Undocumented Kindle "Clippings" Limit?

Andrew Savikas
May 20, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

O'Reilly author Shelley Powers is a heavy user of Kindle's "clipping" feature, and has run into an apparently undocumented clipping limit imposed by Amazon:

I tried to find information about the clipping limit in the Kindle TOS or User Guide, but nothing was covered. I also tried to find out if one can "delete" items from the existing clipping file, in order to replace with other clippings at a later time, but once the limit is reached, nothing associated with the book can be added to the clipping file, not even a highlighted sentence.

Shelley also notes that the clipping limit applies to DRM-free books as well, which definitely doesn't make much sense.

Tags: kindle kindle 2 readers

2 Comments

Shelley said:
May 20, 2009 3:30 PM

I tried the Perl application, mobi2mobi, on several books, and what I'm finding is that the clipping amount is most likely a percentage, not the number of instances.

This matches with our expectations for non-DRM books. Mobi2mobi returns a hex value of 0x64 for all the ones I tested, which is equivalent to 100, or 100% if I'm reading the value correctly.

Now, Amazon is making a major mistake with some of the books. Some were out of copyright books that had been converted into Kindle format, and can be downloaded for free. Amazon has attached a 10% clipping limit on these books, which is inaccurate. You should be able to clip 100% of these books.

Again, this is guesswork since this value is completely undocumented by Amazon.

bowerbird said:
May 20, 2009 3:43 PM

shelley said:
> this value is completely undocumented by Amazon.

considering how "pirates" would use this information,
that's hardly surprising...

"fear of pirates" has clearly been much more important
to publishers than "producing customer satisfaction",
or they wouldn't even be using d.r.m. in the first place,
so again, this is hardly surprising...

-bowerbird

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