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?

Link

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…

  • Brave Little Hitachi Wand
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    92 years ago

    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.

    • Copyright ScepticOP
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      282 years ago

      What “rights” are there in the first place? This measure hurts the customer in the long run

    • lemmyvore
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      42 years ago

      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.

  • @drwankingstein@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    52 years ago

    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

    • Copyright ScepticOP
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      42 years ago

      There are a couple of files, actually.

      This is the root directory.

      Then, I go to the epub directory.

      META-INF contains these files...

      ...and item has these files.

      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.

  • @jws_shadotak@sh.itjust.works
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    22 years ago

    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

  • @cannis@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    21 year ago

    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

    • Copyright ScepticOP
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      21 year ago

      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