What is this place?

This is a place learn about and share your experiences with the Amazon Kindle, it's accessories, the eBooks and other downloads available.

Saturday, December 1, 2012

Going Viral - Free

The apocalypse is here! Infection is everywhere. Captain Richard Yorke's British army unit were tasked with escorting civilians to the safety of Twickenham rugby stadium but instead find themselves facing wave after wave of flesh-hungry ravening maniacs driven to pass on the virus infecting them. Meanwhile teacher Sean O'Day hides out with his family, hoping the infected hordes will pass them by, while schoolboy Richard Green spends his time hunting and killing the infected, blaming them for the death of his best friend. None of their lives will ever be the same again. Going Viral is the first book of The Virus Sequence, a post-apocalyptic thriller in the tradition of Dawn Of The Dead and 28 Days Later.

Sunday, January 1, 2012

Breaking DRM

One of the hassles of eBooks is commercial titles often come with DRM, or Digital Rights Management. This prevents you from moving a ebook from your nook to your Kindle, or from your Kindle to your kid's Kindle. Well, in the USA, the Supreme Court ruled that breaking DRM is not a crime, only what you do with the broken media once you have unlocked it. If you unlock a DRM's eBook so that you can transfer it to another device, and you bought the original, and own the the device you are transferring to, no law has been broken, and you are within your rights. If you then give a copy to your neighbor, then you have broken the law, but it was the act of giving it to your neighbor that was the offense, not the cracking of the DRM. This cannot be any more clear, and if anyone tells you otherwise, they are very wrong. Ok, that out of the way, the easiest tools to remove DRM from an ebook is a program called Calibre, plus a set of plugins that actually perform the cracking. A very cool individual who goes by the name of Apprentice Alf wrote a simple to understand article describing the process. You can read about that on his blog, Apprentice Alf's Blog.