[wordup] More on Adobe Ebooks ...

[Adam Shand]

From: http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/weblog/view/wlg/1462

Knocking Over the Straw Man: A Case Study in Copy Protection
by Schuyler Erle
May. 29, 2002


A friend I have known for some years recently described via e-mail his
attempts to print hardcopies of an encrypted eBook that he had
purchased. Disclaimer: I do not advocate or condone the actions
described below. This information is provided for educational purposes
only.

So, there exists a book that you want to read, and it is only available
in eBook format, meaning you need to sit there and read the screen.
Blech. Here is the step by step on how I sort of circumnavigated the
copy protection of an eBook, and brought it back to the world of paper.

The book in question is David Foster Wallace's "Up Simba - 7 Days on the
Trail of an Anticandidate" on John McCain. BTW, I did actually buy this
book, paying $4.95 through amazon.com for the privilege of downloading
it.

Part 1: Try to Crack Protection...

1. Try to open the PDF in Acrobat in the vain hope that this would 
   be all you have to do.
2. Open the PDF in Notepad, in a similar vain (sic).
3. Find out what type of copy protection would allow this book to be
   opened in eBook reader, but not Acrobat. Learn that an unlocking 
   key exists on Adobe's webserver. Groan.
4. Learn about Advanced eBook Processor, the fabled program that got
   Dmitri Sklyarov imprisoned, that cracks eBooks.
5. Immediately download this program.
6. Groan as you realize that Adobe has put in a built in foil for 
   this program by this time. If only you had an earlier version 
   of eBook Reader.
7. Try to find an earlier version of eBook Reader. Fail.
8. Download the full PDF specifications, available for free on Adobe's
   website. Age 10 years looking at the first few pages. Give up.
9. Become extremely indignant, seek out a nearby soapbox, and rant 
   about how Adobe is violating your rights for fair use of something
   that you own. Consider donating half your paycheck to the Electronic
   Frontier Foundation. Burn your bra.
10. Repeat steps 1-6 a few times, not because you think it will work,
   but because you have no other ideas.
11. Become frustrated and desperate, willing even to consider...

...Part 2: The Brute Force Approach

Ingredients:

* Adobe eBook Reader
* Encrypted eBook
* Adobe Acrobat 5.0 (full version)
* Quite Imposing Plus (an Acrobat plugin that will make you wonder 
  how you ever used Acrobat without it)
* Adobe Photoshop 6.0
* Two hours of free time
* Patience

The method:

1. Load eBook and Photoshop. Change your monitor's resolution to 
   the absolute highest it will go (in my case, 1280x1024).
2. Set eBook reader to two page view, so two full pages display on
   screen at one time.
3. Take a deep breath.
4. Hit Print Screen. Switch to Photoshop. Create a new file and paste
   the clipboard data into it.
5. Repeat step 4, intermingling step 3 every once in a while, until 
   you have copied all the pages to files in Photoshop.
6. Create a script that crops out all of the eBook stuff, saves as PDF
   and closes. Run script on all open files.
7. Manually concatenate a PDF to include all of the single pages into
   one PDF (two pages per page).
8. Get a drink.
9. More groaning as you realize that for half of the pages, you have 
   the taskbar captured at the bottom.
10. Go to [company intranet site] and download License key for Quite
   Imposing.
11. Fix problem in step 9.
12. Crop the right half of the PDF. Save as "odd.pdf". Crop the left
   half of the PDF. Save as "even.pdf".
13. Use Quite Imposing to shuffle even/odd pages together and "create
   booklet" so that you can print the pages double sided and staple 
   them together, like a book.
14. Save.
15. Go to bed, exhausted. Realize that although you can now print the
    book (at a resolution roughly equivalent to 150dpi, not bad). Your
    file size has grown from 900kB to 28MB.
16. Smile!

On a technical note, I subsequently exchanged e-mail with the author of
the above, asking "Have you considered using optical character
recognition on the JPEGs you screencapped, to get the PDF back to its
original size?

The author's response:

Thought about it. Scrapped the idea for a few reasons. a) I don't care
about file size. This wasn't an elegant solution. b) I deal with OCR all
day, and in my experience, you end up needing to spell check and
reformat the entire document anyway, a bit too much brute force for even
me. Besides, with the roughly 150dpi pages, I'm sure its recognition
would be less than stellar. I may as well have just retyped it. I
printed the book out, and it was of sufficient high quality that from
normal reading distance, you don't notice the lack of vectored text,
aside form an odd blurry quality. I got what I wanted out of it. I can
(and just did) read the book laying on my bed, or at the kitchen table,
at my leisure. *shrug*

Frankly, this classic "worse-is-better" solution makes the whole copy
protection thing look a little silly. Given how easy it was for this
person to print an eBook that he'd purchased lawfully, do digital rights
management "features" really and truly protect the rights of the
copyright holder? Or do they merely serve as an barrier to fair use by
the consumer? While we're at it, since when did "fair use" suddenly
exclude printing a document that you've acquired legitimately for your
personal consumption?

Schuyler Erle had nothing to do with the Tunguska explosion of 1908. No,
really.