I’ve been a bit busy recently and couldn’t follow my favorite ebook forum Mobileread.com as closely as I wanted. Also, it seems to have exploded with the release of Kindle 2. I don’t have the device myself and don’t plan to buy it, but I did notice a few things when skimming the forums.
1) Firmware updates
Apparently Amazon didn’t change the obfuscation for the firmware updates and an enterprising person patched my update maker for K2 to make an “update” which sets up a custom screensaver (apparently the K1 shortcut have been disabled).
2) USB network
Apparently K2 includes a USBnet module which can be enabled with a debug command. This allows, for example, to use a PC internet connection instead of Whispernet, or to connect to services running on the Kindle. Telnet is possible, but it needs to be installed on the device first.
3) Kindle for iPhone
Amazon released an iPhone application, and it is now possible use an iPhone or iPod touch instead of Kindle to buy and read ebooks from Amazon. Someone was quick to discover that a small change in kindlepid.py allows one to produce a PID for the iPhone and read library books (or remove DRM from purchased books) the same way as with Kindle. A few days later Amazon removed serial numbers from the “Manage my Kindle” page, probably to try closing this “hole”. It worked for about two hours.
P.S. I did find some time to work on my scripts.
1) Updated kindlepid.py and kindledfix.py to support iPhone serials and fix the metadata corruption problem. Download.
2) Made a combined Kindle firmware update tool. It can extract a firmware update or make a new one, for Kindle 1 or Kindle 2 (K2 untested). Download.
