I have a question regarding trying to help users who post on these Forums about a problematic copyright ebook on their ereader of choice.
Does anyone think it would it be useful to have a simple utility which scrambles the contents of a de-DRM'd copyright ebook sufficiently that the Moderators would be happy for that scrambled copy to be attached on MR? The aim being to scramble the text content whilst leaving the ebook structure and styling intact to make troubleshooting the user's actual problem more straightforward for all who try to help?
Any thoughts? Especially regarding what would constitute "enough scrambling" for the Moderators to be happy.
If it's thought to be worth pursuing I could attach a first attempt at a Scrambler utility - for epub, kepub, azw3.
Just FYI ... for my own private purposes I needed to practice using some of the Calibre ebook manipulation coding tools so I chose this as a little project. If it's not worth pursuing, that's OK, I needed the practice anyway
In its current state it's not a Calibre plugin (
although it easily could be) it's a drag-and-drop the ebook onto a Windows .bat file and a scrambled copy of the book is created on the PC. For the time being I decided to keep scrambled copies well away from the Calibre library.
Some past observations:
When a user posts asking for help with a perceived problem with a copyrighted book there often follows a frustrating sequence of events: e.g.
- due to ignorance rather than malicious intent, user attaches a copy of the copyrighted material in the Forum. This results in a threatening intervention from a Moderator which probably is quite upsetting for the user, especially if they are new to MR and ebooks.
- a more experienced user tries to help and asks to see small HTML/CSS extracts to try to diagnose the problem. This can be a lengthy to-and-fro with many misunderstandings, after all, if the user was knowledgeable about HTML/CSS they probably wouldn't be posting for help in the first place!
- user tries to construct a small sample of the ebook to demonstrate the problem and creates more (and different) errors than exist in the original. This is not helpful to either party.
- swapping of PMs, email addresses or public links to Cloud storage ensues. Putting copyright material in a public area is not really desirable because there's a risk of having your Cloud account closed.