this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
128 points (95.1% liked)

Privacy

30753 readers
933 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Related communities

Chat rooms

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Most of the books I have on my reader are not available in epub or formats like it, rather as pdf/djvu scans. So I'd add it might be absolutely worth it to pay more for a big screen.

Also the device never ever connects to the internet. Gives you more freedom.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (3 children)

You can easily convert pdf files to epub then do a little light editing to make sure you don’t have weird artifacts like page numbers the book name or author name. I can process a pdf to epub in 20 minutes at most (most are a minute it two) for average novel length, which I understand is a big ask for lots of folks but it’s worth it to me to have the file in a format that I can keep and use on pretty much anything.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

you could share your books uploading them to libgen. I mean, they are probably already there but in an annoying PDF format. Not everyone has the knowledge to convert a PDF to an epub with good formatting.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

I would like to do something like that but I don’t want to be scrutinized about technically being a bootleg publisher.

The books I did it to are from small authors writing for niche communities and I don’t want to make it easier to pirate than buy in that case. Anyone else can find those same PDFs on a website easy to search and well recommended by the community so the information is available, and if they want an ePub they can format it themselves or just buy the version from Amazon and support the author.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Mind giving a rundown of how you do it? I tried it many, many times and never accomplished much

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago
  1. Use convert.io to convert pdf to EPUB
  2. Import EPUB to editor software such as sigil
  3. Find editing issues in the text by hand, once you’ve found one issue that gets repeated like “AuThOr 78” for page numbers
  4. Use the search and replace function to replace all instances with blank
  5. Skim over the text for a couple minutes not reading, but looking for other weird breaks in the text flow
  6. When you think you have them all export the file and start reading, if you see any other less obvious issues mark them in the notes and do a final edit for aesthetics

You now have the book on EPUB to be placed in your personal cloud or whatever.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

"Do a light editing" you mean read through a huge book? I have downloaded automatically-converted versions like this and they're unreadable at times. Also would that work well on complex math formulas?

Edit: might try doing so to upload for others, but looking through the whole book must be long, tedious work, definitely not something I'd do for every book.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

”Do a light editing “ You mean read through a huge book?

No, I mean use your eyes to see if there are any obvious breaks in the text, most of the time they’re repeated and follow a pattern that is easily searched and every instance replaced with a button press.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Yes, but far from all mistakes are like this. You'd need to manually scan through a potentially long book. Fine if you do it occasionally for some books to contribute to Libgen, but you'd go insane if you try to do it to your whole library for personal use.

Edit: I meant not repeated and more or less obvious mistakes like these, rather those like "one term got mistaken for another real word", which you won't catch automatically.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Comment here

I’ve been doing it for years to my personal books I download that I can’t find in ePub, I have no issues with my sanity. I also usually do this before I read the book, and double check my editing as I read it. 98% of the time I caught all the errors that were not present in the original text (it copies typos perfectly) .

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Cool, I just don't have patience to scan through a 1000-page book prior to reading) Do you upload these for others to use? And again - what software?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Well, in the linked comment, on the second line where it says to import the converted epub into editing software like sigil,there was a link to a piece of software called sigil, it’s for editing EPUB files, and it’s called sigil. It’s the second link in the comment that takes you to the EPUB editor software called sigil.

I have been tempted to upload them for others to use, but all the authors that I’ve done it for are really small niche community authors, and I do not want to take support away from them.

Just because I’m a broke ass bitch and have decided to re-copy them however I see fit for my personal consumption, doesn’t necessarily mean I want to become a bootlegger publisher.