[blindLaw] Internet Archive extensive collection of law books for blind & print disabled people

[Sai]

The Internet Archive has an extremely extensive collection of scanned
books, which are available to blind & print disabled people for free (e.g.
provable using a BARD or Bookshare account):
https://archive.org/details/printdisabled

Surprisingly, this includes legal textbooks, treatises, academic books,
reference books, study books, etc. etc. Not the latest editions, but they
had at least a semi recent version of nearly everything I searched for.

For example, here's Black's Law Dictionary (abridged) 2015:
https://archive.org/details/blackslawdiction0010edunse_r0f2

Here's one of my favourite books on US law — Eskridge, Frickey, & Garret's
Legislation and Statutory Interpretation:
https://archive.org/details/legislationstatu0000eskr

I also found nearly the entire suite of UK law treatises on my reading list
(Blackstone's everything, Craies, Bennion, etc), as well as a full set of
bar exam (SQE) prep books.


Make sure to sort by published date when you do a search (or have sighted
assistance to check the cover images); the titles might be identical for
different editions, and the publication date is a pain to read for every
entry otherwise (it is on the details page, near the top of the metadata
block).

There are also some books that have the same title in the list, but are
actually different books, like the "condensed" study versions, texts vs
commentaries, etc., or like every book that has a super generic name like
"administrative law". This is again very easy to tell apart from the cover
image, and it should be in the details page metadata, but it's a pain. If
you're doing it yourself, be sure to double check so you're not getting an
older version than is available, and you know if you have multiple books
with similar titles. Check the publication year and authors; that's usually
good enough to tell them apart.


I've not found a collection where you can browse all the law books in one
place; you have to know what to search for.


They provide most books as Adobe Digital Editions (i.e. encrypted PDFs with
DRM).

That's rather a pain to use, and really limits your options for software
and hardware you can read it from, so for your convenience, here's how to
crack it:

0. Make an Internet Archive account and register yourself with the print
disabled access at https://archive.org/details/printdisabled

1. Install Adobe Digital Editions. Log in to it using the same email
account you used for Internet Archive signup.
https://www.adobe.com/solutions/ebook/digital-editions.html

2. Install Calibre (free e-book reader software) https://calibre-ebook.com/

3. Download and unzip DeDRM Tools
https://github.com/apprenticeharper/DeDRM_tools/releases/

4. Open Calibre, go to preferences, plugins, load from file, and select
"DeDRM_Plugin.zip" within the folder you just unzipped. Quit and restart
Calibre.

5. While logged in, search Internet Archive (using the same URL) to find a
book you want. On the details page, the sidebar should have a link labelled
"download Adobe PDF". Click and download. This is an .ACSM file, which is
actually just a link to where Adobe Digital Editions will download the real
thing, not the book itself.

6. While logged in and online, open the Internet Archive provided .ACSM
file using ADE. This will download the actual book onto your computer. It
will still be encrypted, but at least it's on your computer, together with
the decryption key. On Windows, it should be stored in your user folder
under "Documents/My Digital Editions".

7. Open the ADE PDF (which is still encrypted) in Calibre. Assuming you
installed the DeDRM plug-in, this will decrypt it and copy it to Calibre's
separate save directory. You can find that by right clicking the listing in
Calibre and click "open containing folder".

8. You now have a decrypted, OCRed PDF/A in Calibre's save folder. You can
now just ignore the Adobe Digital Editions version; it's strictly worse.
Instead, copy the Calibre version wherever youv want to read it.


You should be able to use the decrypted PDF on any device and software you
prefer. And it will be permanently available — not limited by the 14 day
loan policy — because it's no longer using DRM to get permission to read
every time you open it.


Mind that the usual caveats about OCR quality apply. The scan quality is
generally pretty good, so it's about as good as OCR can be expected, but
it's not going to be as good as a native electronic version.

Very rarely, they may have BRF files, but only if they have it in
unencrypted format. So far I've only found that once. So you should mostly
expect to deal with PDFs.

They have encrypted EPUB available for some but not all books. The
decryption process is the same. If available, the EPUB is much smaller, but
it's still essentially an OCR extract (not natively electronic). My guess
is that books with footnotes and the like — which means nearly all legal
books — will be more of a pain to figure out in EPUB format than PDF. But
try both and see what you prefer

Also, mind that some of these are very large books — e.g. a treatise might
be a couple hundred to a couple thousand pages, anywhere from 20 to 270 MB.
That's not possible to break up if you have only the encrypted version, but
after you decrypt it, you can break it up into separate parts just like any
other PDF.

And they do not have any of the nice navigation markup like chapter
headings and so forth. You'll have to keep your own notes about what pages
things are at and all that.

It's ultimately just a scan. So there are all the usual drawbacks, on top
of the annoyance of having to crack the DRM.

On the other hand, it's free, in fairly high quality, easy to crack the
DRM, and the collection covers a huge number of books that are usually very
hard to find in an even partially accessible format (if at all), or
outrageously expensive.



FWIW, circumventing DRM in order to make content more accessible for blind
people is perfectly legal, under Article 7 of the Marrakesh Treaty. It's
nice that we get an exception for this.


I hope it's useful to you all. Happy reading!

Sincerely,
Sai
President, Fiat Fiendum, Inc., a 501(c)(3)

Sent from my mobile phone; please excuse the concision and autocorrect
errors.