24 ms·

I make an explicit decision not to get any Amazon hardware within my household. I don’t even trust the Eero brand.

Andrex 1y ago
They got me by the balls with Kindle. Someone(/me if I had enough time) should make some kind of LLM scraper extension for Amazon's Web Reader. Run it on your own ebooks while you're signed in and you get the EPUBs. Maybe this already exists... I know there was some kind of cutoff earlier this year for unDRMing your Kindle books, but I definitely missed that by a mile.
- boldlybold 1y ago
  Buy the ebook, then download a beautiful DRM-free and guilt-free version from Anna's Archive? win-win.
- pixelmelt 1y ago
  I've been working on exactly this! After buying a book and having an awful exerience in their native reader I realized they no longer let you download your ebooks. Thus began the war on their web reader, they have some interesting defenses on how they encode the book, its basically a bunch of SVG paths that render to letters that are mapped to IDs that change on every request to fetch book data (the most you can fetch at once is 5 pages) the SVG paths also contain micro variations so an A on one page will never have the same path on another, you have to render and fill in every unique letter in the book and compare it to every other to create a unified mapping and THEN compare it to the letters of the actual font its using to actually find out what letter each character actually is. The only thing I have left to do is get newlines working properly and package it all up nicely for release.
  - boldlybold 1y ago
    Damn, that's an impressive obfuscation and debugging. If you get around to releasing it I would be interested.
    - pixelmelt 1y ago
      Its released! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45610226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45610226
      - boldlybold 1y ago
        You are an absolute legend, nice work!
  - Andrex 1y ago
    That is amazing!! I will check that out whenever it's done. Thank you for your work! Dumb question: why not flip through the pages, take screenshots, then use OCR? Maybe some kind of jank Amazon DRMalike?
    - pixelmelt 1y ago
      OCR would likely work, however I would need to render everything out with a browser and do (probably) more processing. I also wanted a way to preserve text styling exactly as the web viewer shows it, not sure if OCR supports detecting text alignment. Also I've released the tool and a post about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45610226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45610226
      - Andrex 1y ago
        Just saw it at #1! Congrats and thank you!

They got me by the balls with Kindle. Someone(/me if I had enough time) should make some kind of LLM scraper extension for Amazon's Web Reader. Run it on your own ebooks while you're signed in and you get the EPUBs. Maybe this already exists... I know there was some kind of cutoff earlier this year for unDRMing your Kindle books, but I definitely missed that by a mile.

boldlybold 1y ago
Buy the ebook, then download a beautiful DRM-free and guilt-free version from Anna's Archive? win-win.
pixelmelt 1y ago
I've been working on exactly this! After buying a book and having an awful exerience in their native reader I realized they no longer let you download your ebooks. Thus began the war on their web reader, they have some interesting defenses on how they encode the book, its basically a bunch of SVG paths that render to letters that are mapped to IDs that change on every request to fetch book data (the most you can fetch at once is 5 pages) the SVG paths also contain micro variations so an A on one page will never have the same path on another, you have to render and fill in every unique letter in the book and compare it to every other to create a unified mapping and THEN compare it to the letters of the actual font its using to actually find out what letter each character actually is. The only thing I have left to do is get newlines working properly and package it all up nicely for release.
- boldlybold 1y ago
  Damn, that's an impressive obfuscation and debugging. If you get around to releasing it I would be interested.
  - pixelmelt 1y ago
    Its released! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45610226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45610226
    - boldlybold 1y ago
      You are an absolute legend, nice work!
- Andrex 1y ago
  That is amazing!! I will check that out whenever it's done. Thank you for your work! Dumb question: why not flip through the pages, take screenshots, then use OCR? Maybe some kind of jank Amazon DRMalike?
  - pixelmelt 1y ago
    OCR would likely work, however I would need to render everything out with a browser and do (probably) more processing. I also wanted a way to preserve text styling exactly as the web viewer shows it, not sure if OCR supports detecting text alignment. Also I've released the tool and a post about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45610226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45610226
    - Andrex 1y ago
      Just saw it at #1! Congrats and thank you!