I have a few ebooks I’ve purchased online that came as password protected PDFs. While mildly annoying while trying to read them on a desktop system, it’s patently absurd when I try to move them over to the iPad to use. There are a bunch of hacks floating around describing how to use conversion software to remove the password. Such as convert to a postscript file and then back to a PDF. Generally you end up with a pretty crappy PDF out the other end. You always loose hyperlinks (table of content or index), and a lot of times the formatting can get screwy. Fortunately I found a few comments mentioning qpdf, which is in the default repos for Ubuntu at least:
- sudo apt-get install qpdf
- qpdf --password=******** --decrypt lame_pass_version.pdf happy_version.pdf
Yay! No more crashing iBooks trying to read stuff I paid money for. And there’s an actual preview of the cover on the bookshelf now. Amazing.
Great tip, but unfortunally removing the copy protection could be illegal in some countries.
Phew! Good thing I don’t care then huh? If I paid for the content, I’m allowed to do what I need to make it possible for me to use it lawfully. Any laws stating otherwise need to be quickly stricken.
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