Scrambling copyright ebooks to help troubleshoot problems ???

[PeterT]

I'm of the opinion that anything within a <.....> should be left unchanged.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I'm not saying that people have never done it - they almost certainly have - but they would have been firmly asked not to do it again had it come to the attention of the moderating team .

Well, like I said, maybe I saw it happen in threads where moderators had been active, and assumed they saw it.


And I can think of circumstances where samples might not actually be useful for troubleshooting, and you'd need the book itself.


But whatever -- a definite decision has been made by the moderating team, and now we know for sure.
I will definitely keep that in mind, rather than any mistaken assumptions I may have made.

[jackie_w]

Please see post #2.

All interested parties, please feel free to try out with some of your own books and report back. Better not upload them here yet, though

All feedback welcome (I think), particularly if the scrambled book reports errors which weren't in the original.

@HarryT,
I may have been a bit lenient with zapping the metadata. There appears to be varied opinion on what's OK and what's not. As the Voice of the Moderators, if you could check a few scrambled OPF files and feedback the problem areas, I'd be grateful. Thanks.

[RbnJrg]

Thank you very much for your work. I'm using Calibre portable and it seems the .bat file is not working with that version of Calibre. By the way, did you read this post?

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by RbnJrg

Ok, I can understand that You started this thread as a "kobo thread" (thinking in Kobo books though your utility is useful for any ebook). Since ereaders now are supporting several epub3 features (ADE now has almost full support of epub3), maybe you could maintain the numbers unscrumbled when you find something like:

    <p>something <a epub:type="noteref" href="#fn01">1</a></p>
    …
    <aside id="fn01" epub:type="footnote">
        Some footnote content
    </aside>

In those cases, is doubtless that numbers belong to a footnote. What do you say?

I had missed your post, sorry. (Freudian slip in self-defence, maybe )

If the calibre parser supports epub3 then possibly - but I'm not ready to think about epub3-specifics yet.

My own preference would be not to scramble digits at all, but it doesn't seem like this is an allowable option.

ETA: I don't think the Scrambler will break any epub3 features, though. If it works in the original it should work in the scrambled version.

[eschwartz]

@RbnJrg,
calibre portable doesn't use a .bat folder (for years now). There is a special calibre-portable "installer" that uses an exe launcher.

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by RbnJrg

Thank you very much for your work. I'm using Calibre portable and it seems the .bat file is not working with that version of Calibre. By the way, did you read this post?

I don't use calibre portable so I can't check. The .bat file assumes that the calibre program directory, containing calibre-debug.exe is in your main Windows path (what's the official title for that?). I mean what you see if you type path at the C:> prompt. You could check that. It was there by default when I did a standard calibre installation to the C: drive.

Also you could try editing the .bat and changing the line

calibre-debug -e "%ProgDir%ebookscramble.py" "%FileIn%"

to

F:\path_to_calibre_port\calibre-debug -e "%ProgDir%ebookscramble.py" "%FileIn%"

Or something similar. Where are the OS techies when you need them?
ETA: I take it all back, he arrived before I did.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

My own preference would be not to scramble digits at all, but it doesn't seem like this is an allowable option.

My personal opinion is that most digits would be OK unscrambled: footnote numbers, chapter numbers, the odd year within the text... But there may be some other digits that may need scrambling, like data within tables. Since there's no easy way to automatically decide which is which, the safest is to scramble everything (the same goes with chapter titles, "Chapter 1" would be fine, but a more elaborate title needs scrabling, that's why it's better to scramble everything). For the purpose of testing and debugging, I don't think maintaining footnote numbers or not makes any difference.

Regarding the metadata. It's OK (to me) to maintain author, title, genre... but a summary or description may need scrabling, so again it's better to scramble everything. And as for the content of HTML tags (between < and >), you wouldn't want to scrable "href" or "style" attributes, but "title" or "alt" may need scrambling too.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

@RbnJrg,
calibre portable doesn't use a .bat folder (for years now). There is a special calibre-portable "installer" that uses an exe launcher.

My bad, I didn't realize the .bat file is how you were supposed to use this tool. I assumed it was going to be a plugin, but clearly not yet.

(And hey, using the portability aspect of calibre-portable isn't actually relevant at the moment. )

Originally Posted by jackie_w

I don't use calibre portable so I can't check. The .bat file assumes that the calibre program directory, containing calibre-debug.exe is in your main Windows path (what's the official title for that?). I mean what you see if you type path at the C:> prompt. You could check that. It was there by default when I did a standard calibre installation to the C: drive.

Also you could try editing the .bat and changing the line

calibre-debug -e "%ProgDir%ebookscramble.py" "%FileIn%"

to

F:\path_to_calibre_port\calibre-debug -e "%ProgDir%ebookscramble.py" "%FileIn%"

Or something similar. Where are the OS techies when you need them?
ETA: I take it all back, he arrived before I did.

Editing the .bat will do it, or you could also move the python script and the .bat file into the program directory of your calibre portable installation.

[RbnJrg]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

I don't use calibre portable so I can't check.
...
Also you could try editing the .bat and changing the line

calibre-debug -e "%ProgDir%ebookscramble.py" "%FileIn%"

to

F:\path_to_calibre_port\calibre-debug -e "%ProgDir%ebookscramble.py" "%FileIn%"

That worked! Your utility does a fantastic job! Many thanks! Now, could you do a little experiment? Could you modify your script in order that all/any numbers remains unchanged? And after that, could you apply that modified script to any of the books here in MR (books in public domain) and upload that book? If noone here, even with the numbers unchanged can know what book is, then it doesn't matter to have that feature on DRM books because anyway none will be able to know what is the original book. Could you do that? Thanks again for your work.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by RbnJrg

That worked! Your utility does a fantastic job! Many thanks! Now, could you do a little experiment? Could you modify your script in order that all/any numbers remains unchanged? And after that, could you apply that modified script to any of the books here in MR (books in public domain) and upload that book? If noone here, even with the numbers unchanged can know what book is, then it doesn't matter to have that feature on DRM books because anyway none will be able to know what is the original book. Could you do that? Thanks again for your work.

You will be able to tell what the original book is if the ISBN, which is generally on the publisher information page, is unchanged.

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by RbnJrg

That worked! Your utility does a fantastic job!

Let's see how it goes

Originally Posted by RbnJrg

Many thanks! Now, could you do a little experiment? Could you modify your script in order that all/any numbers remains unchanged?

I've got a better idea. I'll PM you and give you a one-line change so you can try it yourself.

[RbnJrg]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

Let's see how it goes


I've got a better idea. I'll PM you and give you a one-line change so you can try it yourself.

OK

[RbnJrg]

Originally Posted by HarryT

You will be able to tell what the original book is if the ISBN, which is generally on the publisher information page, is unchanged.

True.

[RbnJrg]

Watch the ebook I attach. That book was scrambled with your original utility; I don't know why, the .xhtml index resulted with the numbers unchanged The original book is in public domain (is "The mistery of the yellow room") so if you need it to find the cause of the unscrambled numbers in TOC, I can upload here.