Getting a full PDF from a DRM-encumbered online textbook

I've done the same thing before on a book in college, except my DRM wasn't nice enough to let me print 10 pages at a go. Instead, I spun up a virtual X server with Xdummy with a resolution of 1200x10000. That showed a few dozen pages at a time. Then I automated screenshots (scrot) and PageDown (xdotool). Finally, some PIL magic to look for the thin gray line between pages plus convert and ghostscript and I had a PDF!

Watermarks and such are easy to remove with PDFtk, the swiss army knife of PDF files. Convert the input files to a plain-text representation, find the code that implements the watermark (it will be the only code that's identical on every page), delete it and convert back. Easy as pie. It will also concatenate the partial files.

DRM-laden online books is a red flag that the college you are attending is a thinly veiled profit center, not an education provider.<p>Has anyone made an index of which colleges require DRM textbook purchases in their courses?

I have this idea that any material that uses DRM should not be covered by copyright simply because it removes itself from things that will end up in the public domain.<p>For me, one of the wonderful things about copyright is that works always end up available for free to the general public. A DRMed work will never be free in that sense, and should then not be covered by the regular legal protections.

I&#x27;m glad he did it, and published the result. But isn&#x27;t cracking DRM a criminal offence? Is it wise to confess to it in a public forum?

As someone interested in Clojure, it&#x27;s cool to see stuff like this build with it. Luckily I haven&#x27;t needed to purchase expensive books since freshman year. Everything I&#x27;ve been required to I either rent on Amazon for $30 or find online.

I notice he said the final product was around 700 megabytes, which is a bit absurd. What could he have done to make the final size more reasonable?