help

[nerdflighter]

Does anyone know how to rip books from archive.org? I'm a desperately slow reader, and I'd like to read Sex Matters and Call Me By Your Name on my own time and at my own pace. The two week borrow limit is stressful and it makes me a slower reader still.

Also, last time I 'borrowed' sex matters, it wouldn't let me copy out tracts of the text?? Which was so weird tbh I'm not sure how that even works with a screenreader............anyway. If you have a copy of either of those that I can convert to epub and read on my phone, hmu

Comments

[hellofriendsiminthedark]

Sometimes archive.org has lots of download options, but those two books are just scans loaded into a fancy reader widget so the page turn is animated, which is why you can't copy text out of it. There are pdf versions you can download while you're borrowing the book, but they're encoded so they have to be opened with a compatible Adobe reader and I think? they expire after the two weeks is up. The site has an option for "print disabled" folks too, which is presumably an (encrypted) audiobook.

The good news is that you can keep borrowing over and over again. If you really wanted to go through the effort, you could also screenshot every page and read them as individual image files. I also found this reddit thread about downloading from archive.org which may or may not work for you. You could also convert the download file (in ascm format) to a pdf and remove the legal metadata.

[amberite]

I know Calibre does a lot of ebook conversions - I don't know if it works with stuff from archive.org but it may be worth looking into.

[sciatrix]

You can, as hellofriendsiminthedark pointed out, download the PDF versions and strip the DRM from them. The easiest (and free) way to do this is via Apprentice Alf's calibre plugin.

Do bear in mind that these types of services often pay their authors, though, so that it is good if you're doing this with library books to periodically "check out" the books when you're reading them, so they show up in the subscription stats.

If you like listening to books, also, AIReader is a pretty good Android app for reading books organized in Calibre Companion on a phone, and it has a really nice text-to-speech function. If you combine it with one of the nicer Google voices, it can make a decent audiobook as long as you don't mind weird pronunciations on fantasy words now and again. (I mention this because an excellent student of mine who was also a very slow reader expressed a desire to be able to listen to text more once, and it occurred to me that not everyone knows how to do that.)