Tag: Copy Protection

Route Around Amazon Kindle’s Ridiculous Limits on Highlights Exporting With Bookcision

While the Amazon Kindle platform has a lot going for it as far as ease of use, it has a number of anti-consumers “features” built into it. One of those are limits that make it difficult/impossible to export highlights you have made of a book.

For example, I can’t even see all of the highlights I’ve made of a book on the Amazon Kindle’s online Notebook area, because after a certain point Amazon starts hiding them from me due to copyright issues: “Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.”

If I try to export those highlights from a Kindle app, I receive an error message like this:

This export will exceed the 15% limit set by the publisher for this book by 21%. New items will not be exported after the limit is reached.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Anyway, Bookcision is a bookmark tool for Chrome that routes around Amazon’s damage to your books. Drag the button to the Chrome bookmark bar, login to the Amazon Kindle Cloud Reader in your browser, click on a book, and then hit the bookmark. A window will pop up that has all of the highlights for that book with the option to copy/paste or download them.

It just works.

Circuit City DIVX Sales Training Video

Not to be confused with the DivX video codec, DIVX was a DVD format introduced by Circuit City in 1998.

Aimed squarely at the DVD rental market of the time, the (awful) idea was that consumers would buy a disc for a relatively low price of around $5, but would only be able to watch the video on the disc for a relatively short period of time. The DIVX DVD players, which were required to use the discs, acted as a copy protection mechanism requiring authorization from a remote server in order to enable playback of the disc content.

The format was, thankfully, a disaster that nobody wanted, and was discontinued in 1999. But not before they made awesomely bad internal training videos like this.