I purchased an ebook (two of them, actually) from some Japanese site called honto, but of course, stupid old me didn’t realise that Digital Restrictions Management was going to make my life a living hell. Has anyone had any luck with cracking them, or did I just spend 730 Yen on a nothingburger?
Apparently, there are some local files on my phone from “doenloading” the ebook, but they won’t load. In the browser I had a little more luck, but the images are scrambled when I attempt to “inspect element”.
What do I do? I really want to get this to work…
Have you made sure it can’t be gotten from Anna’s Archive before you go the bother of cracking this?
Probably, but just checking.
Doesn’t look like it. The book is quite recent (2020)
Alright. Good luck with the DRM!
Digital Restrictions Management
Isn’t it “digital rights management”?
What “rights” are there in the first place? This measure hurts the customer in the long run
Copyright. I’m not making some statement of value. I fucking hate it as much as the next person here, just pointing out the proper acronym.
Stallman was the one who proposed calling it that: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/opposing-drm.html
That kind of shit is just annoying. Changing the terms because you don’t like what they refer to is just lazy virtue signaling. It’s the equivalent of injecting some variant of “penis” into someone’s name because you don’t like them. The context of the conversation should be sufficient enough to establish your opinion on the topic without it. For instance, making a post asking about how to remove drm.
Yeah righto MomoPenis
Its managing your rights in the sense of taking them away.
Yes, well, they want to spin it that way but realistically speaking DRM has always been about restrictions. Or, if you prefer rights, it’s their rights not yours.
Looks like it’s a proprietary encrypted file format that nobody ever bothered to crack, unfortunately
if you can provide some of the images it would probably help, a good idea is to simply firstly look at the image in a hex editor to see if there are any notifiers of file type. but sharing the files you got would be a good idea
What kind of file did it download?
There are a couple of files, actually.
image and xhtml folders have the same amount of files (137), but the former has them in the jpg format, while the latter has them in the xhtml format.
Sorry for haphazardly explaining it like this, I’m on mobile.
I would try zipping up the epub dir and changing the extension to .epub
This should work, but this looks like an EPUB with DRM (since there’s an
encryption.xmlfile), so you might need to remove the DRM using something like Calibre.
did you ever figure this out? i’m kinda in a similar situation, though i ended up just using a downloader for the clip studio online reader they provide
I found an excruciatingly manual method of extracting comics which I purchased, but it works well
To make it a lot simpler, a Discord user made a script (with the help of AI) which takes the scrambled .jpg image and the tag (e.g. 3,4,7,14,0,13,12,11,6,10,2,8,15,5,1,9) and then uses ImageMagick to unscramble that image. Then I may have to edit the image manually (the edges for example are not scrambled so I have to edit those in)
I’d love to share the script with those who use Honto and would benefit from it, just gotta know if it’s alright with this community
These files appear as images but they could be zip files that get combined in memory and decompressed into the file. Try finagling the filetypes and see what you find
