E-books are a nice replacement for physical books in a number of ways, but one area they tend to fall down is sharing. While you can easily share a book, it’s harder to share e-books due to digital rights management (DRM) software that stops you from simply taking the e-book file from your Kindle and sending it to someone else.
But as long as DRM has been around, there have been tools to break it. Until now, potentially. As Amazon is claiming it has perfected an unbreakable DRM system.
Amazon really doesn’t want you taking e-books elsewhere
No more easy cracking
Previously, DRM was stored individually on each e-book file, meaning if you could remove the file from the Kindle device, it was relatively easy to remove the DRM. Then Amazon would update the DRM, crackers would crack it, and so on.
But Amazon’s latest version of their DRM is much more devious. Installed as part of one of the newest Kindle updates, the DRM now uses a secret key within a locked folder with the Kindle’s file system. That key is used to decrypt the book’s DRM. Due to its location, that folder and the key within are not accessible to users without jailbreaking the device. And according to a poster on a tech forum/website, Mobileread, accessing that storage is only possible if your Kindle was jailbroken before the update came in.
The changes apply to all e-books downloaded onto a Kindle after the update was applied, regardless of whether that e-book originally had that DRM or not. The only exceptions are those e-books whose publishers have requested to stay DRM-free.
This is only the latest in a series of changes that Amazon has made in order to secure its platform. In February of this year, it discontinued the ability to download your Kindle e-books onto a computer, and has taken steps to ensure people using the Kindle app for PC aren’t able to download their e-books and remove the DRM.
Of course, it’s worth keeping in mind that, legally, you don’t own any e-book you buy from Amazon. Instead, you’re paying for a digital license of an e-book, which can be taken away at any time Amazon sees fit. Such is the reality of buying digital goods.
Those who make it their business to go about breaking this sort of protection won’t take this lying down, of course. The chance to crack a supposedly uncrackable DRM is one that they will jump at with both feet. Time will tell whether Amazon’s latest counterstroke is the one that ends the battle for good, or whether this particular arms race will continue on.
