Anyone to rip PDF from publishers?

[hdaackda]

I have access to a big publishers website as an instructor and can view almost ANY of their books! Issue is, I can only view 1 page at a time.

Is there any way I can save the entire book in PDF or ePub etc easily? (i tried the inspect/view source but can't find any pdf etc.. each page is shown individually after clicking next)

[Foozle]

Look for a download / save option in the window. If it's not there, they may not allow full document downloads. Without seeing it or knowing how it's coded, that's my only suggestion.

[Quoth]

It would be theft if it was possible. But you'd never get charged with theft, but sued with copyright violation as theft has fixed maximum penalties and copyright cases have no limit.

Here in Ireland it's "Theft of service" to tap into cable TV and use 3rd party card & box to view. To save legal costs they might just bill someone for premium service back to the time they moved into their dwelling.
If the provider of the gear was charged with theft they'd face about €6,000 fine. Instead they take a civil case and the result is usually €100,000 plus all related electronic gear seized.

Misusing a website is legally identical.

[Comfy.n]

there's a famous website, in my country, that would allow users download any document, from day 1.

it's similar to Scribd. Users upload documents and it happily collects all of them.

then after 3 years or so, after having amassed millions of documents, including copyrighted books, this website locked all that content, forbidding any downloads. Even subscribers can't download the content. It's locked up behind a bloated and clunky interface, which made all that content pretty useless.

now that's what should be called theft, something very distinct from some user getting files for personal use...

[Quoth]

As I explained, no individual gets prosecuted for content theft.

Indeed rights holders do prefer to sue operators as they are more likely to get the money. In this case a user would at a minimum get their rights revoked.

People can join a library or buy the book. Authors need to eat too.

Scribd also buys content. I confess I don't entirely understand their site, but publishers are suing the "Open Library", which loans copyright books without buying a library licence.
Every regular library buys an ebook licence per simultaneous loan. Some countries they also pay about 30c per borrow royalty too.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by hdaackda

Issue is, I can only view 1 page at a time.

Is there any way I can save the entire book in PDF or ePub etc easily? (i tried the inspect/view source but can't find any pdf etc.. each page is shown individually after clicking next)

If you wanted, you could even use something like AutoHotKey:

• 2021: "Screencapture tool for ebooks"

You'd be able to create a basic scraper which:

• Downloads the image.
  
  • Or screenshots the page.
• Saves + numbers the images sequentially.
• Clicks through next page.

(Of course, this would still require you to sit there and press a few buttons.)

If you wanted to go full automation, then team up with a Computer Science student/programmer, and you could come up with something much smarter:

• Detect page change
• Check a location to make sure image was fully loaded.
  
  • Could be as simple as... 1/4th down + 1/4th middle of the screen:
    
  • If background color = X, image not loaded yet.
    
  • If color = white, image fully loaded.
    
• Zoom in + Scrape highest resolution image possible.
  
  • Or pull/save image data right from the network.
• Automatically number/split pages.
• Automate the PDF bundling + OCR at the end.
• [...]

Each publisher's website is probably going to require a customized solution.... but if it shows up on your screen, you can capture it.

I used something similar many years ago to grab a few images off of HathiTrust's website, because they had old public domain scans that weren't available elsewhere, but they were hidden behind their annoying website.