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Microsoft's .lit format decrypted
Posted by Ernest Miller on Tuesday, December 31 @ 14:03:24 EST
Contributed by dmoynihan
Digital Millennium Copyright Act
dmoynihan writes "I guess we can talk about this now, though some people have been posting on the matter for a while.

Microsoft's theoretically ultra-secure, DRM-5 sealed format for ebooks has been decrypted.

You might remember that Adobe's researchers plumbed the depths of the net for months trying to find any freely circulating books that had been hacked using Elcomsoft's Advanced Ebook Processor, to no avail. Interesting fair use argument could be made here: when Reader was first launched, people bought Jornadas and such to use it, only to be told later that the required updates to their software would not be offered. So do those people who bought an early Jornada/Ipaq, with the expectation of using the device to read ebooks, have the right to decrypt a commercial ebook and place it on their PDA?

And what about those of us who are using the file extractor to get a look at Microsoft Reader ebooks we create with one file converter or another? "

 
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"User Login" | Login/Create an Account | 3 comments | Search Discussion
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Re: Microsoft's .lit format decrypted (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Tuesday, December 31 @ 18:31:53 EST
Ebooks will fail unless an open standard is accepted by all involved with the ebook industry.

Ebooks, by thier nature, need to be easily accessible by the people who buy them. The people who buy them(me included) would most likely like to be able to read the same ebook on multiple platforms without having to buy it in different formats.

Ebooks will never be popular unless they are affordable, and in order to be affordable you can not make people buy multiple copies perhaps in different formats simply because they want to read it on thier Apple laptop instead of thier Ipaq.


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still no LIT->anything converter (Score: 1)
by mako on Thursday, January 02 @ 04:56:42 EST
(User Info | Send a Message) http://people.debian.org/~mako/
What the program does is downgrade from LIT DRM5 to LIT DRM1. This is great if you bought ebooks with the idea that you'd be able to place them on your Jornada but if you use GNU/Linux and were expecting to be able to read your ebook without rebooting or reinstalling, you're still screwed.

There is still no way to read your .LITs under Linux and there's no available LIT->anything else converter that may help you do this. You still need MS Reader or a similar equipped PDA to be able to get at this and the only operating system family that these programs support.

I've read that there is a script that essentially automates the cut and paste from Reader into Wordpad. This is kludgy but it's interesting as I imagine that this would have worked long before DRM5 was cracked. Of course, again it ties you to a particular family of operating systems and doesn't get around the software bottleneck which is really my problem. Of course, it reiterates the point that if you can see it, you can copy it. When will they get it?


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