4 replies to this topic

[bbrewer9538]

Greetings,

I am currently in college and studying a couple languages (VB9 and Java6). Anyone that has ever taken even one semester of college realizes that books are expensive... and can be a quite a mess of work to try and get the right books before classes start. Thus comes my theory; have electronic copies of our textbooks available for students that are enrolled in certain classes. Most, if not all, of the books that are needed for the classes offered have an ebook or PDF version available. Obviously there is an issue that if publishers were willing to provide the school with PDFs of the materials, what is to stop students from pirating from each other or the rest of the world, which is what brings me to the main reason for inquiring for help.

What options are available, and what languages would be suitable for creating an "ebook" application that uses PDF files as a source, licenses them for use for a specific time period, and disables the ability to print the material. My idea is to use the PDF source and maybe change its file extension so that if someone was crafty enough to locate the PDF source they couldn't nab it.

Hopefully this is not too complex to come up with. Again, I am new to the whole programming thing and would like to come up with a working model that could be proposed to our schools IT department. Several of my instructors seem to be onboard with the idea.

[Momerath]

Almost every ebook reader on the market can read PDF files. Many of them have DRM as you suggested.

The biggest issue is taking notes on the ebook. You need to let the user mark up the text as they see fit. There are several colleges in the USA that are currently conducting projects where they have issued every student a kindle and all books, lecture notes, etc. are available for downloading. The biggest complaint is the one I mentioned above.

[bbrewer9538]

Thanks for the reply. I know there are some finished programs out there, but I was hoping to program one that was tailored specifically to the needs of our college, and have the DRM administered through the admissions and registration records database based upon what students were in what classes, and thus allowing them to only access the books for the classes they need. It is a case of there are several "universal" solutions, but not one that really does everything that you need, and the way you want it.

As for the mark up feature, I did not even think about that. Thanks for the heads up.

[WingedPanther]

Here's my issue: I want to KEEP my book, if its part of the major I'm studying, not RENT it. The used book market is alive and well, so anything electronic will have to compete with that.

All that said, there are already mechanisms for securing PDFs so only a "registered" user can read it, and it can only be a certain number of times.

[bettylovelife]

Many books can be read on the Internet in the form of PDF. Ebooks makes reading easier in a lot of ways.