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, 1280×1024).
  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?

Does printing an eBook for personal consumption constitute “fair use”? Or does it infringe on the rights of the copyright holder? Discuss.