More on TechnologyTell: Gadget News | Apple News
When will Kindle books be read on Linux?
November 13, 2009 | 11:13 am
|
By Paul Biba
The Practical Nomad, Edward Hasbrouck’s blog, has an article about the new Kindle for Windows software and what it might mean for other formats. He’s also offering a free book in a contest you might be interested in:
… Once content is displayed on screen by a Windows app, it’s available to any standard screen-capture utility.
Now that Kindle for PC has been released, it’s only a matter of time — probably measured in weeks or at most a few months — before someone releases a “Kindle-ripping” app that “reads” a Kindle e-book using the Kindle for PC app, captures the pages from the screen as images, and saves them as a PDF (or text or HTML) file that can be read on any device. The absence of a Kindle for Linux app gives a compelling motive for Linux users to develop such an app, as the only way to read their legally purchased copies of Kindle Edition e-books on their Linux devices.
I anticipate, of course, the same disputes about the legality of these Kindle ripping apps as surrounded the first apps developed to play legally-purchased DVD’s on Linux computers.
|
Previous
SUBSCRIBE TO RSS
Comments:
…
Sign me up.
I guess this guy haven’t heard of mobidedrm.
Actually, there is a question whether that tool will work on the Kindle on PC files. Have you tried it?
Hey, hi Igorsk! Ha ha!
Is it any wonder that e-books are going the way of openness, platform-independence, risk of screen-capture? Welcome to alt+printScreen and scripting friends to automate the task. That means for the publishing industry (and certainly for authors) that they’ll have to squeeze their brains to figure out how to make profit out of books (or whatever they evolve into).
Maybe it’s time for Google Editions, BookGlutton or other social platforms, that would rely on advertising and cheap suscriptions to allow content with rich, up-to-date linking between books/blogs/readers. With such added value (plus cheap-yet-not-free), users may feel encouraged to stick to those social platforms.
@Steve Jordan: I can’t vouch for it myself since I haven’t used it but the word on the BeBook forum (among other places easily Bing’ed or Googled) is that most Kindle ebooks can be DeDRM’ed by use of the same tool that removes Mobipocket DRM (Kindle uses Mobi DRM). There are several online tutorials on how to do it and even a GUI front-end that makes it non-techie friendly.
Nice to know its doable but so far I have no use for it, myself…
(shrug)
Given that there are several excellent Mobi readers available on LINUX (CoolReader 3, FBReader, etc) odds are that Kindle books have been read on Linux PCs for months if not years now.
Add in that pretty much every Linux box out there uses Wine or VMWare (or equivalents) both of which reportedly run Kindle For PC just fine so its pretty clear that anybody that wants to buy Kindle books to read on Linux PCs can do it already.
Now, whether Amazon will ever release Kindle App for LINUX PCs is an interesting question unto itself; the Kindle runs on LINUX so the app obviously exists. Whether they choose to release it or not is more likely an economic decision than a technical one.
Kindle for PC AZW ebooks still seem to use MOBI DRM. What isn’t known is how to find out the MOBI PID used by Kindle for PC. Once the PID is discovered, mobidedrm will presumably work.
Responding to the “Linux port” question, I have long advocated that MobiPocket should have just paid CodeWeavers to do a custom port of their Windows Reader to wine for Linux. This is even easier to do in the case of Kindle for PC, because it does not need to interact with USB-attached devices (and is in other ways a much simpler application). This gets Amazon millions of new potential customers for a small outlay of resources.