On Friday, someone from the Readium Consortium contacted me to express their concerns about me publishing my research into how to extract content from an LCP DRM ePub. I've given it a lot of thought and come to the following conclusion. As clever as LCP is, it means Readium is a gatekeeper […] - ThreadSky

Edent.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy • 58 days ago

On Friday, someone from the Readium Consortium contacted me to express their concerns about me publishing my research into how to extract content from an LCP DRM ePub.

I've given it a lot of thought and come to the following conclusion.

As clever as LCP is, it means Readium is a gatekeeper […]

Comments

Edent.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy•58 days ago

That's unacceptable.

People should be able to read their books on any hardware they like running any software they want.

You shouldn't have to buy a new eReader just to read a book. That's an ecological nightmare.

Forcing people to switch to closed source software, which leaks private […]

paulasimoes.ciberlandia.pt.ap.brid.gy•58 days ago

@Edent Also, in some countries, like Portugal, you can now break "DRM" to make legal uses of the work, so it's important for people to know how to do it (although AFAIK there is no break in this case of yours)

(How we did it here https://fsfe.org/news/2019/news-20191113-01.en.html)

Edent.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy•58 days ago

The technique I've discovered isn't sophisticated. While I *think* I'm the first person to do this with an LCP ePub, anyone with a basic grasp of programming could do the same.

It doesn't reverse-engineer anything. There's no complex cryptographic cracking. It doesn't reveal private keys or […]

Edent.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy•58 days ago

Anyway, my blog post will be published at lunchtime today.

You can subscribe to the feed at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/feed/atom

Or as an email newsletter https://shkspr.mobi/newsletter/

Or follow on the Fediverse https://shkspr.mobi/blog/@blog

Edent.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy•58 days ago

Here's the blog post.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/03/towards-extracting-content-from-an-lcp-protected-epub/

Edent.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy•56 days ago

Further discussion on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43378627

ocdtrekkie.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy•58 days ago

@Edent I'm sort of partial to the argument that publishers having bought into a DRM scheme that's breakable is a good thing, but man those followup replies burned any goodwill hard.

yacc143.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy•57 days ago

@Edent https://shkspr.mobi/blog/@blog Sorry, the consortium's stance, "harder DRM" will be the solution is exactly the wrong answer.

E.g. look to the German book market.

Digital watermarking is the usual outside Amazon and scientific text books.

If surrendering to Amazon, and the existing DRM systems are too hard to […]

maccruiskeen.social.linux.pizza.ap.brid.gy•57 days ago

@yacc143 @Edent https://shkspr.mobi/blog/@blog What is the point of wtaermarking an unencrypted epub file? It would be easy to remove.

yacc143.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy•57 days ago

@maccruiskeen @Edent https://shkspr.mobi/blog/@blog I have no idea how hard a steganographic digital watermark would be to remove.
(Look up what digital watermarks are about and how they work.)

The point is 99% of the readers/buyers do not have a degree in mathematics or computer science, so the reminder that their […]

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