. . . I almost never buy anything from amazon, but they had a translation of a short story that was only available there and nowhere else (and no, not on Anna’s Archive either).

So anyway, I purchased it, downloaded the Kindle app from the Aurora store to my phone, signed in using Mrs. Erinaceus’s account (still trying to get her to delete it, but that’s another story), brought up the book, and then went on to screenshot every “page” (I thought maybe the app would prevent my phone from doing screenshots, but fortunately not). Sent the pngs to my laptop, used ImageMagick to mogrify them into PDFs, merged all the PDFs into one and OCR’d it using ocrmypdf.

I think there used to be a way to do this with some calibre plugins, but it required rooting around for a kindle key file, which I didn’t feel like doing, so I just did it this way. This is for a short story that is only 22 pages; for something longer this would of course be quite labor intensive.

But kind of just goes to show what ridiculous lengths publishers (and some authors) will go to to protect their stuff, turning off potential readers and punishing actual ones. Why not just do things the bandcamp way? It’s easy, it’s fair, it’s instant gratification—it’s fun! Anyway, preaching to the choir here, just thought I’d share.