Last I heard blind people are permitted under the fair use doctrine to
break drm on all books with two exception categories; lyrics and drama
are both off limits.
That was when Kurt Sylke was running the Library of Congress.
On Tue, 15 Sep 2015, John G Heim wrote:
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 2015 09:54:20
From: John G Heim <jheim@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: Linux for blind general discussion <blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: Linux for blind general discussion <blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Reading Kindle books on Linux
Get Amazon to write a linux app? I don't think that is practical. Maybe
somebody could sue them. But persuade them? Impossible.
Are you sure it's illegal for a blind person to break the DRM on a kindle
book? The Library of Congress puts out a list of exceptions to the DMCA every
3 years. Here is a link to an article that does a good job of covering the
exception on ebooks for people who use screen readers:
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=94238
If you are suggesting that it's unethical fora blindperson to break DRM on an
ebook, I strongly disagree with that. I can see that a difficult legal issue
could be created by saying a blind person can do that and a sighted person
cannot. Maybe sighted people should be allowed to do it too. I don't have any
opinion on that. But as an ethical issue, I sure don't think there is
anything unethical about a blind person breaking DRM so he can listen to a
book he legally owns on his choice of platform.
On 09/15/2015 07:35 AM, Karen Lewellen wrote:
of course the simple solution is to tell Amazon, who must make their
products accessible, to create a Kindle application for Linux.
The hacking into them is exactly why getting anyone on board with said
treaty is a problem. It is established by the existence of an
application to violate copyright that people will violate copyright.
Yes Bookshare is a huge alternative, and many many countries are a part
of the program now.
But if one wants a solution rooted in integrity, get amazon to solve
the problem. I believe the department of Education and or Justice
successfully told them that they must, with some tools existing already.
I will go one better, if you can write applications offer to partner
with them, and earn some money too boot.
Just my take,
Karen
On Tue, 15 Sep 2015, Tony Baechler wrote:
On 9/14/2015 3:47 AM, John J. Boyer wrote:
I have Debian Jessie set up for command-line only, Braille only. Is
there a way to read Kindle books?
Hi all,
Since there seems to be some interest in this, here goes. As always,
corrections welcome.
The short answer is no. Kindle books are in the .mobi format. It's
highly likely that ebook-convert can convert them except for one
little problem. Most Kindle books have DRM protection, meaning that
you have to be able to decrypt them before you can do anything
further. The idea, of course, is so you won't share them or do
exactly what you're trying to do. Not all books have DRM, but most
do. If you only buy Kindle books without DRM, you should be fine, but
there seems to be no easy way to find out which do and which don't.
There is a little bit of good news. Someone has written a Python
program to break this decryption. I will not share it for obvious
legal reasons, but one can find it if one looks hard enough. It was
designed for Windows and might require a GUI, but since the decryption
part is a command line Python program, it should work in Linux. Look
for a program to break the Amazon DRM encryption on .mobi files.
Sorry for not having a better answer. If you're in the US, Bookshare
is probably a better alternative. They don't use DRM, their files are
a lot easier to convert and they get a lot of publisher files. They
do have international members, but I don't know to what extent their
books are available outside of the US. Hopefully the recently enacted
treaty will help with some of this. If you do have a better solution,
I am very interested. I usually don't buy Kindle books because it's
such a hassle to make them readable.
_______________________________________________
Blinux-list mailing list
Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
_______________________________________________
Blinux-list mailing list
Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
--
_______________________________________________
Blinux-list mailing list
Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list