Want to read your you Kindle purchases on a bigger screen? You just may be able to, but that won’t make Amazon and the old school book publishers happy. My guess is that unlocking the Kindles’ files violates something in the end user agreement. Moving media from one device to another may be more convenient for you, but copyright holders aren’t always interested in making things easy for their customers.

One hack reportedly resulted from a Kindle DRM challenge issued on Israeli forum Hacking.org. On that site, an Israeli hacker known as Labba claims to have created a tool that lets e-books stored on the Kindle be transferred as PDF files.

A U.S. hacker who goes by the name “i♥cabbages,” meanwhile, created a program called Unswindle that promises to convert books stored in the Kindle for PC application into a different file format.

The free Kindle for PC app lets book buyers read their books right from their PCs without having to buy a Kindle reader. Unswindle has to be used in conjunction with MobiDeDRM, a program by another hacker named “darkreverser.”

Posters on i♥cabbages’ blog give Unswindle mixed reviews, ranging from “works like a charm” and “worked flawlessly” to descriptions of various errors. (Cnet)

The customer rep asked me to send every one of the books in my Amazon library to my iPhone. Most of them gave the message that they were sent but a number of them returned the message “Cannot be sent to selected device”.

“Oh that’s the problem,” he said “if some of the books will download and the others won’t it means that you’ve reached the maximum number of times you can download the book.”

I asked him what that meant since the books I needed to download weren’t currently on any device because I had wiped those devices clean and simply wanted to reinstall. He proceeded to tell me that there is always a limit to the number of times you can download a given book. Sometimes, he said, it’s five or six times but at other times it may only be once or twice. And, here’s the kicker folks, once you reach the cap you need to repurchase the book if you want to download it again.

So lets recap. We see the following trends –

• The cost for the virtual book in many cases is only a couple dollars cheaper then the paperback release. Yet there were no capital costs in the ‘printing’ and distribution/warehousing costs are nonexistent.
• We know that the audio TTS capability has been turned off in the Kindle at the request of the audio book publishers.
• I have to spend $300-400 for the device. That buys an awful lot of books.
• Now we find out that in order to upgrade the Kindle you have to wipe your current library clean. Do the upgrade. Only to now find out that the publishers in some cases may only allow you X number of downloads which maybe only a unit of 1.

Remind me again why I want to buy a Kindle?

What is happening here is that the legacy information sources are trying to protect their old income streams before they burn them down. While at the same time attempting to enter the new revenue stream with conditions. What they don’t realize that in trying to manage both at once they are killing the goose with the golden egg before she gets a chance to lay it.

The publishers have to understand that readers want the same relationship with their etext as they had with their pulp text. One of which is the owner gets to do what they wish with the etext in regards to possession. If I wish to keep it fine. I have perpetual right to use the etext forever. If on the other hand I want to sell or trade it away I have that right too. I also have responsibilities. I don’t represent the etext as my own work. I don’t compete with the publisher on new sales, etc.

eReaders won’t take off big time till a few things happen. eTexts have to get cheap. An etext should never cost more than the paperback release of the same book. Fact it should be cheaper. There should be no restriction on which device I have the etext on. I should have the right to backup the etext to any format I desire. Yes I should even have the right to have TTS of the etext if the reader supports it.

Linky.

What’s the right price for an e-book? No more than $10, says a group of Amazon Kindle e-book owners — and they have found a novel way to make themselves heard.

Some 250 Kindle readers are using Amazon’s own book-tagging system to mark e-books priced more than $10 with the tag ‘9 99 boycott’. Their argument: A Kindle book is more restricted in its use than a paper book and therefore should not cost as much.

“It just doesn’t seem right,” says Crystal O’Brien, a Connecticut librarian who bought a Kindle last year. For the last few days, O’Brien has spent a few minutes every day in the Kindle book store tagging the more expensive digital books with the ‘9 99 boycott’ tag and removing it once the price drops below the threshold.

“You are not getting something you can lend out to other people, you are not getting a physical item,” says O’Brien. “So you shouldn’t have to pay so much for a digital copy.”

Well I tend to agree with the angst. I find it somewhat over the top that an ebook copy of a copyrighted work would cost more than its paperback variant. Distribution costs are nil. Creating the work in epub format is pennies. There are no publishing or warehousing costs either. That hard back first edition that would go for $22.50 at Borders probably ought to be $5 for the Kindle. Most of that going to the author, not the publisher.

The other thing that has the sight impaired upset is that the latest releases of Kindle have the TTS features disabled. All because the publisher wants to sell the audio book separately? This is the same issue the music fans are having about labels and their ‘container’ issues about musical works.

More here.

Samsung is coming out with an eBook reader to compete with Kindle. It has some pluses and minuses –

Samsung is getting into the e-book reader bandwagon with its Papyrus. There isn’t that much technical details available for the Papyrus but there are some:

* An A5-sized reader, which means that it is 8.25 x 5.75″. Thickness will probably be less than 1″. Just a guess.
* EPD (electronic paper display) has touch capability (you’ll need to use the stylus that’s included)
* 512MB of internal memory with no memory card option
* No WiFi and no cellular connection either

No WiFi? OK, then you’d expect it to have some WWAN connection. But nope. Not on the Papyrus. And that will doom the Papyrus unfortunately.

I would think that companies would have learned a good lesson from Amazon’s Kindle by now. You most important part about a successful e-book reader is that it needs to be supremely easy to load content onto it. Samsung’s Papyrus, for now, seems to have already failed. The target price will be under US$300 according to sources. The Papyrus is available in Europe and will be launched in Korea in June. US? Maybe.

The plus? Much better form factor. The minus? Lack of serious connectivity options. When the Reader grows up it will most likely sport a SD type slot for both data cards and wireless and a RJ45 connector.

But at a minimum with release of the Samsung reader, another StarTrek physical goes from being science fiction to science fact.

Linky.