this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024
210 points (97.3% liked)
Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
53779 readers
353 users here now
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
Rules • Full Version
1. Posts must be related to the discussion of digital piracy
2. Don't request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote
3. Don't request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs
4. Don't submit low-quality posts, be entitled, or harass others
Loot, Pillage, & Plunder
💰 Please help cover server costs.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The bad news is that uploading e-books will involve programming on your part (for your sanity at least).
The good news is that it should be far easier than other mediums.
If you are approaching from a complete safety perspective (cause you live in a fiefdom that owes tribute to the publishers guild), then you're going to want to OCR the pages of the book and use the text to make a brand new book free from metadata. I'm pretty sure a python crash course could get you up and running in a month or 6.
If you want what's closest to the original product, then you'll need a python script that strips everything from the book into just a text document, then re-convert back into your own book. You'll have to review the text document to see if any random code was included in the book like invisible text.
Both options are so simple from a programming perspective that I've never seen scripts to strip e-book protections. A real (the solution is left un-worked as a challenge for the reader). And from what I know, the publishers have switched to focusing on selling hard copies as their bread and butter, and striking deals with libraries for other revenue. Big money is still in mandatory university textbooks.
Source: Never actually done what you're asking for
Thanks for your advice. I am a programmer by craft so I can definitely do that. I think the only issue may be books with any important content that is not text, i.e. graphics and images (and unfortunately, many of the books I am interested in have that). If I understood what you said correctly.
gImageReader or ocrmypdf will get you the pdf text, but after the text will need fiddling with and cleaning. Use LibreOffice, languagetool, write-good, etc to make finding the oddballs easy.
pdftk is what you want for editing pdf metadata.
Gimp is what you'll need for editing images, Looking for watermarks, smoothing edges, lowering quality, introducing random noise, etc.
exiftool is what you'll need for image metadata. Or take a screenshot, add a bit of noise or de-noise, and add back to the new pdf.
Scrivener or LibreOffice if you want to polish/republish, though that's a ton of work.