it’s a travel book if that matters
Remove watermarks, metadata, etc first. Whatever could be used to identify you.
Also run spell check. Specific misspellings are another tracking method.
Reminds me of “paper street”
Is that why they’ve been more prevalent? Just thought terrible editor not intentionally making books worse.
why don’t people want to pay full price for ebooks
It’s a spy/security thing, never actually heard of it being used for something like ebooks.
Yeah it started commercially about a decade ago from what I can tell. Now it’s probably part of every ebook. It’s just a little code. Cheap and easy if you want to track leaks and/or pirating.
Old spy craft thing. Disseminate 12 copies of a doc, each with a very subtle difference. If that doc pops up somewhere it shouldn’t, you know where it came from.
LOL, probably not so useful in the digital age.
It’s definitely still useful and easier to do now too. SpaceX and Tesla both allegedly use it to catch leakers. It’s usually done now with whitespace and/or invisible characters.
What worries me is, what if they put in some obfudcated unique ID in the document that can be traced back to you? Is there a way to catch it with reasonable certainty?
you can view and edit every bit of metadata inside Calibre. If you want to make sure, go and edit the metadata there.
Yeah but what if the fingerprint is more tricky? Like a blank line with the font called afzer the fingerprint? Metadata inside of an image?
To be reasonable safe one would have to buy the book from multiple accounts and compare some hashes.
For fucks sake I’m pretty privacy conscious but you guys just take it too far
I’m pretty sure there was at least one publisher caught experimenting with this.
I doubt OP is a publisher. Nobody goes after the little guy (except when they want to make an example of someone, but the odds of that happening to you are slim to none).
I regularly get materials with identifying information embedded in them, it’s very common in the technical publishing industry, not unreasonable to check a purchased eBook for an identifier which ties it back to the original purchaser.
I have no purchased ebooks, but am genuinely curious; how trivial is it to remove watermarks and metadata?
Think there was a github repo with a script which reads out the visible information from an epub and puts it into a new one. Basically copying it, but leaving everything extra behind. Sadly could not find it at the moment.
Upload it here:
Archive.org, Library Genisis, Anna’s Archive?
Archive.org handles books like a library, making it pretty useless for piracy (unless you use a script to save it as a PDF and lend it back)
Are you sure that it’s not possible to also upload ebooks? I haven’t done it but I downloaded stuff from there that was probably in a grey zone at best (not sure if it ever was an ebool, though)
Library genisis
o7
Sigil and Calibre have tools that allow you to view metadata and edit html, toc etc. But I doubt there’d be tracking on a travel book tbh despite the comments below - (I’m happy to be corrected). It’s often visible on journal articles and others have stated technical books too.
Mam
If it’s an epub there are tools to view the metadata. Probably want to de-drm it to start with, if it isn’t drm-free. Then use something like exiftool to view all of the metadata… and you can probably strip it before you share it.
Another place to ask would be the IRC groups that specialise in this.
