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pfdietzyesterday at 9:54 PM1 replyview on HN

So, if you search for some text that occurs at the end of one chunk, will it then preview a following chunk? And could chaining these chunks give you the entire book?

If so, I could see someone doing this to exfiltrate books.


Replies

crazygringoyesterday at 10:13 PM

You're talking about in-book search (TFA is about search across all books), and yes that was indeed once a known technique for extracting whole or nearly whole books.

That's why publishers responded by excluding sections of books from search (it will list the pages but you can't view them), and individual Google accounts became limited in how many extra pages they were ever allowed to see of an individual book beyond the standard preview pages.

But then LibGen, Z-lib, and Anna's Archive became popular and built up their collections...