TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Mr. Kindle Hack tells why he did it—and says he’ll return to the Sony Reader

By Humayun Kabir

Igor Skochinsky is the reverse engineer guy who hacked the file system of the Kindle, and discovered hidden features that Aamazon didn’t want to reveal. He also wrote a program to generate Mobipocket PIDs from Kindle Serial Numbers so that you can read your previously purchased Mobipocket e-books on the Kindle. The program is freely available from his blog. Igor plans to work on the Kindle further, and later, on Sony reader. Here is his short interview with Kindle News:

Humayun Kabir: Why did you decide to hack or reverse engineer the Kindle?

Igor Skochinksy: I like to get inside of hardware and software to see how it works. Also, in this case I wanted to see how user content and user applications can be added to the Kindle.

HK: From your own experience do you think the Kindle is the most closed or protected system?

Igor: It is closed, but not that much (you can load some user content after all), and protection is not very strong (Sony Reader or Apple iPhone are much better protected).

HK: Is there any fundamental difference between Mobipocket and Kindle formats? If so, what kind of?

Igor: The .azw format is exactly the same as Mobipocket.

Amazon books can have some Kindle-specific metadata, and the PID format is slightly different, but the underlying format is same old Mobi. That said, the Kindle also supports another e-book format called Topaz (file extension .tpz or .azw1) and a few books offered by Amazon use it. It seems to offer more features than Mobipocket. I’ll be investigating it some time later (I don’t currently have any Topaz books and buying them outside of U.S. is complicated).

HK: You wrote the program so that DRMed Mobipocket format can be read on the Kindle. Do you think reverse (reading DRMed Kkindle format on any device that support DRMed Mmobipocket) is also possible? If so, do you want to do that? (since Amazon own Mobipocket.com the reverse shouldn’t be legal problem, I think)

Igor: Yes, adding more PIDs to Kindle books is quite trivial. However, I currently don’t plan doing that as I don’t really want to deal with Amazon’s lawyers even if it’s legal.

HK: Any more hidden features on the Kindle?

Igor: I think I described about everything I found.

HK: What might be the reasons (in your view) for Amazon’s unwillingness to reveal the features you figured out? Are the features still in development stage etc.?

Igor: They probably felt they weren’t ready or there were some bugs which made them unsuitable for release.

HK: What is your next hack you plan with the Kindle?

Igor: I plan to release a script to copy arbitrary files from and to Kindle, and maybe a sample Java booklet to test the extensibility. Then I’ll probably go back to fiddling with Sony Reader and let others to continue Kindle development.