The Amazon Kindle Cloud Reader is live

http://read.amazon.com

by cek • 15 years ago

181 118 15 years ago

read.amazon.com

fpgeek5• 15 years ago

Wonder why they decided to change the name from "Kindle for Web"?

OP, please fix the spelling in the title. I find it very irritating.

fpgeek5• 15 years ago

Wow, they support Chrome and Safari, but not Firefox. Time to spoof my user agent and see if it really doesn't work or not...

Update: Even user-agent spoofing didn't make a difference with Firefox.

cageface11• 15 years ago

Looks like they're using Web SQL for local storage. Mozilla foolishly (IMO) rejected this standard so they'd have to reimplement the storage layer with IndexedDB to get this working on FF.

wycats• 15 years ago

WebSQLDB isn't really a "standard". The standard is "whatever version of sqlite safari happened to ship with" which is really not a tenable long-term solution.

zds• 15 years ago

The innovation in web apps that Apple spurred by their payment restrictions is going to be good for everyone. The Financial Times' excellent iPad app has now been replaced by an equally impressive web app. Amazon's Kindle Cloud Reader is almost as responsive as the native app. I'm almost ready to switch to it. Should be interesting to see how this affects the number of books they sell.

fpgeek5• 15 years ago

They're highlighting their new iPad-optimized Kindle Store for Tablets. That is clearly a shot back at Apple for the recent "eBookstore Armageddon". Given how close they were to releasing their web app, I'm a little surprised that they didn't play more hardball with Apple, though.

cageface11• 15 years ago

This is one more reason why I'm happy I'm not locked into a single-platform store like iBooks.

bryanlarsen2• 15 years ago

Sadly, I think many will miss your irony.

bdickason• 15 years ago

I was expecting a similar experience to this on my desktop as well. Loved the web app but wish the store was also optimized and didn't just dump me onto the main AMZN site ;(

ComputerGuru• 15 years ago

s/Kindel/Kindle/

It's a pretty grating misspelling. Thank you.

jerrya• 15 years ago

It's a very nice app. Thank you Amazon.

I hope O'Reilly and Safari Books Online take note. I use Safari but its web app to read the books is so slow as to make the whole experience painful and doesn't provide nearly the value it could.

It also seems to be very Microsoft IE optimized and basically lets you read one and only one book at a time, regardless of whether you have a post 2005 tabbed browser or not.

pw2• 15 years ago

Yeah, I was sorely disappointed when I tried Safari. Great selection, but the interface is horrible. And they make it very hard to cancel your subscription. I expected better from O'Reilly. (It's actually a joint venture between O'Reilly and Pearson, which explains a lot. Still, it's a blight on O'Reilly's otherwise stellar reputation.)

pieter3• 15 years ago

Nice. Now, if they'd just drop their surcharge for ordering ebooks in mainland Europe I might actually use it. Paying $3-%5 extra per book just because I live somewhere else doesn't make sense with ebooks.

davidw3• 15 years ago

I wonder if there's a way to fudge this by registering the Kindle with a US company/address or something like that.

The problem is that to set up a service like that would cost money and... you'd end up having to pay to use it, so you're back at square one.

oemera• 15 years ago

I'm from Germany and I have heard from people who have registered their account with a address in the united states and a valid credit card which is also registered to a guy living in the united states. If you can do this you can buy from the american kindle store and you are paying for the same books less money than european customers.

I hope they will get this right without a hack in the future.

fpgeek5• 15 years ago

Don't complain to Amazon about their ebook prices. Since "agency pricing", they're (mostly) not allowed to set them anymore. Beyond agency pricing, some European countries (e.g. France, Germany) have tried to regulate the prices of ebooks themselves. Sadly, Amazon is stuck just as much as you are.

shangaslammi2• 15 years ago

This specific complaint is about Amazon though. Even if a publisher sets the exact same price for every region, Amazon sometimes adds their own "Whispernet tax" of about $2 + VAT. They seem to be gradually phasing it out now, but for the longest time, there were e.g. no free books outside the US, because even books listed as "free" actually cost a minimum of $2 + tax.

anghyflawn• 15 years ago

As far as I understand you have more surcharges to fear from European authorities than from Amazon.

Signed - unhappy person living in Norway, where the government is enforcing VAT (which is 25%) on all digital services bought abroad, including ebooks and Apple Store apps. Which is especially lame given that actual books are exempt from VAT (I love actual books, but why the unequal treatment?)

forcer• 15 years ago

It shows only books downloaded to the 1st Kindle associated with particular account. Anyone knows how to display books from all Kindles on that account?

ghshephard2• 15 years ago

Shows books associated with all of my devices. Or, to be more accurate, all of the books I have purchased, in archive or on a device, are present. Including seven (7) unique copies of the Amazon Kindle Guide.

davidw3• 15 years ago

So... you can't cut and paste from it. Anyone want to dig in and look at how it's implemented? They must be fairly confident that people aren't going to use it to rip books off.

ghshephard2• 15 years ago

http://www.free-ocr.com/, or, I guess any OCR tool will do a job. But then - people could always have done (and probably did) that with a physical book, so, I'm not sure whether it would be worth it to make it more difficult to do with the digital book.

corin_• 15 years ago

Well if someone created the software to do it, you could rip digital books automatically - not quite as easy to do with paper books, what with having to scan all the pages (possibly after first unbinding the book).

sien• 15 years ago

They are probably fairly confident that isn't worth the hassle for most people.

You could already do the same with the Kindle app on the PC at any rate.

There are also scripts for breaking the encryption on Kindle files already.

ericmoritz• 15 years ago

The text on the page is actually text. It's just a matter off time before someone writes a greasemonkey script to enable cut and paste.

jonburs• 15 years ago

The misspelling in the title is quite intentional -- cek is Charlie Kindel, former GM of Windows Phone Developer Experience (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2860646).

It should also be said that he's a great guy that I've known for more than a decade. Anyone who's interested in taking part in an early stage Seattle startup should definitely send him a message.

Well, on LinkedIn or Twitter or Google+ I guess -- Charlie, please add contact info to your HN profile!

[Edit] Looks like the title spelling has been corrected...

davidw3• 15 years ago

He probably writes Kindel a lot more than Kindle and has it hard wired into his fingers.

cek2• 15 years ago

When I posted this link to twitter I did intentionally mis-spell it (my tweet was "Oh, wow. The Amazon Kindel (er, Kindle) Cloud Reader is live: http://bit.ly/pBoMhS.

But, When I pasted it here to share on HN, I removed the "(er,...)" and MEANT to fix the original. My apologies for not doing that. Glad someone at HN was able to fix it.

@jonburs - My contact info IS in my HN profile, not sure why it's not showing up.

veidr• 15 years ago

Wow. For reading, that is incomparably better than the (admittedly horrid) Kindle for Mac native application.

If this gains a search feature, I cannot imagine ever launching the native app again.

cageface11• 15 years ago

Agreed. This is impressive. There are fewer and fewer reasons to write native apps it seems.

Any ideas what frameworks were used to build this?

pw2• 15 years ago

This is wonderful. My one gripe with Kindle books was that I couldn't access them from my Ubuntu workstation. Because of that, I actually purchased a second copy of some titles from the Google eBookstore or resorted to pirating a PDF.

It doesn't look like you can highlight passages, though. And the lack of copy and paste, while understandable, will surely be grating in a desktop environment.

bergie• 15 years ago

I've been running Kindle for PC on Wine, but this web app is definitely nicer.

smhinsey• 15 years ago

I would love to see this synchronize with the "collections" feature on the DX (not sure if all models have it). Otherwise, this is excellent.

nextparadigms• 15 years ago

"Optimized for iPad: shop the integrated Kindle Store for Tablets"

I was expecting this for a few months now, especially after Apple wanted to introduce that policy of theirs where they wanted a %30 cut. Amazon is not taking any chances with Apple anymore. Good for them. All content providers should use web-apps.

mfringel• 15 years ago

Web apps sacrifice offline operation. I can't say I'd be totally sanguine about that, specifically with content providers.

Derbasti• 15 years ago

This one doesn't. It works just fine offline.

anigbrowl• 15 years ago

You can cache stuff offline with HTML 5. My tablet is wifi-only (didn't want to spend 100$ on an overpriced data plan) and this works fine with it.

Google Books also has an 'available offline' option, BTW. I can't quite decide which I prefer.

estel• 15 years ago

The only thing I've found missing are keyboard shortcuts to navigate the book? Or am I just trying the wrong keys?

maguay• 15 years ago

The left and right arrows on the keyboard work for me in Safari, though only after first clicking the next arrow on-screen.

stralep2• 15 years ago

The Amazon KINDEL Cloud Reader is live...

stralep2• 15 years ago

OK... It's fixed now

jrockway4• 15 years ago

So is this the end of DRM on Kindle books? Because it works fine in Chromium, which I have full access to the source code for. That means I can make it do anything, including dump out the text that I'm looking at.

I dug around a little bit and found that it's storing its data in a sqlite database in ~/.config/chromium/Default/databases/https_read.amazon.com_0/2 (there's an index of what's in what database in ../Databases.db). I did a "select * from fragments", found some things that look like data URLs representing images, pasted them into my browser and yup... those are the pictures from the book I'm reading. So, DRM fail.

As for the text of the book, I see some words from the book surrounded by garbage. So if this is encryption, it's pretty bad. Excerpt:

⟳As➁⨋0⫪⟳I➁⨋0⬀⟳exit,➁⨋0⭂⟳I❪➖⨋0⭍⟳⡿❪➖⨋0⮥⟳m➁⨋0⮻⟳⢞⥞ys➁⨋0Ⰸ⟳⢵refu

"As I exit, I'm careful..."

Next step is to look for the source code that implements this and see what those garbage characters are doing.

ristretto2• 15 years ago

To be fair, you can find tons of kindle books for free in torrents and on the internet anyway, amazon doesnt stop you even from copying them to your kindle. I m sure amazon and even the authors are aware of those limitations and are focusing on a better experience readers would be willing to pay for.

officemonkey3• 15 years ago

I think Amazon has mostly learned the mistakes of the record labels made. They realize if they go hog-wild on the DRM that the public are just going to go the torrents.

The rest of the publishing industry occasionally forgets and does dumb stuff (like get pissy over the text-to-speech function in order to protect their audiobook profits).

In fact, I won't be surprised if DRM is eventually dropped from eBooks you buy.

JonLim3• 15 years ago

Kindle user here. Started out by downloading a handful of books from various authors whom were recommended to me. After seeing how poorly formatted some pirated books were, I downloaded some samples of other books, and the formatting was great.

Went and bought a whole whack of books right after that. I pirated the first book in Song of Fire and Ice (Game of Thrones) and bought the rest because I loved the book so much.

So yes, Amazon has played this arena VERY well, in my opinion.

arethuza• 15 years ago

Doesn't having some encryption, even if it is trivial to break, mean that the DMCA applies if you are in the US turning this activity into a criminal act?

mtogo• 15 years ago

This comment is encrypted with ROT-26. By reading it you have cracked it and are breaking the law.

recoiledsnake• 15 years ago

Isn't violating copyright(except for fair use) already illegal? If you photocopy a book fully and give it your friend, you're already violating copyright and can receive a takedown notice[1], regardless of the anti-decryption clause of the DMCA.

[1] A different provision of the DMCA

sp332• 15 years ago

It's like the difference between trespassing vs. breaking and entering. If you have to turn a doorknob, it's trespassing. But picking a lock is breaking and entering. If you can read the plain text in Notepad, I don't think it counts. From http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/dltr/articles/2009dltr003.h...

The anti-circumvention provisions of §1201 were intended to "encourage[] technological solutions" to piracy by providing legal sanctions against the circumvention of such technology. Realizing that "what may be encrypted or scrambled often may be decrypted or unscrambled," Congress thought it necessary to provide an alternate form of protection to those willing to invest in (and implement) "effective" technological measures. Section 1201 "does not mandate the adoption of any . . . technological protection;" it merely "takes those technological measures that win adoption because of their efficacy and confers [statutory] protection on them." If, as Congress suggested, the circumvention of a technological measure designed to protect a copyrighted work truly is "the electronic equivalent of breaking into a locked room in order to obtain a copy of a book," providing a legal remedy if the lock fails seems entirely reasonable and appropriate.

rufo• 15 years ago

Kindle (and Nook, and Adobe) DRM has been super-easy to crack for a while now. You can even set up Calibre to do it for you.

mmastrac• 15 years ago

This is just a simple LZ compression scheme with a per-book, static dictionary. It's trivial to decompress, although that exercise is left to the reader.

jrockway4• 15 years ago

Excellent. Why is Amazon suddenly going so easy on the DRM? Did they realize it's pointless? Is this a bug? That's what I'm curious about.

kia2• 15 years ago

WTF??? They don't support two most popular web browsers.

Firefox 5: "Your web browser isn't supported yet. Download Chrome or Safari below."

IE9: "Your web browser isn't supported yet. Download Chrome or Safari below."

cageface11• 15 years ago

Complain to Mozilla for being too pig-headed to support Web SQL.

JeremyBanks3• 15 years ago

Web SQL's abandoned now and Mozilla supports its successor, IndexedDB. Hopefully Amazon will support that too, before too long.

lmorchard3• 15 years ago

Oh, and by the way: Microsoft was opposed to WebSQL, too. It wasn't all Mozilla.

JeremyBanks3• 15 years ago

They're using the Web SQL database to store the books on the client. This has never been supported by Firefox. Alternatives are becoming available, but it's not surprising that they started with the most established client-side database. It's also the only one supported by Safari, and since it seems like tablet support is one of their goals, that's important.

ristretto2• 15 years ago

That is not an excuse for them, they should have a non-offline alternative for ie9 & FF

kia2• 15 years ago

Customers don't really care what technologies a company uses. If a customer uses modern web browser the product must work. Period.

_b8r0• 15 years ago

It's interesting to see Amazon working around the iPad's artificial limitations in this way. jrockway's comment about the sqlite database is particularly interesting. I'm not convinced that it would be particularly feasible to implement DRM in a cross browser way without causing serious performance problems (although I await to be unpleasantly surprised).

pogos• 15 years ago

This is so cool. I can now read kindle books on my ubuntu laptop without setting up kindle for pc + wine ugliness.

RexRollman• 15 years ago

At least now I will be able to read Kindle books on my CR-48 (Chromebook).

tord_f• 15 years ago

Shame that the dictionary is missing.

jenquiqui• 15 years ago

That logo looks really ominous

cek2• 15 years ago

There are rumors Amazon is bringing out a color Kindle that is more an iPad like tablet than a book reader, likely based on Android.

Given the (apparently) great HTML5 work that went into building the Cloud Reader, I wonder what we'll see for UI in the color Kindle. Will there be a suite of apps that are all HTML5?

toddmorey• 15 years ago

Would anyone like to guess why search has been omitted in the web version? Also, for reference / technical books, it would be nice if the authors could mark certain blocks of content to allow copy and paste. It feels weird to have to retype all the code examples from a digital publication.

stevelaz• 15 years ago

Woot! Finally, we can now read kindle books on Linux. Thanks amazon.

eneveu• 15 years ago

I've just bought my first e-books with this week's Pragmatic Programmer 40% sale ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2861479 ). I'm now interested in buying an e-reader. Still hesitating between Kindle, Nook, iPad, or an Android tablet...

This might just tip the scale toward the Kindle DX.

jmelloy• 15 years ago

I love my Nook, and it supports ePub.

cageface11• 15 years ago

I consolidated from a Kindle and iPad to just the iPad for travelling but I miss the Kindle. It's smaller and more comfortable to read and I prefer it for everything but books with a lot of equation or diagrams.

The Amazon Kindle Cloud Reader is live

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