4 ms·

Which is silly because you can easily just use OCR and screenshots to create DRM free versions of Kindle books.

jm4 6mo ago
Not to mention it’s as easy to download books from Anna’s Archive as it is to buy them from Amazon. It’s weird going through so much effort to lock down books people already paid for. I wonder how much this is about making it difficult for people to migrate to another platform. I recently switched to Kobo and the reader is far superior to Kindle. I had a hell of a time moving my library though.
- carlosjobim 6mo ago
  It's to stop people from seeding new books to shadow libraries. It's not as easy to find new books on AA as on Amazon.
  - jasomill 6mo ago
    Given how quickly full-quality releases of movies and TV shows appear after they're first streamed, this is surprising to me, at least so long as the PC and/or Android Kindle apps continue to exist.
    - carlosjobim 6mo ago
      That's the title of the post.
- sbarre 6mo ago
  I suspect at least some of this comes from publisher pressure. An acquaintance works for one of the big global book publishers and his general sense from upper management is that they still hate having to sell digital books. It feels like the last major media industry that is holding out against a "future" that has been here for a long time already.
  - atherton94027 6mo ago
    This applies to newspapers too — if you compare the print version to the online version of a newspaper you notice that there's a lot more attention paid to the paper version. Whereas the online version has all kinds of aggressive banners and ads. I think it's a generational thing, for a lot of publishers the internet is this newfangled thing
  - mh- 6mo ago
    It's all from external pressure. Amazon spending energy on ebook DRM is a negative ROI activity for them. A vanishingly small % of would-be ebook buyers even know pirated ones exist, and an even smaller one knows how to get those onto their Kindle. My wife buys dozens of ebooks per year on Amazon, her friends too. I'm guessing if I poll that group, none of them would even know where to start, nor care to.
    - justsomehnguy 6mo ago
      "Piracy is almost always a service problem" is also true. I see a lot of people who were risen on a pirated .mp3 and .epub to move to the streaming platforms just because it's a bit more convenient.
      - sbarre 6mo ago
        Yes totally agreed. I pay for streaming music and for Youtube because the costs make sense to me for what I get. I used to pay for Netflix but now that there's so many different streaming services I have returned to the high seas because we just don't watch enough shows (maybe 3-5 shows a year?), yet they are spread across different services that all cost $20/month now, so the costs don't make sense for us. For books, honestly, I refuse to accept that an EPUB costs $25 when the hardcover version costs $30. I also have heard first-hand how little of that $25 goes to the author (for the average author, not for a famous one).. I do try to buy digital books directly from authors when I can, which is increasingly an option from upcoming writers, but otherwise, yarrrr...
  - UltraSane 6mo ago
asveikau 6mo ago
What OCR do you guys use? I have only seen OCR that makes a lot of errors. Having it be usable requires tons of manual review. I probably wouldn't trust an LLM to do that review because it may introduce its own errors. Edit: downvoters, would you like to answer my question? I would genuinely like to know. I thought based on the confidence of the comment above there must be a super accurate OCR I've never heard of, but after seeing the sibling comment I'm going to guess there isn't.
- UltraSane 6mo ago
  Modern OCR is VERY accurate. Heck Adobe Acrobat Pro OCR was essentially perfect 20 years ago.
  - asveikau 6mo ago
    Can you name a good open source one? I have spent many hours in the current decade correcting OCR errors. Mostly tesseract.
  - wl 6mo ago
    One of my hobbies is typesetting modern editions of a certain type of rare, obscure old books that were poorly typeset to begin with. Modern OCR—and I’ve tried plenty of tools—is still rather error prone in my application.
- zshn25 6mo ago
  Stirling PDF https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF is a free self-hosted PDF tool that can do very accurate OCR while keeping the formatting.
estimator7292 6mo ago
OCR'd ebooks are universally trash. For one, all formatting is gone. Anything in the book other than ASCII characters will vanish. You lose links within the book and all other advanced features. And OCR is generally just not accurate enough and still makes very visible mistakes throughout the text. Have you read many OCR'd ebooks? I have, and every single one was massively inferior. Most I would consider barely readable.
- UltraSane 6mo ago
  For books that you want to keep the formatting the best option is to use Adobe Acrobat Pro and its Editable Text and Images feature. This replaces the scanned letters with a custom TrueType font. I used this in college to scan textbooks and it worked really well. Modern OCR on books is incredibly accurate. see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhJ9zqY8Da0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhJ9zqY8Da0
  - zshn25 6mo ago
    Open-source, free version of this is Stirling PDF https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF where you can do very accurate OCR while keep the formatting.
- wolvoleo 6mo ago
  I love it when formatting is removed. Some ebooks especially epub don't work well with alternative fonts somehow.

jm4 6mo ago

Not to mention it’s as easy to download books from Anna’s Archive as it is to buy them from Amazon. It’s weird going through so much effort to lock down books people already paid for. I wonder how much this is about making it difficult for people to migrate to another platform. I recently switched to Kobo and the reader is far superior to Kindle. I had a hell of a time moving my library though.

carlosjobim 6mo ago
It's to stop people from seeding new books to shadow libraries. It's not as easy to find new books on AA as on Amazon.
- jasomill 6mo ago
  Given how quickly full-quality releases of movies and TV shows appear after they're first streamed, this is surprising to me, at least so long as the PC and/or Android Kindle apps continue to exist.
  - carlosjobim 6mo ago
    That's the title of the post.
sbarre 6mo ago
I suspect at least some of this comes from publisher pressure. An acquaintance works for one of the big global book publishers and his general sense from upper management is that they still hate having to sell digital books. It feels like the last major media industry that is holding out against a "future" that has been here for a long time already.
- atherton94027 6mo ago
  This applies to newspapers too — if you compare the print version to the online version of a newspaper you notice that there's a lot more attention paid to the paper version. Whereas the online version has all kinds of aggressive banners and ads. I think it's a generational thing, for a lot of publishers the internet is this newfangled thing
- mh- 6mo ago
  It's all from external pressure. Amazon spending energy on ebook DRM is a negative ROI activity for them. A vanishingly small % of would-be ebook buyers even know pirated ones exist, and an even smaller one knows how to get those onto their Kindle. My wife buys dozens of ebooks per year on Amazon, her friends too. I'm guessing if I poll that group, none of them would even know where to start, nor care to.
  - justsomehnguy 6mo ago
    "Piracy is almost always a service problem" is also true. I see a lot of people who were risen on a pirated .mp3 and .epub to move to the streaming platforms just because it's a bit more convenient.
    - sbarre 6mo ago
      Yes totally agreed. I pay for streaming music and for Youtube because the costs make sense to me for what I get. I used to pay for Netflix but now that there's so many different streaming services I have returned to the high seas because we just don't watch enough shows (maybe 3-5 shows a year?), yet they are spread across different services that all cost $20/month now, so the costs don't make sense for us. For books, honestly, I refuse to accept that an EPUB costs $25 when the hardcover version costs $30. I also have heard first-hand how little of that $25 goes to the author (for the average author, not for a famous one).. I do try to buy digital books directly from authors when I can, which is increasingly an option from upcoming writers, but otherwise, yarrrr...
- UltraSane 6mo ago

asveikau 6mo ago

What OCR do you guys use? I have only seen OCR that makes a lot of errors. Having it be usable requires tons of manual review. I probably wouldn't trust an LLM to do that review because it may introduce its own errors. Edit: downvoters, would you like to answer my question? I would genuinely like to know. I thought based on the confidence of the comment above there must be a super accurate OCR I've never heard of, but after seeing the sibling comment I'm going to guess there isn't.

UltraSane 6mo ago
Modern OCR is VERY accurate. Heck Adobe Acrobat Pro OCR was essentially perfect 20 years ago.
- asveikau 6mo ago
  Can you name a good open source one? I have spent many hours in the current decade correcting OCR errors. Mostly tesseract.
- wl 6mo ago
  One of my hobbies is typesetting modern editions of a certain type of rare, obscure old books that were poorly typeset to begin with. Modern OCR—and I’ve tried plenty of tools—is still rather error prone in my application.
zshn25 6mo ago
Stirling PDF https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF is a free self-hosted PDF tool that can do very accurate OCR while keeping the formatting.

estimator7292 6mo ago

OCR'd ebooks are universally trash. For one, all formatting is gone. Anything in the book other than ASCII characters will vanish. You lose links within the book and all other advanced features. And OCR is generally just not accurate enough and still makes very visible mistakes throughout the text. Have you read many OCR'd ebooks? I have, and every single one was massively inferior. Most I would consider barely readable.

UltraSane 6mo ago
For books that you want to keep the formatting the best option is to use Adobe Acrobat Pro and its Editable Text and Images feature. This replaces the scanned letters with a custom TrueType font. I used this in college to scan textbooks and it worked really well. Modern OCR on books is incredibly accurate. see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhJ9zqY8Da0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhJ9zqY8Da0
- zshn25 6mo ago
  Open-source, free version of this is Stirling PDF https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF where you can do very accurate OCR while keep the formatting.
wolvoleo 6mo ago
I love it when formatting is removed. Some ebooks especially epub don't work well with alternative fonts somehow.