3 ms·
> No problem if it's the book I want, but the preview is just not enough Manning has a decent solution to this. You can browse the entire book, but only a smal
by thinkmassive 3y ago
> No problem if it's the book I want, but the preview is just not enough
Manning has a decent solution to this. You can browse the entire book, but only a small section of it at a time is “descrambled” in the live view.
On more than one occasion I’ve used this to look up some specific topic, which was immediately viewable (and unblocked me on that problem), then gone on to purchase the book because I know it’s high quality and I’m likely to refer to it in the future for other reasons.
https://www.manning.com/ https://www.manning.com/
- zamnos 3y agoI might be misunderstanding the scheme, but that sounds like someone would just need to automate viewing of consecutive sections in live view as it would unblur each section until you've downloaded the whole book. What am I missing?
- thinkmassive 3y agoYou’re not missing anything, but apparently it works for them. I suppose if it were more widespread then there’d be more incentive to automate scraping entire books. They also sell their eBooks as normal PDFs (no DRM). I assume it’s a healthy combination of making high quality technical publications easy to acquire at a reasonable price. Similar to how digital movie and music piracy finally died down when that media became reasonably easy to acquire legally.