Are you interested in sharing more details to make your claim more believable?

Yes and no.

I actually wrote the code to make this work with screen readers, back when I worked for Kindle in 2018.

I even got to test it out with a few Amazon employees who were blind, which was a really cool experience!

We added some hidden divs which had the plaintext version for screenreaders. For whatever reason, upper management was ok with the plaintext being scrapable, as long as the formatted version couldn't be scraped.

Ohhhhh. Wow! Did you have to push this through, or was everybody on board from the start?

> For whatever reason, upper management was ok with the plaintext being scrapable, as long as the formatted version couldn't be scraped.

I guess it’s either “formatted version is slightly better and typesetting is hard to get right” or “well we’ll have plausible deniability in case publishers ask us where’s our DRM”. Probably both. Still doesn’t make a lot of sense to me though.

Thanks for sharing!

Ya, your reasoning about why the text-only version was ok is what I heard as well.

As far as people being on board with this--I did not have to push it through, it was a task that management wanted done that I happily did, because I could see the value of it.

Amazon actually does a really good job with accessibility across all their products. When I was there, they had at least 2 full time employees (1 Product manager and 1 Quality assurance engineer) whose full time job was just accessibility, across all Kindle platforms and I heard the intention was to grow that team as I was leaving. They had an entire team working on accessibility for the retail website, from what I heard (though I only met one or two of those people).

However, there still was a sentiment among certain engineers that worrying about accessibility was a waste of time because it only helps a small section of the population. Thankfully Web accessibility (both in standards and in culture) has come a long way in the last 8-10 years, and I think a lot more people believe in its importance now that they did back in 2017 when I started working on this.

While Amazon does some shady stuff, at least _some_ of the blame here belongs on the big publishing companies.

One of the big publishers put heavy pressure on Amazon to patch DRM exploits or else they would pull all their content from the platform (or so I was told).

(I worked at Kindle 2017-2019, and was on the team that wrote the code that OP reversed engineered)

One argument I heard was that this was actually due to "kindle unlimited". I think publishers didn't really care that people were removing drm after purchasing a book, but with amazon's push to a streaming model people started subscribing and mass downloading books to read after unsubscribing. Both unlimited and book purchases used the same drm.

Maybe streaming is inevitable, but streaming is at least partially pushed by the streaming services who make more money on streaming than they do purchases.

Books are rapidly dropping in relevance. It could certainly be that that's exactly how this went down a decade ago, but I'd be willing to bet on Amazon stipulating "no DRM to be on Amazon" (not just Kindle; bundle all the first party distribution together) now and at least some of the big houses folding.

Dropping in popularity, but not relevance.

Reading is still a completely different thing from a book, a stream of consciousness between a writer and a reader, than it is reading in almost any other format. The way we read online from websites and apps is changing how our brains work and how we process text for information (not for the better). We're slowly becoming like the look-up tools that we use in Google and other search engines and LLM agents.

The best way for many chronically online dopamine fried people today to revert their brain back to some normality would be for them to read books and to fight through the distractions as they read.

Dropping in popularity equals dropping in relevance.

When more people get their information calories from sources that are not books, what the books say becomes less relevant.

There's plenty of blame to go around. Tech companies like Amazon blame publishers or other tech companies, publishers blame tech companies or other publishers. My point is that DRM has gone from bad to worse.

So... It's your fault? I mean, you wrote it. You had the option to say no. You didn't. Tired of programmers making the world worse and trying to blame everyone but themselves for why the world got shittier.

If you worked on that code, could tou tell us something more about this technique? What do you think about the OP way of hacking the e-book contents?

While Amazon does some shady stuff, at least _some_ of the blame here belongs on the big publishing companies.

One of the big publishers put heavy pressure on Amazon to patch this exploit or else they would pull all their content from the platform (or so I was told).

(I worked at Kindle 2017-2019, and was on the team that wrote the code that OP reversed engineered)

Amazon has exercised substantial market power to get publishers to do what they want. If they really wanted to, they could have pushed back just like they have in other areas.

Arguably not so much with music anymore given the prolific nature of lossless DRM free downloads available for purchase.

Personally, I buy more music now than any other time in my life: high quality sources playable on all my devices.

Most music is sold without digital restrictions, and many video games are also sold without digital restrictions.

> Most music is sold without digital restrictions

Thanks to Apple

>many video games are also sold without digital restrictions

Thanks to GoG and (to a lesser extent) Steam

>No.

The point you are responding to is at least partially true. Re-read it and see. Your brutal "No" only serves to discredit your own (partially true) argument.

I was on the team that wrote this code.

We knew it was reverse-engineerable, we just didn't care.

Upper management seemed happy enough that it was pretty obfuscated, and we were happy that they didn't force us to do more about it.

> we just didn't care. Upper management seemed happy enough

This is very relatable. Management want X, engineers recognise X is dumb and deliver something that sorta looks like X, management see something that looks like X and are happy.

You are exactly correct.

Yes, but it's still amazing coming from Amazon. Everyone hates Amazon now but it's hard to argue they're not incredibly successful; how did they get where they are if they're staffed with Dilbert's boss types?

I wonder if the start of the causal chain (or at least the intended audience) might be book publishers rather than people in Amazon

Replies like this are why I love HN (assuming it’s true)

It is, I promise :)

Email in bio if you have other questions about it you care to ask.

Uh, just so you know, your bio is empty as of this writing.

I can see their email in their bio.

thanks, I think its fixed now.

It kind of makes sense. It's good enough to stop a non-coder. Anything in the browser can be either broken by a serious coder or has unpleasant tradeoffs.

Amazon would need to drop this feature to seriously lock down their books

Still a DMCA violation to break, though.

This is why the DMCA needs to die. It's absolutely ridiculous.

But you still did it. With awful consequences discussed in this thread. Couldn't you have done less about it ?

Do you tell yourself "well if I hadn't, the next person would've" ?

Did they force you to do it, then ? Was it worth it ?

You ask great questions.

I definitely have regrets about my time working at Amazon. Specifically, I wish that I had pushed back more about doing certain things.

Honestly, DRM wasn't even the worst. All the unnecessary user tracking was way worse, in my opinion.

Its impossible to know for sure, because I didn't push back as much as I should have, but I really think that "well if I hadn't, the next person would've" was absolutely true in this case (knowing what I know about all the other engineers that were in the department at the same time as me). I'm not saying the other engineers were bad people, a lot of them were lovely but they definitely had different convictions than I have.

I worked on the team that implemented this, years ago! (around 2017-2018)

Upper management really enjoyed telling us (the engineers) that we needed to implement more DRM, and we liked complaining that it was dumb.

Fun to see someone reverse engineer what we implemented!

That's amazing! Well done, it was a fun challenge

I don't think its dumb from a business point of view. You've got to make promises to the editors that the platform is going to drive the sales up, not down.

Is it hostile to customers, absolutely.