Allowing user to copy text in the reader into clipboard

[TheGrimLich]

I think the point JP was making was, "If it's not the case that the vast majority of commonly-used screen readers and text-to-speech tools use copy-paste to function, there's less of an incentive to do it." Now, I will admit some ignorance on how screen readers work (although I think some of them actually go through the HTML on websites? I know that people need to tag content ID in order to get images to work with them, and I also know that people in some online spaces are getting more proactive about that), but I also know that linking the website/reader devs to "how this works" for the screen readers most likely to be used by actual blind/sight-impaired people would help immensely.

[LegitPancake]

@ladyillusion I don't see how disabled people fit into this. I've tried text-to-speech with the new website and it seems to work just fine. I personally only read via TTS even though I have 20/20 vision lol.

[ladyillusion]

@LegitPancake Under some circumstances it works. The new reader doesn't work at all with VoiceOver active but does work with Speak Screen if the layout settings are changed. I'm not sure if it works at all on desktop either.
Edit: At this point in time it works on my Mac with Safari, but that method depends on being able to select the text. If selecting text is disabled, it might no longer work.

[alfonso_rd_36]

Ok, I didn't want to get in in this topic because of reasons, but I must say I find both depressing and hilarious how far the topic deviated.

Now, Personally, I'd love to be able to Copy paste stuff on the reader because one of my favorite series (Outbreak) is, like 20 Volumes! Do you have any Idea how impossible would be to read it on the catchup? I would need to either read 24/7 or something that would suck my soul out of me, so copying the text to read it at my leisure would be nice. petty I know, selfish I know, but that's all there is to it. heck! hiroto's reasons are far nobler

[Khaos]

I too think it's a bit counteractive to provide api for 3rd party readers but not include certain functions on the official app...but anyways...

Personally I would like copy and paste strictly for error reporting or for quoting to the forum for x reason. If not, oh well...Currently I use an OCR app, Text Scanner, that uses screenshots that you can then copy from it.

But mostly I would like a select text feature not to copy but to define or to search(google).

[Terrence]

@LegitPancake said in Allowing user to copy text in the reader into clipboard:

@lookman373 I use text-to-speech with 90% of J-Novel's prepubs currently, almost every day. It works perfectly fine (at least on the apps, haven't tried on a browser).

It doesn't work great on Android in the app right now, but it works amazingly on the new website with the vertical reading mode from the little I tried (Talkback specifically).

[jpwong]

@TheGrimLich That's not really the point I was making, it was more, make a sales pitch to JNC as to why the functionality is needed. Accessibility is just an easy example because it might not impact a lot of users, but for the users it does impact, it can be a huge QoL upgrade (and if they know what specific software people are using, maybe they can make a fix that still fits with the specific reason the functionality is disabled).

I mean JNC isn't some mega corporation with a battalion of developers, if they choose to go ahead with a specific suggestion, it's taking hours away from other suggestions they could be looking at. That's why it's important to lay out why you think a change is valuable if it's not one the majority of users see as a big deal.

[AlexUsman]

@alfonso_rd_36 said in Allowing user to copy text in the reader into clipboard:

copying the text to read it at my leisure would be nice

So you want to make mass dumps of prepubs, then?
Thank you for giving people who's against copying text one more argument in their favor, that really helped. /s

[Tube]

@jpwong What is a "paying pirate" in this context? And those third party readers are not "pirate sites". They require you to log in with your JNC account. Working as intended, not piracy. Pirate sites are where you read the stuff without paying for it after someone has ripped the content.

Sure, the third party readers are in use of all JNC paying customers, and that is almost all of the point: why take something out from the main site and official reader that is already available by jumping through a simple hoop and is available for those who do not pay at all.

The benefits that it brings us the customers is going to be weighed against the downsides and time it would take on the business' side.

Yeah, and there are literally no downsides to allowing copy pasting from the official reader since people who want to rip the pre-pubs can already do that. The only people who this "prevents" from ripping the content are the pirates who are stupid enough to not use the readily available 3rd party readers that are even advertised by their authors on this very forum. Weighting any upside to literally zero downsides makes the scale unbalanced.

@AlexUsman though I do think that would be the kind of behaviour that JNC claims to want to pretend with disabling the copy pasting from the reader, they really aren't since people can already do it with 3rd party readers that work with APIs they provide. The argument would make sense if there was no API and no 3rd party readers.

[jpwong]

@Tube said in Allowing user to copy text in the reader into clipboard:

@jpwong What is a "paying pirate" in this context? And those third party readers are not "pirate sites". They require you to log in with your JNC account. Working as intended, not piracy. Pirate sites are where you read the stuff without paying for it after someone has ripped the content.

In order to use JNC's APIs you need to have a valid paid account as far as I'm aware. Therefore the group(s) pirating the content are either members or premium members here. Sure the people they distribute to aren't likely to be paid members, but there is to the best of my knowledge no way to access the content via any of JNC's supported methods without paying for a subscription in some way or form.

And I wouldn't say there's no downside, it might be a ridiculously minuscule concern, but just throwing up a marginal technical barrier such as needing to use APIs to free rip all the content actually does deter at least some portion of the casual pirates who can't be bothered to write the code to do the extraction as espoused in the second post of this thread. Is it kind of silly when you look at it? Maybe it is, because once one of the more technically inclined "professional" pirate aggregation sites rips the text, everyone else will just copy from that site the same way you see manga aggregation sites copy content from each other, but there is a business case for it, however weak it might look in our eyes.

[Tube]

@jpwong You misunderstand something somewhere. There is no need to write any code at all to rip the text (to the extent that implementing copy paste to the official reader would allow). Just go and use those 3rd party readers and copy paste. No barrier for copy pasting from the prepubs other than reading the official JNC forums and learning that third party readers do indeed exist is in place as we write this.

EDIT: The following text is directly copy pasted from Ascendance of a Bookworm first volume pre-pub part 1/10 with the use of Crimson JNC Reader just now:

Urano Motosu loved books. Psychology, religion, history, geography, education, anthropology, math, physics, geology, chemistry, biology, art, language, fiction... Books were filled with the knowledge of all humanity and she loved them from the bottom of her heart.

[jpwong]

@Tube I'm not arguing it's easy as heck to get around, but I'm guessing the idea is that they have internal stats showing the vast majority of users access the content through the official reader and if doing that deters most of the casual pirates, then they probably consider it worth it given that it doesn't appear to have a serious detriment to the regular end user.

I mean we can argue about how ineffective it is all day, what it comes down to is, that it's in as an anti-piracy measure. If people want the functionality, they need to present a compelling pitch to JNC about why enabling that ability is going to help regular users out, or why limiting that functionality is being extremely detrimental to the ability to read the content.

[Jon Mitchell]

did it occur to anyone that disabling cut/copy/paste from pre-pubs might be there for a reason? as had been adequately commented on, APIs are in place to allow content to 'punch out' to other reader aps etc. but the 'standard' user only has 'read-only' access - why might this be? I have a few speculations:

• contractual compliance : sales/downloads of epubs to a customer's library (premium credit) or via amazon etc. are tracked, and royalties are paid. "view only" access to pre pubs may have a clause in the contract with the Japanese copyright holder, disabling cut/copy/paste may fill a contractual obligation that the content isn't downloadable (and therefore royalties are paid at a different rate or not at all), and the API is an exception (like to comply with the ADA or for dev/ops use)
• A feature/ not a bug : when negotiating for licenses. JNC can rightly say that they have protections in place to (attempt to) prevent piracy of the content they are trying to license.
• it is an incentive to purchase titles: owning a ePub gives the customer offline access to the content, that they don't have via the web/view only content.

I'm sure there are other reasons that I didn't think of, but any of the three above are feasibly actual business reasons, with dollars attached, as to why cut/copy/paste is disabled. JNC has a policy of not disclosing contents of contracts/negotiations and I believe the reasons for not doing so are sound. Although I believe making a suggestion via forums is fine, I find the argument: "I'm a paying customer! give me whatever it is that I want because I want it!" to be repugnant.

[Tube]

@Jon-Mitchell You present some good points. The first two are actually pretty much the first good arguments towards having copy paste disabled in the official reader but the third one fails again at the existance of unofficial readers. If someone wants to copy and paste the pre-pubs into a text document, they can already do that. However, if it's in the contracts that JNC will not allow copy paste on their own reader, then they can't really do anything about it even if the availability to the same feature in 3rd party readers makes the situation seem insane. Not disclosing the content of contracts is fine and all but I'll tell you that the words "contractual obligations" would shut this conversation down really quickly.

@Jon-Mitchell said in Allowing user to copy text in the reader into clipboard:

I find the argument: "I'm a paying customer! give me whatever it is that I want because I want it!" to be repugnant.

How about "I'm a paying customer, please make sure what I get is at least as good of a product as what pirates get for free"?

Some people do not see piracy as a bad thing and keeping those customers happy too will keep them paying because the added value is enough to make it worth it. Like step number one should be to make sure that paying customers get a product that is at least as good as the one that pirates get. No one has suggested that JNC should just bend over at all requests, just the ones where there are no downsides for JNC to comply but huge benefits for customers. It gets harder with subsciption based stuff for sure since the product is not intended to be available for the customer forever, so that people can't just copy and paste the whole thing to a text document, but that is already possible with JNC's blessing thanks to all the third party readers.

[Gamen]

On top of that, "Paying customers should have the same options as pirates" isn't a rule, it's a suggestion that's potentially a business opportunity. You wouldn't argue that guests should have the same access to your home that trespassers do, no?

A large theme park doesn't want people trespassing into its backstage, but if there's enough interest they can offer a backstage tour. And essentially that that's what happened with the streaming services; there was a lot of interest in on-demand streaming of music, movies, and tv shows that removed the hassle of renting from Blockbusters or requesting a song on the radio or waiting for an episode to re-air in syndication or buying the DVD box set... (that said, where are my Mandalorian DVD/BDs!?) ....but even in that case it's not like paying customers did get everything pirates have; they just got the on-demand streaming convenience that YouTube was being abused for (though less convenient now than when it was just Netflix... and Hulu.)

That said, I would I like the ability to copy snippets for reporting corrections... I was able to whip up a little POC using the selection API and selectionchange event to limit selections to (in my test) 25 characters.

[unknownmat]

I've made a similar request a few times in the past and it tends to get ignored, so I have mostly just passively lurked in this thread. However, if I may add one additional point to the discussion...

As a paying customer I value the ability to report errors to the JNC staff. Anything you can do to make reporting errors easier would improve my experience as a customer. I frequently see errors in both prepub and published works (I know for a fact that there are errors in all existing Bookworm volumes and all existing Arifureta volumes for example), and would very much value the ability to quickly raise awareness of the errors I spot to the people who can do something about it.

I tend to read on my tablet, but respond to forums on my PC. In the walk from my tablet to my PC I simply forget what the errors were (there's a missing comma in Bookworm P3V5P1, for example, but I can't recall where). Amazon Kindle already has this functionality where you can just highlight the text and "report error" and I use it frequently and am thankful for its existence (excepting the growing suspicion that my suggestions are just being ignored and discarded by Amazon). I could personally tolerate the lack of copy/paste if a "report error" feature existed.

[alfonso_rd_36]

@AlexUsman said in Allowing user to copy text in the reader into clipboard:

@alfonso_rd_36 said in Allowing user to copy text in the reader into clipboard:

copying the text to read it at my leisure would be nice

So you want to make mass dumps of prepubs, then?
Thank you for giving people who are against copying text one more argument in their favor, that really helped. /s

Not Really... it's something FOR MY EXCLUSIVE USE, Because I've known of the POSSIBILITY of buying up the books so late in the game I need to catch up, And paying what, MX$ 150 for, let's say... 16 books is (approximately) MX2400. Considering My income is MX$ 500 a week, I could afford them, provided I don't eat anything for 5 weeks...

But Yeah, I'm going against the "Pro Copy & Paste" Team with my Selfish desire to reqad anything I'm paying for at my leisure.

[Kilocron]

I don't plan to support either camp in this argument, but I will say that if I need to grab a small blob of text, I use a screenshot software paired with an OCR plugin that does the trick, though it can be error prone at times. Take that info as you will!

[AlexUsman]

@Kilocron you don't need that. The parts are presented in plain text on the site and just covered with a transparent layer. You just open inspector and do whatever you want with it. But that's on a pc in desktop browser and people quite more often read prepubs on their more portable devices like phones and tablets.

[pcj]

The barrier to entry is actually a good argument. If you think about it, the folks who tend to pirate stuff probably sign up for a throwaway account and are only here to pirate, and would never bother reading the forums to see that the third-party readers exist. Having the copy/paste disabled would discourage those people.

The people who tend to actually read the forums are precisely the people who are here for their own enjoyment of reading the content and participating in discussions with other readers, and would be less likely to pirate because they have a feeling of community with the other readers and many of the editors and translators, and thus wouldn't want to steal from them.

So this barrier to entry is allowing copy/paste specifically to the people who are least likely to abuse it.