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Post by Deadshot on Feb 7, 2021 6:55:30 GMT
Hi,
I did a quick sear in the forum but couldn't find what I was looking for. I am sure one of you here has looked into it already.
I would like to publish/display one of my books on my website so that it can be used/read (it's a language teaching textbook). Does anyone know of a good (not necessarily free/premium would be ok) website where I could share my book digitally but without the ability for others to download or take screenshots?
I had a look at issuu.com but they do not have that layer of protection.
Thanks
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Post by Ken on Feb 7, 2021 10:14:52 GMT
Almost impossible to achieve.
If it’s on a screen it can be copied.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 7, 2021 13:26:45 GMT
You have to think of media protection systems as being like Speed Bumps in the road, their aim isn't to stop something from being copied but to slow people down sufficiently and make things so difficult in the hope they'll just give up and go away.
What little methods there are to protect information being displayed on a screen (like removing the Context Menu so you can't Save an image) don't work because there are ways round them and you can have System Level events running that have priority like Screen Capture or third party hotkey software like OCR Screen Readers or Screen Recorders.
Even if you could somehow lock the entire keyboard\mouse\touch screen\joystick etc. stopping the reader from doing anything other than look at the screen then they can always take a picture of it with their phone or a camera and Save that image instead.
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Post by Ken on Feb 7, 2021 16:00:51 GMT
Absolutely correct.
I couldn’t explain it better.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 7, 2021 16:59:49 GMT
Hi, I did a quick sear in the forum but couldn't find what I was looking for. I am sure one of you here has looked into it already. I would like to publish/display one of my books on my website so that it can be used/read (it's a language teaching textbook). Does anyone know of a good (not necessarily free/premium would be ok) website where I could share my book digitally but without the ability for others to download or take screenshots? I had a look at issuu.com but they do not have that layer of protection. Thanks I used Issuu, embedded the code, and disabled download. |
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Post by potet on Feb 7, 2021 18:41:41 GMT
The best solution is to publish your books with Lulu.
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Post by adrianallan on Feb 7, 2021 21:21:37 GMT
1. Have a password-protected page
2. Use software to discreetly print the name and email of the person who downloads the file on the actual PDF - this discourages sharing.
3. You can format a PDF file so any text within it can't be copied and pasted.
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Post by benziger on Feb 7, 2021 22:47:43 GMT
I have thought about this for a long time. There are ways to make it "impossible" to copy text. But when I call up the source code of the page, the text is still there somewhere between the HTML tags... As others have already written: You can thwart thieves and get rid of them that way. But to prevent someone from photographing the screen with another device, for example, is impossible. On the other hand, I think adrianallan 's advice is perfect. We have this at my employer. A lot of PDFs have this written in grey at the bottom: (c) & Licensed for X.X & date. The grey font with the ascenders easily gets into the last Text line. Unattractive. But that prevents me from covering it. Passing on such personalised documents - you have to be very audacious.
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Post by BlueAndGold on Feb 7, 2021 23:25:07 GMT
Any electronic document is in the Pirate Zone by default, just like recorded music.
You can slow some down, but the persistent will overcome.
Locks can help keep honest people honest, but they do not keep a thief out.
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Post by Retread-Retired-Cameron on Feb 8, 2021 0:27:00 GMT
As B&G noted, locks keep honest people honest but rarely deter a thief [or law enforcement for that matter]. A quick search showed me five different ways to unlock a PDF sans password to enable copy / paste functionality. A more detailed search would undoubtedly show more.
Disabling screenshots is also not likely as it would involve at least semi-disabling a variety of Operating Systems from MS to Linux to MacOS, which would tend to get the work in question a negative connotation.
Perhaps the better question is what do you hope to accomplish with the work and how do you best accomplish the objective with the least amount of issues.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 8, 2021 2:41:42 GMT
If there was a 100% secure protection method around for epubs then large companies like Amazon would be using it to protect their files. The best protection for purchased Kindle titles Amazon can come up with is AZW, a method that is now so open and breakable you can get free programs to do it for you automatically. If Amazon - with all the billions they make - can't prevent their material being copied then there's not much hope for the rest of us.
All the current major DRM systems used to protect digital media today have been defeated including Denuvo for games, Cinavia for Blu-Ray and HDCP for video. Watermarking sounds great but "watermarked" film screeners sent out at Oscar time are regularly stripped of any identifying marks (and not just the obvious visible ones) to prevent their source being identified and then made available for download. Again, if a multi-billion industry like Hollywood can't protect or even track their gold eggs then that should tell you something.
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Post by Deadshot on Feb 8, 2021 4:06:26 GMT
Hi. Thanks everyone for your input and guidance. I would have used issuu but they have disabled their embed option for free plan. Premium is a bit pricey but I may just consider it eventually.
The other option I have found is to set my Indesign output to jpgs and the pages will be downloaded individually as images. I upload the textbook pages as images (with Watermark and Copyright notice) and that may deter 'thieves'. I have had hundreds of requests to 'pass on the pdf' of my textbooks from teachers. Obviously, that would just put me out of business. In the Remote Learning age now, textbooks should go digital anyway.
Thanks
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Post by Deleted on Feb 8, 2021 6:27:08 GMT
Hi. Thanks everyone for your input and guidance. I would have used issuu but they have disabled their embed option for free plan. Premium is a bit pricey but I may just consider it eventually. The other option I have found is to set my Indesign output to jpgs and the pages will be downloaded individually as images. I upload the textbook pages as images (with Watermark and Copyright notice) and that may deter 'thieves'. I have had hundreds of requests to 'pass on the pdf' of my textbooks from teachers. Obviously, that would just put me out of business. In the Remote Learning age now, textbooks should go digital anyway. Thanks You can also use Flip Book and Novaslider and other such extensions. Another option is generating GIFs and merging them in Photoshop (way back when I had created a gif with multiple images. Perhaps someone else can chime in with the exact process.) |
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Post by Ken on Feb 8, 2021 11:43:56 GMT
It really doesn’t matter what you do. If it’s on a screen it’s copyable.
By the way teachers are the worst offenders for copying anything. The photocopier in a school staff room is the most used piece of equipment.
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Post by benziger on Feb 8, 2021 14:03:00 GMT
It really doesn’t matter what you do. If it’s on a screen it’s copyable. By the way teachers are the worst offenders for copying anything. The photocopier in a school staff room is the most used piece of equipment. That is a true word, Ken , but it is also the case that copying and copying are not the same thing. If I simply copy something from a book, then that is a copy. Legal? Illegal? Doesn't matter.
But if Teacher Smith hands out a copy that says at the bottom that the copy is only for Teacher Miller and his class, then it is a bit embarrassing for Teacher Smith to hand out the copies. The Lehrmittelverlag Zürich, the largest publisher of teaching materials in Switzerland, works accordingly: the electronic versions are only available online with a password. What someone downloads gets a footer with a watermark: "Licensed for [school name], [teacher name], [date]". That puts the brakes on wild copying. A copy from a colleague for lesson preparation cannot be prevented in this way, but copies to students can. See example (click to enlarge)
1 First line copyright notice 2 Second line individual license notice with name (as it is no more a pdf and the cards are unusable due to the red arrows, I changed the real names to sample names)
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