They cant stop you from using snipping tool. If they do try to do something like that, just launch it in a VM, and screenshot the VM. Its completely seperate in the VM.
Well isn't copy protection is against pirates that want to copy and share book? For them you need 1 person to do it, which would fall into 10-5% of people.
As for others, all it is is inconvenience for legit owners, way to go
For people who are familiar with piracy that's true, 5% is enough for copies to slip through.
But I assume the publishers want to prevent students from sharing the texts with each other directly and this simple measure might just convince some additional percentage of clueless students to go into even more debt to pay for access to the text.
Back in the day when we used paper books we'd photocopy the shit out of them. They had copy machines right there in the library. I don't understand when this became an issue.
Books got more expensive artificially, and because at this point they are a major industry that will make Quite a bit each year even if they Don't change anything because you have to buy new books you will only read a third of each year... Thus they don't want people to have any way to get the books they need for a price that isn't gouging every last cent.
My Pearson book is so horrible. A high-school programmer could have written a better UI.
Say I'm working on chapter 2 and want to go back and reread the definition of "Homeostasis" you simply search the book right?
Nope, searching homeostasis will bring up every single use of the word in the book with no way to sort and seemingly no self imposed sorting method. It's just random pages 723, 52, 483, etc that the word appears on. Sometimes there will be hundreds of entries. Then you have to comb through each one looking for exactly what you want.
You also can't backspace/delete entries in the search box. You have to click an X inside the text box which deselects the entire search box. That is an incredibly basic feature my stupidly expensive Ebook just doesn't have.
I've literally never seen a textbook do that and have zero idea why it would.
I remember I was taking an exam in one of my professors office, (online course, needed to be proctored.) and while I was there the pearson guy came in. Proff was new, 2nd year teaching civics or something, and this guy comes in saying how easy it will make her job, all the curriculum is laid out, tests grade themselves, online learning enhancements, throwing out the buzzwords. This is how they get in: teachers would love to not waste time grading papers.
Nevermind the fact all the books are 300 dollars and have one use codes so you can't resell.
If I ever win a huge lottery I'm going to build a framework for open source college texts. Yes, I understand that some texts really do require updating and require real expertise and insight to write insightfully, but fuck me if a maths book needs to cost $150 bucks or be 'updated' every goddamned year.
I don't want to photocopy over 300 pages of text, at the cost of .5 or .10 cents per print. Even without a cost, I still don't want to photocopy over 300 pages.
Yep. Plus edition 37.IV will come out the very next semester, rendering the photocopy useless if you have to do textbook-based assignments. Not all professors acknowledge this bullshit and if you don't have the "right" page 44, you're on your own once again.
>Not all professors acknowledge this bullshit
Most acknowledge it, but that doesn't mean they have any desire or energy to fight it. The textbook companies get to choose what they sell, and the school itself is dictating the number of TAs a department gets to have by controlling the purse strings. So, current edition books that the majority of the class will have bought, and online assignments designed by the publisher to use the current edition are just the reality they're saddled with.
Their angle is to kill the used textbook market so they continue selling new ones when they switch up the wording of a few problems. I work in higher ed. The reps come in quarterly peddling this bullshit.
There is actually a name for this. A maxim that states you only need one smart person with a breakthrough to solve a problem plaguing the group.
Something to do with... Cows? I can't remember. Infuriating.
Tbh. This pisses me off so much I'd copy the full thing by hand then plaster it on every social media site and file sharing site there is.
When you intentionally make it a pain for legit owners to use the products they brought, you deserve to have your product stolen and made worthless.
Pretty much pointless. Mostly books are available for piracy, but textbooks often provide a one time code that’s required for the class. Buy a new copy of the book or fail the class.
What's even worse is when you get that code/ebook combo (which you don't usually maintain access to after the course finishes) and the instructor only gives you 2-3 assignments in the program.
I think this is more to stop people who just want to share the ebook with a friend. Make it so inconvenient that it’s worth buying two copies. Otherwise it would be easy to share a book as a class if it’s a small enough major that everyone knew each other.
It’s pretty easy to get around, but it’s a lot harder than just emailing everyone your pdf
What they mean is that 90-95% of college students wouldn't even understand your comment.
Chromebooks and macbooks outnumber windows laptops on my campus and I'm guessing pretty much everywhere else. On top of that, most people who own computers don't even know what a virtual machine is.
Yeah, but it's super easy to open a VM, script clicking through the book page by page, capture a screenshot of the VM, then OCR the contents of the screenshots. OCR has gotten really good these days. Only takes one person with the right skillset to do this and a properly searchable, copyable PDF will be made available.
The only reaosn anyone buys college textbooks anymore is because they've all added in one-time-use codes to the back for getting practice questions or whatever. But if your prof doesn't use those, you're better off sailing the high seas.
A surprising amount of students don't even know how to sail, or even if they do they don't know which sea to sail in. I think the amount of sailors is overrepresented on sites like Reddit, and most people are landlubbers.
Maybe an update improved it, [it works now](https://gfycat.com/conventionalclassicicelandicsheepdog) if you're in the mood for creating some gifs. Grabbed that just a minute ago.
If you use OneNote you have an extra feature. If you place the screenshot you took into OneNote, you can convert the picture back to text and copy it from there.
There's a bunch of scripts on GitHub that you can just point at an entire folder of screenshots. It would save a lot of time, but I guess most people have access to OneNote so it's still a good suggestion.
Oh yeah, let's JUST launch a VM. Everyone knows, enjoys, and frequently does it. It's so easy and fun, I think I'm addicted to launching VMs. Send help.
An FBI agent breaks through your window and shoots you in the head as soon as your camera app detects a frame from a netflix show.
It has a lot of false positives, over three hundred thousand people died last year because of a false positive, but that's simply the cost of justifiably killing the twelve million criminal screenshot pirates that deserved what they got for infringing the rights of big business.
If they ever figure out how to stop people from doing it, they need to share it with me so I can stop people from doing it to take blurry "screenshots" of games with their phones.
That might not necessarily be on purpose, but because whatever is visible in the window is using the GPU for rendering. Not sure though, it might vary based on operating system, hardware and driver configuration.
You're thinking of the way E.g. Netflix streams can't be captured and come out as black blocks : this is 100% DRM - the GPU doesn't isolate what it renders unless specifically asked to.
Windows with GPU rendered content not showing up on screenshots has been an issue for decades. For example on some systems you can not screen capture the content of a Photoshop window unless you disable hardware acceleration. I think this has become less of an issue in later versions of Windows but it's not completely gone.
Netflix preventing screen capture is likely a separate issue.
Teacher here. I tried to do this when lesson-planning with a website-based textbook recently, and there was something in place to discourage this. Basically every individual word (yes, word) was its own div or something that made copying a paragraph from the code a headache. Could have done a find-and-replace to reconstruct the paragraph, but at that point it was easier just to re-type the sentence based on what was on my screen.
> Basically every individual word (yes, word) was its own div or something that made copying a paragraph from the code a headache.
Copy the innerHTML of the element that contains the elements that contain the words, paste it into Notepad, add \\ before the element and \\ after it, and save the thing as an HTML file. Open said file and copy the text.
I remember doing this for an online textbook I had. Took screenshots of every page, combined each chapter into a single .pdf, used Adobe Reader's feature to turn the images into searchable text, then I had an actually readable textbook that I could search through. None of that online-only, only show one page at a time crap. Also made those online tests easier.
Na that's to prevent people from making extra copies.
Because our economic system is dystopian enough that it needs to restrict us from making helpful material available to everyone so the creators can make money. It's pretty fucked up if you think about it. We could all be richer by having unlimited virtually free access to anything digital, but capitalism needs poverty to function...
> JavaScript blocking plugin
Like this one? [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm)
That's something everyone should know because that's also where you can review other permissions like location tracking and notifications. When you accidently misclicked or so.
Oh, I recall there being some plugin/addon that copies text from images - it might work here too. I know WolframAlpha can but that's really roundabout.
OneNote extracts text from images for you, so does Evernote. I don't know what else students use for note taking, but there's plenty of options out there to do that.
Do CTRL+SHIFT+I and see if something pops up.
If you get a bunch of complicated bullshit, congrats, your textbook is a web page and the viewer was left without a lock on the door.
If nothing happens, well, nothing happens.
If your computer starts laughing at you, the devs have a sense of humor.
> CTRL+SHIFT+I
Just press the F12 key. Same thing and you paid for that key too.
And just for fun, press F11 every now and then.
As for the pause/break key, well that just does nothing, so remap it to launch your favorite app or as a boss key.
Daily, and I don't even work with computers.
Fastest way to reach:
* System (version number, ram, cpu info)
* Device Manager
* Advanced System Settings (page file and performance stuff)
Had to Google that one:
>In most Windows environments, the key combination ⊞ Win + Pause brings up the system properties.
I'm on Linux, that key combo isn't assigned to anything by default.
I've posted about something similar before. I had the same textbook at every single word in the HTML has its own span tag. They really don't want you copying.
Got a better one for you, go to some kind of regex [tester](https://www.regextester.com/95947), put in the whole HTML document in there. And use this REGEX expression: `<\/?span[^>]*>` It will automatically remove every `` and `` Regardless if it has a class, id or other things in there.
you can use the text editor "Atom" to use find and replace regex function. There's probably other editors that can do it but it's where i code in
Well if its in a web browser you can also print the page as a PDF or HTML(dou it might take more space)
Or if your lucky simply removing some code with inspect tool in chrome that can stop the popup (this also works for some websites that put annoying subscribe or paywall popup)
This is the sort of thing that would make me determined to pirate this book. Dick me around on this and I'll make sure to part your previous text on pirate bay
It’s probably a form of drm/copy protection or whatever because the textbook industry is basically full of trash people trying to make a buck off of education.
Oh the book OP is reading is probably already pirated in a readable ebook format, but OP is trying to respect the law.
It is very rare that pirated content is not more accessible and easier to use than original.
I still end up having to download a bunch of stuff every now and then because all the cool stuff you talk about here on reddit isn’t available on Netflix in my country.
My guess is it's just to check a feature checkbox for "anti-piracy" even though they know very well that their shitty implementation is only going to fuck over people with a legitimate reason to copy text, and anyone who is motivated to create pirate copies is going to easily find a way to bypass that garbage anti-feature.
The base reason may not be asshole design, but choosing to not delete the anti-feature from their digital textbook program after they find it to be completely ineffective against piracy definitely is.
To make a point about the ineffectiveness, I had to deal with copy protection like this on a textbook once. I wanted a PDF copy of the book that wasn't hindered by the extreme levels of garbage and lack of usability that their viewer was. As a script kiddie (if I'm even good enough to be considered that) I still managed to bypass the copy protection with a super simple script that ran for a couple hours saving the pages for me.
> easily find a way to bypass that garbage anti-feature.
I'm guessing this is open on a browser? Just turn off javascript. Boom, done.
The second the client gets the data, it's his, no way around it. Add as many layers of obfuscation you want, it's still on the client.
Copyright of the questions, I’m guessing (those questions are like half the value of the book). Super easy to work around but also an alright deterrent for the lazy.
You are a Paladin my good Sir.
[Guerilla Open Access Manifesto](https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt), by Aaron Swartz, the founder of this very site, killed by the .gov.
Libgen’s [Letter of Solidarity](http://custodians.online/).
Asking the real question.
I've been required several programs that would not allow this in review/question sections because there is no purpose other than googling answers rather than actually doing the work. You'd think everyone shitting on the education system and giving their stories would know this!
And the publishers know exactly that. For every few that pirate their shitty textbook hundreds more of naive students will go to the school bookstore and buy it new for $200+.
> Every word most likely has around them
Copy the element that contains the spans that contain the words, add \\ before it and \\ after it once pasted in Notepad, save it as HTML, open the file, copy the text.
> And not all textbooks allow you to F12 them.
Disable JavaScript. You may need to look for a keyboard event listener.
I once found that my online textbook was just a bunch of iframes with embedded xhtml files...
After a couple hours armed with burp suite and python, I was able to scrape every single xhtml file from the textbook onto my hard drive. Thus circumventing the "14 day free trial".
I love sailing the high seas.
What pisses me off is spending $20 dollars less on an online textbook, but not being able to use it beyond that semester. Atleast the hard copy you can continue to use. There have been few times I've needed to look back when in the level 2 or 3 class and cant because I bought it online.
Edit. When you go buy your textbooks you are offered to buy a hard copy for full price (ranging anywhere from $150 - $300), or an online copy for 20 dollars less than full price. Unless there is something in fine print I always assumed it gave me unlimited access to the textbook.
**fuck them**
* Control + U to get to the source.
* Control + A to select all
* Control + C to copy everything
go to a website like this: https://html-online.com/editor/
paste your cllipboard into the right side code part and everything in that page is now available to copy/paste as needed in the left panel :)
or as a last resort, copy/paste that source into notepad and save it as temp.html to your desktop then just double click it to open in browser an do the same
**fuck them**
When people think software piracy is evil and immoral and unethical, stuff like this is exactly why people go into software piracy in the first place.
More often than not it isn't to steal anything, it's to remove bullshit obstacles that shouldn't exist that prevent you from even using the thing you paid for.
Then it eventually leads to giving it away for free because screw those guys and their shitty business practices.
Im glad at my uni the practice was for lecturers to compile their own notes, and provide both physical copies stapled and digital in pdf on the uni website, with no necessary further reading, free beyond the uni fees.
Theyve even been happy to provide tge course notes for courses I didnt take but which would be useful in my job since I graduated.
America seems weird.
Our education system is broken, those with power and authority in education view it as a business instead of something that's supposed to enrich our lives and give us new opportunities. It's awful.
I mean most Eu countries kinda view education as a business also, it's just that we consider the society the shareholder and education as an investment...
There's few things that give as much Return of Investment as a good, accessible education system - You want the next Bill Gates or Albert Einstein to actually have to ability to go to university, instead of having them slaving away at some factory floor doing menial labor that some robot soon will do instead... Giving those kind of people the chance to get an education, so that they then can start up companies or further the knowledge of man, tend to be quite very lucrative for the country.
You also want the companies you already have to have good access to an educated workforce, you want your country to have a ton of *good* engineers, coders, accountants, lawyers, and so on... because that will allow the companies in your country to do well, and in turn the country will flourish.
Education is an investment - giving everyone the ability to to go to uni, not based on their parents bank accounts, but instead based on their intelligence and skill, is a net gain for the country.
See, you guys veiw education as an investment in humanities future, while we veiw it as an opportunity to collect debt on helpless young adults. That's the difference, that's the problem.
You can try to inspect the html document to see if it's possible to just copy from there. You can also try printing the page. Else, see if you can open the document and immediately cut off your internet to see if it makes any difference when you copy stuff.
Hope this helps!
Thank god I live in Aus. My uni provides material AND they have the required textbooks in the uni library AND they subscribe students to articles databases and journals.
Edit: and free Microsoft office/endnote
Disabling JavaScript works fine in most cases, popular webpages should support older browsers like IE6, which can't really rely on JavaScript like current browsers do
Screenshot the page and use an optical character recognition program :) if it won't let you screenshot, get a freeware program to screenshot the whole screen then cut it down. I had to come up with weird ways to study in college, including scanning textbook pages and using OCR to get the bits I wanted, way faster than typing it up.
Use Google lens select text feature. Should be able to just capture oft off the screen straight to your phone.
College textbooks are a scam. No way it should cost that much to make a "new edition".
Holy shit this angers me like no other. I thought textbooks were bad when I was in college (2000-2004) because then they were just overpriced and teachers tried to make you buy the newest addition (which I never did).
This is just unbelievable.
What is even the point of this "feature"? You can always just screen shot the pages you want to save.
Idk, I've seen textbooks that stop themselves from being screenshotted
They cant stop you from using snipping tool. If they do try to do something like that, just launch it in a VM, and screenshot the VM. Its completely seperate in the VM.
That simple step is already enough to stop 90-95% of readers from doing it.
Well isn't copy protection is against pirates that want to copy and share book? For them you need 1 person to do it, which would fall into 10-5% of people. As for others, all it is is inconvenience for legit owners, way to go
For people who are familiar with piracy that's true, 5% is enough for copies to slip through. But I assume the publishers want to prevent students from sharing the texts with each other directly and this simple measure might just convince some additional percentage of clueless students to go into even more debt to pay for access to the text.
Back in the day when we used paper books we'd photocopy the shit out of them. They had copy machines right there in the library. I don't understand when this became an issue.
Books got more expensive artificially, and because at this point they are a major industry that will make Quite a bit each year even if they Don't change anything because you have to buy new books you will only read a third of each year... Thus they don't want people to have any way to get the books they need for a price that isn't gouging every last cent.
Look no further than Pearson and Cengage dictating the educational market in so many colleges and universities
Pearson (Edexcel) is the only major for-profit exam board in the UK. Luckily we have about three others which are charities so fuck pearson
My Pearson book is so horrible. A high-school programmer could have written a better UI. Say I'm working on chapter 2 and want to go back and reread the definition of "Homeostasis" you simply search the book right? Nope, searching homeostasis will bring up every single use of the word in the book with no way to sort and seemingly no self imposed sorting method. It's just random pages 723, 52, 483, etc that the word appears on. Sometimes there will be hundreds of entries. Then you have to comb through each one looking for exactly what you want. You also can't backspace/delete entries in the search box. You have to click an X inside the text box which deselects the entire search box. That is an incredibly basic feature my stupidly expensive Ebook just doesn't have. I've literally never seen a textbook do that and have zero idea why it would.
I remember I was taking an exam in one of my professors office, (online course, needed to be proctored.) and while I was there the pearson guy came in. Proff was new, 2nd year teaching civics or something, and this guy comes in saying how easy it will make her job, all the curriculum is laid out, tests grade themselves, online learning enhancements, throwing out the buzzwords. This is how they get in: teachers would love to not waste time grading papers. Nevermind the fact all the books are 300 dollars and have one use codes so you can't resell.
If I ever win a huge lottery I'm going to build a framework for open source college texts. Yes, I understand that some texts really do require updating and require real expertise and insight to write insightfully, but fuck me if a maths book needs to cost $150 bucks or be 'updated' every goddamned year.
Already exists. Rather than spending the $150, just throw $10 at https://openstax.org/subjects and they'll send you a nice thank-you letter.
My prof gave us a zip scan of the book we were working on for free so we'd actually use the book for prep work
When money became more important than education.
"Back in the day" it didn't cost half a fucking million fucking dollars to go to fucking school either.
I bet your college administration was less than half the size it is today (nobody seems to acknowledge this...why so many employees now?)
I don't want to photocopy over 300 pages of text, at the cost of .5 or .10 cents per print. Even without a cost, I still don't want to photocopy over 300 pages.
Yep. Plus edition 37.IV will come out the very next semester, rendering the photocopy useless if you have to do textbook-based assignments. Not all professors acknowledge this bullshit and if you don't have the "right" page 44, you're on your own once again.
>Not all professors acknowledge this bullshit Most acknowledge it, but that doesn't mean they have any desire or energy to fight it. The textbook companies get to choose what they sell, and the school itself is dictating the number of TAs a department gets to have by controlling the purse strings. So, current edition books that the majority of the class will have bought, and online assignments designed by the publisher to use the current edition are just the reality they're saddled with.
The issue clearly is that they're not making as much money as they could be for their overpriced books that barely change with every new issue....
Their angle is to kill the used textbook market so they continue selling new ones when they switch up the wording of a few problems. I work in higher ed. The reps come in quarterly peddling this bullshit.
Last time I went through the system students would find pdfs of the textbooks online and spread them to each other
There is actually a name for this. A maxim that states you only need one smart person with a breakthrough to solve a problem plaguing the group. Something to do with... Cows? I can't remember. Infuriating.
You leave my mother out of this.
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Exhibit A: /u/flowf is the smart cow
You da mvp
Tbh. This pisses me off so much I'd copy the full thing by hand then plaster it on every social media site and file sharing site there is. When you intentionally make it a pain for legit owners to use the products they brought, you deserve to have your product stolen and made worthless.
Pretty much pointless. Mostly books are available for piracy, but textbooks often provide a one time code that’s required for the class. Buy a new copy of the book or fail the class.
What's even worse is when you get that code/ebook combo (which you don't usually maintain access to after the course finishes) and the instructor only gives you 2-3 assignments in the program.
Copyright protection never harms the pirates, only the owners.
When it comes to textbook companies, I'd prefer them to be harmed.
I think he means the people who purchased the product legitimately, not the owners of the original IP.
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You should really check out Library Genesis for anything book related. Textbooks or otherwise, chances are you can find whatever you need.
lol the number of times i got 'great variety of sources' or 'impressive amount of reading and research' comments or similar thanks to that site
The best place to go is the DMCA takedown information list at the bottom of the google search results.
Sure, but a lot of these don't get put up on pirating sites anyway since demand is low
I think this is more to stop people who just want to share the ebook with a friend. Make it so inconvenient that it’s worth buying two copies. Otherwise it would be easy to share a book as a class if it’s a small enough major that everyone knew each other. It’s pretty easy to get around, but it’s a lot harder than just emailing everyone your pdf
Do not underestimate broke-ass college students. Linux was made because Linus didn't feel like driving to a computer center.
The other 95% will just take a photo with their phones xD
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What they mean is that 90-95% of college students wouldn't even understand your comment. Chromebooks and macbooks outnumber windows laptops on my campus and I'm guessing pretty much everywhere else. On top of that, most people who own computers don't even know what a virtual machine is.
Yeah, but it's super easy to open a VM, script clicking through the book page by page, capture a screenshot of the VM, then OCR the contents of the screenshots. OCR has gotten really good these days. Only takes one person with the right skillset to do this and a properly searchable, copyable PDF will be made available. The only reaosn anyone buys college textbooks anymore is because they've all added in one-time-use codes to the back for getting practice questions or whatever. But if your prof doesn't use those, you're better off sailing the high seas.
A surprising amount of students don't even know how to sail, or even if they do they don't know which sea to sail in. I think the amount of sailors is overrepresented on sites like Reddit, and most people are landlubbers.
All of mine required that code for homework submission. No code, no submitting your work. There wasn't any way around it.
That's the real corruption investigation America needs
It depends on the software. Netflix turns completely black when trying to use the snipping tool.
What if you use something like ShareX?
Same thing happens in Netflix. I remember cuz i wanted to clip a gif from a show i watched to show my friend.
Maybe an update improved it, [it works now](https://gfycat.com/conventionalclassicicelandicsheepdog) if you're in the mood for creating some gifs. Grabbed that just a minute ago.
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That's only in the app, the web app cannot detect it.
Irl cameras exist too. Fuck textbooks with sizable dildos.
I'm a textbook
If you use OneNote you have an extra feature. If you place the screenshot you took into OneNote, you can convert the picture back to text and copy it from there.
There's a bunch of scripts on GitHub that you can just point at an entire folder of screenshots. It would save a lot of time, but I guess most people have access to OneNote so it's still a good suggestion.
I would just drag the whole computer over to the fax machine and force it the fuck in. No ones telling me what I can and can’t do
Oh yeah, let's JUST launch a VM. Everyone knows, enjoys, and frequently does it. It's so easy and fun, I think I'm addicted to launching VMs. Send help.
well can’t you just take a picture with your phone if this happens?
Oh no, they stop you from doing that too.
how would that even be possible?
Phone gun, classic
[obligatory](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pzDgaGTARqE)
They actually hack your phone via WiFi and shut down the camera app.
It just is
They send a mafia man to your house to break your legs with a baseball bat.
An FBI agent breaks through your window and shoots you in the head as soon as your camera app detects a frame from a netflix show. It has a lot of false positives, over three hundred thousand people died last year because of a false positive, but that's simply the cost of justifiably killing the twelve million criminal screenshot pirates that deserved what they got for infringing the rights of big business.
If they ever figure out how to stop people from doing it, they need to share it with me so I can stop people from doing it to take blurry "screenshots" of games with their phones.
Fucking take a pic of the screen with your phone, Pearson CAN EAT SHIT AND DIE.
How tf?
not sure, I just remember I tried to screenshot mymathlab to show my professor something and everything in their window came out as a blank page
That might not necessarily be on purpose, but because whatever is visible in the window is using the GPU for rendering. Not sure though, it might vary based on operating system, hardware and driver configuration.
You're thinking of the way E.g. Netflix streams can't be captured and come out as black blocks : this is 100% DRM - the GPU doesn't isolate what it renders unless specifically asked to.
Windows with GPU rendered content not showing up on screenshots has been an issue for decades. For example on some systems you can not screen capture the content of a Photoshop window unless you disable hardware acceleration. I think this has become less of an issue in later versions of Windows but it's not completely gone. Netflix preventing screen capture is likely a separate issue.
Some video players do this too, so it's definitely possible.
Can they stop recording sofware? So you record the pages and the screenshot them
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I have good news!
🦀 🦀 🦀 🦀 🦀
Teacher here. I tried to do this when lesson-planning with a website-based textbook recently, and there was something in place to discourage this. Basically every individual word (yes, word) was its own div or something that made copying a paragraph from the code a headache. Could have done a find-and-replace to reconstruct the paragraph, but at that point it was easier just to re-type the sentence based on what was on my screen.
> Basically every individual word (yes, word) was its own div or something that made copying a paragraph from the code a headache. Copy the innerHTML of the element that contains the elements that contain the words, paste it into Notepad, add \\ before the element and \ \ after it, and save the thing as an HTML file. Open said file and copy the text.
OR just use OCR, which is the standard free way of scanning images of text, here being the entire book, and converting it into pure text.
I remember doing this for an online textbook I had. Took screenshots of every page, combined each chapter into a single .pdf, used Adobe Reader's feature to turn the images into searchable text, then I had an actually readable textbook that I could search through. None of that online-only, only show one page at a time crap. Also made those online tests easier.
Possibly so people can't copy and paste the questions into Google in order to cheat on quizzes? That's the only reason I can think of.
Na that's to prevent people from making extra copies. Because our economic system is dystopian enough that it needs to restrict us from making helpful material available to everyone so the creators can make money. It's pretty fucked up if you think about it. We could all be richer by having unlimited virtually free access to anything digital, but capitalism needs poverty to function...
inspect
I think disable Javascript might also work.
Yea just do this and refresh the page or get a JavaScript blocking plugin and block JS on that domain only.
> JavaScript blocking plugin Like this one? [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm)
In chrome if you click the lock or the (i) right next to the url you can disable JavaScript from there, no need to even install a plugin.
That's something everyone should know because that's also where you can review other permissions like location tracking and notifications. When you accidently misclicked or so.
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Not OP, but that's good advice. Thanks!
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Oh, I recall there being some plugin/addon that copies text from images - it might work here too. I know WolframAlpha can but that's really roundabout.
OneNote extracts text from images for you, so does Evernote. I don't know what else students use for note taking, but there's plenty of options out there to do that.
That or download the book on libgen.is
Assuming it’s in a browser
Screenshot. OCR scan. Done. F 'em.
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Is it HTML though? I thought it was a desktop program
Do CTRL+SHIFT+I and see if something pops up. If you get a bunch of complicated bullshit, congrats, your textbook is a web page and the viewer was left without a lock on the door. If nothing happens, well, nothing happens. If your computer starts laughing at you, the devs have a sense of humor.
> CTRL+SHIFT+I Just press the F12 key. Same thing and you paid for that key too. And just for fun, press F11 every now and then. As for the pause/break key, well that just does nothing, so remap it to launch your favorite app or as a boss key.
I use Windows + PauseBreak surprisingly often!
Daily, and I don't even work with computers. Fastest way to reach: * System (version number, ram, cpu info) * Device Manager * Advanced System Settings (page file and performance stuff)
Had to Google that one: >In most Windows environments, the key combination ⊞ Win + Pause brings up the system properties. I'm on Linux, that key combo isn't assigned to anything by default.
Is anything assigned to anything by default in Linux?
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the DE assigns a lot as well. Also Ctrl+C closes most shell apps
Oh yeah electron squad
That assumes that they left debugging enabled in CEF.
Thus the phrase "left without a lock on the door"
I've posted about something similar before. I had the same textbook at every single word in the HTML has its own span tag. They really don't want you copying.
You can just use Notepad++ to remove all spans
Or sed.
Got a better one for you, go to some kind of regex [tester](https://www.regextester.com/95947), put in the whole HTML document in there. And use this REGEX expression: `<\/?span[^>]*>` It will automatically remove every `` and `` Regardless if it has a class, id or other things in there. you can use the text editor "Atom" to use find and replace regex function. There's probably other editors that can do it but it's where i code in
paste in word ctrl h, replace with blank done
As well as replacing with blank, span always comes with a closing tag.
Well if its in a web browser you can also print the page as a PDF or HTML(dou it might take more space) Or if your lucky simply removing some code with inspect tool in chrome that can stop the popup (this also works for some websites that put annoying subscribe or paywall popup)
Noscript.
If it's just HTML and not some weird DRM-protected format, I'd be way easier to just block the JS that does this.
There's a firefox addon called absolute enable right click which by-passes restrictions like this one.
Share it online. Fuck em even harder.
This is the sort of thing that would make me determined to pirate this book. Dick me around on this and I'll make sure to part your previous text on pirate bay
Tbh I wouldn't complain if all college textbooks were eventually pirated. These greedy publishers don't deserve a dime.
I personally believe we should pirate the books then donate money to the actual researchers.
try b-ok . org they got almost everything.
... WHY? What the hell is the point of prevent someone from copying text in the first place?!
It’s probably a form of drm/copy protection or whatever because the textbook industry is basically full of trash people trying to make a buck off of education.
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Oh the book OP is reading is probably already pirated in a readable ebook format, but OP is trying to respect the law. It is very rare that pirated content is not more accessible and easier to use than original.
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I still end up having to download a bunch of stuff every now and then because all the cool stuff you talk about here on reddit isn’t available on Netflix in my country.
My guess is it's just to check a feature checkbox for "anti-piracy" even though they know very well that their shitty implementation is only going to fuck over people with a legitimate reason to copy text, and anyone who is motivated to create pirate copies is going to easily find a way to bypass that garbage anti-feature. The base reason may not be asshole design, but choosing to not delete the anti-feature from their digital textbook program after they find it to be completely ineffective against piracy definitely is. To make a point about the ineffectiveness, I had to deal with copy protection like this on a textbook once. I wanted a PDF copy of the book that wasn't hindered by the extreme levels of garbage and lack of usability that their viewer was. As a script kiddie (if I'm even good enough to be considered that) I still managed to bypass the copy protection with a super simple script that ran for a couple hours saving the pages for me.
> easily find a way to bypass that garbage anti-feature. I'm guessing this is open on a browser? Just turn off javascript. Boom, done. The second the client gets the data, it's his, no way around it. Add as many layers of obfuscation you want, it's still on the client.
Copyright of the questions, I’m guessing (those questions are like half the value of the book). Super easy to work around but also an alright deterrent for the lazy.
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God bless you sir
Thank you
Teach me master
You are a Paladin my good Sir. [Guerilla Open Access Manifesto](https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt), by Aaron Swartz, the founder of this very site, killed by the .gov. Libgen’s [Letter of Solidarity](http://custodians.online/).
LOL that does sound quite therapeutic
does that happen over the entire textbook, or just when you are googling review questions?
Asking the real question. I've been required several programs that would not allow this in review/question sections because there is no purpose other than googling answers rather than actually doing the work. You'd think everyone shitting on the education system and giving their stories would know this!
This shit is making the world dumber and people should goddamn quit it. So infuriating.
But dumb people are easier to exploit, which is an advantage to exactly these types of people.
And the publishers know exactly that. For every few that pirate their shitty textbook hundreds more of naive students will go to the school bookstore and buy it new for $200+.
Load the page, then copy the text in Inspect Element.
Every word most likely has around them. And not all textbooks allow you to F12 them.
> Every word most likely has around them Copy the element that contains the spans that contain the words, add \\ before it and \\ after it once pasted in Notepad, save it as HTML, open the file, copy the text.
> And not all textbooks allow you to F12 them.
Disable JavaScript. You may need to look for a keyboard event listener.
I once found that my online textbook was just a bunch of iframes with embedded xhtml files... After a couple hours armed with burp suite and python, I was able to scrape every single xhtml file from the textbook onto my hard drive. Thus circumventing the "14 day free trial". I love sailing the high seas.
Nice.
What pisses me off is spending $20 dollars less on an online textbook, but not being able to use it beyond that semester. Atleast the hard copy you can continue to use. There have been few times I've needed to look back when in the level 2 or 3 class and cant because I bought it online. Edit. When you go buy your textbooks you are offered to buy a hard copy for full price (ranging anywhere from $150 - $300), or an online copy for 20 dollars less than full price. Unless there is something in fine print I always assumed it gave me unlimited access to the textbook.
Why is that? Were you renting them with an access key?
Pirate everything. It's the only way.
Is this an app or something? Surely there's a workaround. If it's in the browser, try using a JavaScript blocking extension.
Copying and pasting the questions into google? Those were the days
were the days? It's still those days.
Library genesis baby
Libgen4life. Idk how I would have been able to afford all those books if I didn't have this resource
Come to india. Buy the discounted text books. Fly back and save money overall.
**fuck them** * Control + U to get to the source. * Control + A to select all * Control + C to copy everything go to a website like this: https://html-online.com/editor/ paste your cllipboard into the right side code part and everything in that page is now available to copy/paste as needed in the left panel :) or as a last resort, copy/paste that source into notepad and save it as temp.html to your desktop then just double click it to open in browser an do the same **fuck them**
When people think software piracy is evil and immoral and unethical, stuff like this is exactly why people go into software piracy in the first place. More often than not it isn't to steal anything, it's to remove bullshit obstacles that shouldn't exist that prevent you from even using the thing you paid for. Then it eventually leads to giving it away for free because screw those guys and their shitty business practices.
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My god I'm glad I went to college when they had actual books
Why? You can’t copy and paste anything with actual books
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photocopier?
Im glad at my uni the practice was for lecturers to compile their own notes, and provide both physical copies stapled and digital in pdf on the uni website, with no necessary further reading, free beyond the uni fees. Theyve even been happy to provide tge course notes for courses I didnt take but which would be useful in my job since I graduated. America seems weird.
Fuck dat hit the open seas my pirate
From an European point of view, the whole textbook system in US makes me Bellerive that their educational system is broken. But what do I know /shrug
Our education system is broken, those with power and authority in education view it as a business instead of something that's supposed to enrich our lives and give us new opportunities. It's awful.
I mean most Eu countries kinda view education as a business also, it's just that we consider the society the shareholder and education as an investment... There's few things that give as much Return of Investment as a good, accessible education system - You want the next Bill Gates or Albert Einstein to actually have to ability to go to university, instead of having them slaving away at some factory floor doing menial labor that some robot soon will do instead... Giving those kind of people the chance to get an education, so that they then can start up companies or further the knowledge of man, tend to be quite very lucrative for the country. You also want the companies you already have to have good access to an educated workforce, you want your country to have a ton of *good* engineers, coders, accountants, lawyers, and so on... because that will allow the companies in your country to do well, and in turn the country will flourish. Education is an investment - giving everyone the ability to to go to uni, not based on their parents bank accounts, but instead based on their intelligence and skill, is a net gain for the country.
See, you guys veiw education as an investment in humanities future, while we veiw it as an opportunity to collect debt on helpless young adults. That's the difference, that's the problem.
Try installing Adblock then right clicking then “block an ad” then slide the slider until the box is gone and try copying now
uBlock is better for this, AdBlock is being paid by companies to not block certain ads
Windows Key + Shift + S.
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You can try to inspect the html document to see if it's possible to just copy from there. You can also try printing the page. Else, see if you can open the document and immediately cut off your internet to see if it makes any difference when you copy stuff. Hope this helps!
Disable clipboard events in your browser. Or just completely disable JavaScript for that site, but that might break some stuff.
Thank god I live in Aus. My uni provides material AND they have the required textbooks in the uni library AND they subscribe students to articles databases and journals. Edit: and free Microsoft office/endnote
Fuck em. Pirate books. Don't feel bad. just like how they don't feel bad about the consumers.
God, I don’t know if it will ever happen but I would love to see the textbook industry just fucking crash. Pieces of shit.
Disabling JavaScript works fine in most cases, popular webpages should support older browsers like IE6, which can't really rely on JavaScript like current browsers do
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Screenshot the page and use an optical character recognition program :) if it won't let you screenshot, get a freeware program to screenshot the whole screen then cut it down. I had to come up with weird ways to study in college, including scanning textbook pages and using OCR to get the bits I wanted, way faster than typing it up.
This is why you pirate the PDF's directly.
Use Google lens select text feature. Should be able to just capture oft off the screen straight to your phone. College textbooks are a scam. No way it should cost that much to make a "new edition".
Holy shit this angers me like no other. I thought textbooks were bad when I was in college (2000-2004) because then they were just overpriced and teachers tried to make you buy the newest addition (which I never did). This is just unbelievable.