[dre95060]

Originally Posted by scotty1024

You really haven't thought this through at all have you?

You were imagining hacking up an application to allow viewing pictures embedded in books? Well how exactly would that application pan and zoom pictures protected by DRM without hacking the DRM?

Or did you imagine you were going to extend the existing book reader application on the platform? Well ditto the above comment. You'd have to hack that application's DRM system, the one thing they're clearly out to protect, the crown jewel of the platform, to gain access to un-protected content so you can pan and zoom it.

Either way, once you showed everyone your mad hacking skillz how exactly would that code not be used to pull images and text from books?

So where did you imagine Amazon was not going to care about your activities???

You need to realize that images have always been the incestuous-love-child-kept-chained-under-the-stairs of the ebook industry. High quality images worth panning and zooming are big. Have you noticed Amazon offering up any Manga? Whispernet isn't unlimited bandwidth and they like that "On your Kindle in under a minute" tag line. Your desires may be laudable "I want my pictures and see them too!" but they run smack into the harsh realities of the technology.

Young man, I have been a hardware engineer for more than 30 years. Let me give you a piece of advice: Do not live your life in fear of lawyers. There is a reason God gave you balls. Use them once in awhile.

Here is the hack I want. It has nothing to do with DRM or Whispernet:

Imagine an application (in place of this "demo") that does the following: When I hit Shift-SYM it takes a screenshot of the current 800x600 image and divides it into four quadrants, each 400x300. Then as I hit the Next Page key it takes each quadrant in turn, blows it up to 800x600, and displays it. Next Page and Prev Page cycle through the quadrants. The Back key would take be back to where I was originally. This could be recursive, such that if the exploded quadrant was not large enough I could hit Shift-SYM again and blow that one up, etc.

I fully recognize the limitations due to the resolution of the original image. There is nothing we can do about that unless the hi-res image is baked into the original ebook. However, my limited experiments with blowing up screenshots in PhotoShop have convinced me that this idea has some merit. It is certainly better than what they have now.

I'll give $500 to the first person who figures out how to do this, sends me the working code and gets it to work on my Kindle. Lab126 employees exempted.

Regards,

Dave E