The Amazon Kindle Touch eBook Reader may not run Google Android like the latest eReaders from Barnes & Noble and Sony. But that doesn’t mean you can’t crack open the operating system and install custom apps.
Developer Yifan Lu has figured out how to jailbreak the Kindle Touch simply by downloading an MP3 file and playing it on the eReader. Seriously, it’s that easy.
That’s because the MP3 includes custom ID3 tags that execute commands on the Kindle Touch. The Kindle Touch user interface is largely written in HTML5 and Javascript and in order to unlock the device so that it can run custom code, you just need to figure out a way to inject some custom HTML. Yifan Lu figured out how to do that using Amazon’s experimental MP3 player.
Right now there’s not really much you can do with a jailbroken Kindle Touch. Modifications designed for older Kindle devices won’t work because the Kindle operating system has changed rather dramatically.
But it should be fairly simple for someone to add support for EPUB books or other files by writing an HTML5 extension for the Kindle software.
“an HMTL5 extension”…
Change to “an HTML5 extension”
Thanks, corrected!