The Librie mailing list gained a bunch of new members after mentions on the eBook Community list and in this blog. Please join the list to free the Librie. Your membership will be a vote against Orwellian DRM and vanishing e-books. Meanwhile here are observations from Mark Hill, a Librie owner in the United Kingdom–follow by an example of the hardware hacking that very likely will follow.
The unit is very slick, the screen quality is awesome, I cannot use it for anything, I do not speak Japanese, and I really bought it because I think if we can bypass the DRM, it would be a wonderful device. This was a brave move, I think, and without a lot of skilled people working on it, I am unsure that we can do anything with it.
There are two options. We either get ahold of the software used to create the BBEB format and author our own documents from Project Gutenberg, etc., or we hack the device to bypass DRM and/or provide it with the functions to read txt files and html.
I have shown it to a few guys here, and everybody would buy one to a man, if the DRM issues are solved.
I think Sony is being very very short-sighted with its approach here.
They have made major mistakes like this before and continue to make them
I have a blog entry which outlines my thoughts overall.
Meanwhile, over at Sven Neuhaus‘s mailing list devoting to the Librie, the good works go on. Here in the U.S., since computer makers and buyers are still suffering from laws that Hollywood purchased with massive campaign donations in Washington, the goal can’t legally be a DRM bypass per se. But, if nothing else, Americans would like to be able to load programs to read HTML, PDF and other common e-book formats. To show the eagerness of those in the Librie Liberation Movement, here’s a recent exchange btween Mark and another member of the Neuhaus list.
It ships with a number of books in memory, I am guessing these are taking up the space on the flash NAND.
Some of these will be bulky as they contain audio.
Mark
[Other member’s name]
> Hi!
> After looking at the pictures again, I have a few more
> speculations to offer about the system architecture:
> The main CPU (Dragonball, IC1001) seems to be equipped with
> 64MByte
> SDRAM (16 or 32bit wide, 7ns, IC1201 + IC1202),
> 4MByte NOR flash (16 or 32bit wide, 90ns, IC1203 + IC1204)
> from which program code can be directly executed without loading
> into SDRAM first, and 48MByte (32MB (IC1106) + 16MB (IC1108))
> sectored NAND flash (works like a harddisk, no direct code
> execution from flash possible).
> The 4MB NOR flash is big enough to hold a bootloader and also a
> small Linux system in a compressed R/O filesystem (cramfs).
> What seems odd is that from the 48MByte NAND flash only 10MB are
> available for internal eBook data storage (if I remember it
> right).
> What did Sony fill the other 38MByte with?
> The display controller (IC1610, found no info about this one,
> yet)comes with 1MByte SRAM (16 or 32bit wide, 70ns, IC1612 + IC1613)
> and 512KByte NOR flash (8 or 16bit wide, 90ns, IC1611).
> This seems a resonable amount of memory for a controller driving
> a 800×600 grayscale display.
Detail: If you’re not on the eBook Community list already, why not join that as well?
