You heard it here first… I am coining the phrase “Dumb Rational & Mentality” as referring to DRM, or digital rights management. I was able to break my eBook DRM without even trying. Without any tools except a print dialog box. How sad.

I am taking an online course this semester, and one of the requirements was purchasing an eBook. I have never purchased one, and found that the software I need to use it was Digital Editions, by Adobe. So I downloaded the free software, then bought the book ($14.95), and indeed I was able to read my digital book.

The software didn’t look all that great, it was functional and let me read my book. Lack of zoom features were something I noticed right off the bat and it’s unintuitive scroll bars never let me jump “to here” as do most scroll bars for applications that I use. Anyway, it worked.

Curiosity Killed The Cat

After reading the book for a while, I wondered where this file was actually being stored, and was it a PDF. I knew it would have some DRM attached, but what would the file look like? So I found it in my Documents folder on my Mac. Yes, the file was encrypted. I opened the file, tried saving it with a new name, etc. That didn’t work, still it was encrypted. I used PDFKey Pro, maybe thinking I can unlock it somehow. Nope.

- Encrypted PDF -

I then knew I had one more trick up my sleeve. What if I printed the text from within Digital Editions? The software gives me the option to print, why not just print back to a PDF? I’ve used this before for protected PDFs, and more recently have used PDFKey Pro to remove password protection on another PDF.

Powerful Development Fakery

So I preceded to print, then save as a PDF. The book was almost 300 pages, so at first, I tried opening the file quickly, and got an error message. I figured that it isn’t possible to do this. So I gave up. I tried again today however, and after trying to open the file and getting the error, I closed Digital Editions. Like magic, the PDF on my desktop now showed the eBook. But, I only had 35 pages. I quickly surmized that this was because the book had almost 250 pages, and I was trying to open it before it had a chance to fully print the PDF.

This was so. I again tested it, waiting a minute or so for it to fully print the PDF. And what do you know, the PDF was there, with all 235 pages. Ready to be read. Now there was one problem with the new PDF– the text was not searchable, i.e., each page was just an “image” of the actual book. However, these images were of high quality enough to read, and if you needed this book, this would probably do very well. After all, you can’t search a paperback either.

- Decrypted PDF -

Because I need searching, I’ll keep using my DRM version. I guess if I was really curious, I could convert the images using OCR and see how much of the text I could get out, then making it a searchable document. But I don’t have the time or the will.

Don’t you just love DRM? If I was able to get a copy of the book without even trying, just imagine what someone with some high-techgadgetryand software could do to theencryption?