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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Torifyme12 t1_jd1yx5x wrote

Does DeDRM and the kindle for PC trick no longer work?

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professorlust t1_jd2mrlb wrote

No the DeDRM maintainers couldn’t keep up with Amazon’s constant patching the protection.

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[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.

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[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.

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