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How can I upload books (to libgen, et al) without a trace back to me? (lemy.lol)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I know Calibre can remove DRM, but it seems that Calibre does not remove things like watermarks, references to the buyer by name, etc. Now maybe I can try to find those manually, but that is an error prone process. Plus, what if they embed a unique digital signature that ties back to me? I understand that this is a very uncommon practice, but I do not want to find myself in a bad place.

I suppose the only way to remove a digital signature of any sort is to buy two of the same e-book by different people, diff them, and remove anything that differentiates them.

Is there any tool that does this or automates the process? am I being too paranoid, and this is not a real threat?

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[–] [email protected] 58 points 8 months ago (12 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

I converted a pdf book scan to epub with tessaract ocr and calibre, it didn't need any programming, but the end result did have a typo every few paragraphs. Most were very similar to each other though, so a few hours cleaning it up would've made it pretty readable.

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