All the Apple marks are excited about the iPad. Not me, but whatever. What I am excited about, though, is seeing consumers use the items they’ve bought in the manner of their choosing. Say you’ve bought a bunch of books from the Amazon Kindle store. (Don’t tell Devin!) Those books are only “supposed” to work with the Kindle and the various Kindle readers (iPhone and Touch included), but with a bit of work you can read them on iPad, assuming, of course, that Apple doesn’t let Amazon load the Kindle App onto what amounts to be their dedicated ereader.
It’s really not too hard. All you need is the book you want to read on your iPad, unswindle, mobiledrm, and Stanza, which is a program that reads ePub files.
OK!
1. Buy your book. I recommend “The Death of WCW” by Bryan Alvarez.
2. Download the required software. This includes unswindle, mobiledrm, and maybe the Kindle reader for Windows.
3. Put everything in the same directory, then run unswindle. The Kindle DRM is now gone~!
4. Fire up Stanza, then convert to epub, place it on the iPad, and read away~!
That’s it. Enjoy being able to read Kindle books on your iPad.
Please be aware that Amazon will likely be updating the DRM it uses pretty much every hour on the hour, so don’t get mad when this method suddenly stops working. It’s a cat-and-mouse game because publishers don’t know how to get on with each other or release books in open standards.
UPDATE – Amazon also reminds us that, as of this writing, there is nothing stopping you from being able to download the Kindle software onto your iPad, thereby bypassing these steps.