Amazon’s new Kindle Cloud Reader is a really cool web app and yet another step toward the web playing a huge role in mobile like it does on the desktop.

But.

Amazon has crippled a few features that we web denizens come to expect and rely upon. No copy/paste? No highlighting text as I read it? No context menus to look up a word in a dictionary, clip to Evernote or whathaveyou?

This will not stand, ya know, this aggression will not stand, man.

So I hacked together a bookmarklet which gives your browser those features back. Drag the link below to your bookmarks bar and click it after you load a book in Cloud Reader:

<a href="javascript:(function(){function c(){var a=this.contentWindow.document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0];this.contentWindow.onclick=null;a._frame=this;a.onmousemove=function(){this._frame.contentWindow.onclick=null;this.setAttribute("style","-webkit-user-select: auto;");this.oncontextmenu=a.onselectstart=null};a.onmousemove()}for(var b=document.getElementsByTagName("iframe")[0].contentWindow.document.getElementsByTagName("iframe"),a=0;a<b.length;a++)c.call(b[a]),b[a].onload=c})();">Uncripple Kindle

It’s quite possible that the bookmarklet will break as Amazon makes changes to the app, so I’ve put the source on GitHub for all to participate in its maintenance.

Amazon has moved too fast for me to keep up. This bookmarklet is mostly likely broken and I won’t be working on it further. Sorry! :(

Oh, and I only tested it on Chrome 14 (Mac) and Safari 5.1. I have confirmed that it is NOT working on dev Chrome (currently 16). YMMV.

Happy reading!