRM on epub is harder as these files are mere containers and watermarks can be removed with ease. So as we look soft DRM watermarks we have us use both visible and invisible watermarks that are unique to the rendition, dynamically allocated and are based on an algorithm that will be hard to break. But we must realise that all codes can be broken.

Text to Speech Audiobooks

The Wall Street Journal reports that some publishers and agents expressed concern over a new, experimental feature on the K2 that enables it to read text aloud with a computer-generated voice. This feature is widely available on all PCs today so what is the fuss about?

Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild is reported saying, "They don't have the right to read a book out loud, that's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law." An Amazon spokesman in response noted the text-reading feature depends on text-to-speech technology, and that listeners won't confuse it with the audiobook experience.

So is this a storm in a teacup or a genuine threat to audiobooks as we know them today?

Firstly, we must separate the needs of the visually impaired and those just wishing for an audiobook. The former needs are slightly different and a text to speech offer may meet their needs and must be supported in that effort. Ultimately both require a higher sensitivity of audio specification than that auto generated.

We have looked hard at generating audio from text using leading text to voice synthesis technologies. We found that there were three distinct phases to achieve high quality rendering. First you need to create a stylesheet that is applicable to the text being rendered. This identifies pitch and variation and also creates time pauses and other effects when encountering certain punctuation. This may well generate a number of templates, but will be different for different genres of books. Secondly, there is the voice synthesis engine and dictionary which differ widely and are ever learning and growing, but bring that human aspect to rendering and can introduce dialect as well gender. Finally, there is the need to tidy up any mistakes, be they dictionary or punctuation. We did a fiction and STM book and achieved a full rendering in no time whatsoever. The results were very good and with effort could be excellent. We found that the production process needed expert input and although they improved productivity and reduced costs they didn't match the quality of actors and today’s audio books.

So are instant text to voice renditions going to threaten audiobooks? We don’t think so today but they will do over time. Can text to speech synthesis change audio book production? Yes potentially its almost there today. Can publishers take advantage of text to speech? Certainly, if not just to comply with disability demands. Will text to speech threaten territorial rights and offer instant translations? Well try using Google translator, it’s an excellent tool but like most translators it can make hard work of grammar and words that don’t easily translate, but it’s here today and free.

Some may think that the K2 text to speech has another objective and maybe that lies in the educational market.

Compare ebooks

A simple and comparison on the eink players.

Click here

It's interesting to read and although basic raises many questions.

Pity they only reviewed eink ebook readers as these may only have a short life as we know them today

Kindle in the University

The race to capture the US university market presents some complex digital issues but offers huge opportunities and rewards. In August we wrote ‘Catch them young’ which detailed the adoption of iPhones in the classrooms and mentioned reported on Amazon’s attempt to get the Kindle to replace the textbook.

Yale, Oxford and the University of California have all adopted Kindle programs, and now Princeton University Press will begin publishing Kindle-edition textbooks, launching, Robert Shiller’s new economics book “The Subprime Solution” on the device two weeks before the hard copy. Princeton plans to roll out hundreds of books through the Kindle’s online store. The questions over over the commercial ‘revenue sharing’ arrangements are between the parties and whether , as some may say, Amazon is buying trade.

However with 2,500 universities in the US these, are still relatively small moves. The Kindle may appeal to some but falls far short of meeting demands for colour, and still requires the student to carry three devices; a phone, a laptop and a reader.

Oprah's Favorite New Gadget

Ok who would you choose to promote your brand and product in the US? The answer is both simple and as they say a ‘no brainer’.

Oprah has done as much as anyone to promote books through endorsement and has spawned many pretenders such as Richard and Judy in the UK. She has backed Barak Obama from the start and her endorsements can turn frogs into princes. So this week she backed the Kindle and Amazon’s ebook programme.

She loves it that much she obviously ignores the air traffic rules on when to use electronic devices. ‘Right before a recent flight with Stedman, Oprah says she saw a book advertised in a newspaper she was reading and downloaded that very book as they were heading down the runway. "The other day, too, I didn't want to go out and get the paper. It was Sunday. It was raining," she says. "I go, 'I will download The New York Times,' and I just read from my bed on my Kindle." ‘

The report on www.oprah.com reads like Jeff wrote it or it was taken straight from the Kindle promotion page. Using the code OPRAHWINFREY you can now get $50 of the price of the Kindle.

Today we have several players squaring up to own the eReader device space. This battle is further complicated by the devices not all being available in every country, or in the case of the Kindle not even being supported outside North America. What impact would Oprah make? Will it make this a Kindle Christmas?

The problem Amazon has is that the device has already been declared dated with the announcements of a new model soon. This means that people will be just buying end of line models which will be superseded before they have read a few books. It’s as bad as Sony’s release of the 700 only a couple of weeks after high profile launch in the UK with Waterstones of their now dated 505.

The problem with the Amazon ebook model is that it is Amazon format, through an Amazon store, at an Amazon price point, over an Amazon connection to an Amazon device – a truly ‘exclusive’. If Amazon were to dominate the ebook market we would have a monopoly where scarcity should not occur and it is illogical to have a monopoly.

However, some would argue that this ‘exclusive world domination’ approach could be the best thing for the market. The likes of Sony would probably disappear as fast as ‘live book search’ and the others settle for the scraps. Importantly the mobile market would seriously take off and that’s one Bezos has got covered and where there are truly giants at work today. The online offer would become increasingly attractive to many. We may finally understand that downloading is not the only solution and hording loads of titles on a device just to own them is crazy in this networked age.

So the question of Oprah’s marketing pitch could prove valuable for Bezos to shift his end of line stock but for the market to work on the real digital offers and solutions.

Another Day and Another Big eReader

Septemberfest is well on us now and another digital reader announcement is in the making. Not to be undone by Plastic Logic’s reader we now see that iRex is currently running a teaser on its site for a new product to launch on 22 September. The event is called "seeing is believing". It not unlike the campaign, which we reported on early this week that is currently being run by Sony.

Forbes, report that the company is to launch an "evolved" e-book reader dubbed the iRex Reader 1000 with a 10.2 inch diagonal E-Ink display with a touchscreen plus stylus version available as an upgrade screen and aimed clearly at the business user. The reader will have 80 hours battery life, support a wide range of document formats and some models will also have Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and 3G connectivity.

This raises the bar further against new entrants such as Plastic Logic and the rumoured bigger Kindle. The question is whether the business sector approach has more legs than the ebook consumer one? With pricing for a basic non-touch model rumoured to be $650 the business approach seems sensible. The Blackberry, like the laptop before it, has shown that the business market can drive volume and stimulate the consumer market. In addition as business becomes more communications dependant being able to read documents and other material on a reasonable sized tablet could have appeal. In many cases it’s down to whether the IT heads want to push it or restrict users to laptops and notebooks. Remember eink still doesn’t support video or even colour.

The IT guys are the business world gatekeepers and a friend told me last week that he could have a Blackberry, or a 3G dongle, but not both. It appears that life in IT is Binary all the way through!

DIY instructions on Hacking the Kindle

OK you own a Kindle and want to know more well visit www.kindleformatting.com

The usual suspect are lined up; a Kindle blog and links to other blogs, Digital Text Platform hints and examples, HTML tags and support, and more stuff. All very interesting to someone I am sure but there lurking at the bottom of a menu was ‘Kindle Hacks’!

The link took us to instructions on how to break the root password. Apparently the pre shipped codename for the Kindle is claimed to be ‘Fiona’. They go on to documented shortcuts, features and easter eggs within the machine which included a picture viewer, keyboard shortcuts, global keys, reader keys, diagnostics, text input, a GPS location setting, audio controls, extended search commands and many private commands.

It is a sharp reminder that there are people who will break anything and that little is immune.