Submitted by OutlandishnessOk2452 t3_11wnjms in technology
danielravennest t1_jcziaew wrote
I've been borrowing IA books that have "two week loans", downloading the Adobe Digital Editions pdf, using a Calibre plug-in to remove the restrictions, then "cleaning up" the copy (remove blank pages, reduce page background or increase contrast, add bookmarks if needed, and optimize file size). If the IA ever goes down, I'll have a backup.
I'm not against buying books, I have thousands of physical ones. But I believe sharing knowledge is an absolute good.
SomethingMatter t1_jczjbfk wrote
Just to be clear to anyone reading this. You can do the same with books rented from other sites or ones you get from Amazon Unlimited. I am not advocating for this. I am just saying that this is possible with all digital rental/loan books, not just archive.org, so it shouldn't be used as a reason to target archive.org for allowing piracy.
professorlust t1_jd11jtf wrote
FWIW it’s basically impossible to strip DRM from Amazon files published after January 1.
It’s been a major issue in the ereader community
KairuByte t1_jd15s26 wrote
It’s just a matter of time.
[deleted] t1_jd3tiob wrote
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UnderwhelmingPossum t1_jd17cx2 wrote
> FWIW it’s basically impossible to strip DRM from Amazon files published after January 1.
Best time to stop buying books from Amazon was the day they started selling them. Second best time is right now. Amazon is a cancer.
waaarg t1_jd3hr7j wrote
It’s a shame that they’ve got easily my favorite hardware. The Kindles really are in a class above the rest. I tried to move from Kindle to Kobo last year, and despite the open source support and bookstore being way better, and something’s in the software better, I found myself gravitating back to the ole Kindle Paperwhite after a few months anyway. And I hate that.
JohanBroad t1_jd1iw7k wrote
Publishers are fighting to keep their monopoly against a technology that has rendered them obsolete.
Somebody, somewhere, has made or is working on a tool to strip DRM from amazon ebooks as I type here.
Hachette and all the other Big Books companies are gonna lose in the long run, and there is nothing they can do about it.
[deleted] t1_jd2mvav wrote
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Torifyme12 t1_jd1yx5x wrote
Does DeDRM and the kindle for PC trick no longer work?
professorlust t1_jd2mrlb wrote
No the DeDRM maintainers couldn’t keep up with Amazon’s constant patching the protection.
[deleted] t1_jd1s02m wrote
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reallyfuckingay t1_jd2lhmv wrote
Despite the recent developments in AI suggesting otherwise, OCR tools, at least ones available to the general public without the need to pay for licenses, are still imperfect enough that some amount of manual cleanup is required afterwards, and in larger bodies of text, this is often an unmanageable for a single person to do in a small timeframe. There's a reason people are actually paid for this.
[deleted] t1_jd39nnk wrote
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reallyfuckingay t1_jd7m3b1 wrote
Late reply. I think you're overestimating the reliability of these tools based on a anecdote. Google Lens can achieve such accuracy on smaller pieces of text because it has been trained to guess what the next word will be based on what words precede them, the OCR itself doesn't have to perfect so long as the text follows a predictable pattern, which most real life prose does.
When dealing with fictional settings however, with names and terms that were made up by the author, or otherwise are literary in nature and uncommon in colloquial English, this accuracy can drop quite significantly. It might mistake an obscure word for a much more common one with a completely different meaning, or parse speech which has been intentionally given an unorthographic affection on purpose as random gibberish.
I've used tesseract to extract text from garbled PDFs in the past, it still took a painstaking number of reviews to catch all the errors that seemed to fit a sentence at a glance, but were actually different from the original. It definitely can cut down on the amount of work needed, but this still isn't feasible to instantly and accurately transcribe bodies of text as large as entire books, otherwise you'd see it being used much more often.
teh_saccade t1_jdytnc6 wrote
re-recording onto traditional media works
Carbidereaper t1_jd0x13a wrote
Sounds easier to just download a book from Z-library
danielravennest t1_jd4kie4 wrote
Z-library is good for new stuff, but the Internet Archive is better for old or obscure books.
EROSENTINEL t1_jd2dkdq wrote
you have thousands of actual books? 😅
danielravennest t1_jd4lpvz wrote
Yes. The three previous houses I lived in needed reinforcement, since that many books are heavy. My current home is 70 years old, and was built stronger. Even so, I have to spread the books around the house to avoid overloading the floor.
Side benefits are noise reduction across the house, and the thermal mass reduces heating and A/C cost as the house temperature varies less.
wrgrant t1_jd39151 wrote
Quite possible. My wife and I live in a 2 bedroom apartment and have 13 full sized book shelves. We read a lot :)
Mr_ToDo t1_jd31p86 wrote
I've got a few ebooks from microsoft press. The DRM on the PDF's there is just watermarks. If they ever die I still have my books no extra work needed.
I've also bought from other stores that have at least some outright DRM free ebooks(it seems that it's often up to the author/publisher if it gets DRM).
So it's not like they don't exist. They might not exist for the books you want, or in the format you want but I guess you don't always get everything.
danielravennest t1_jd4mniy wrote
Quite a few of my ebooks are open-source textbooks, unrestricted ones from the National Academies, or older ones out of copyright. But they don't cover everything I'm interested in.
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