Reader to support DRM

meginator · April 29, 2024

Quite a remarkable portion of the material I need to read for my research are e-books loaned from libraries and all of those are DRM protected. Therefore I cannot utilize Zotero Reader in any way, which breaks my workflow.
Would it be possible to consider adding Adobe and/or LCP DRM support to Reader? The latter one (https://www.edrlab.org/readium-lcp/) is a open source and seems to be spreading quite fast among libraries around the world.

AbeJellinek · April 30, 2024

Both Adobe and Readium LCP DRM are nonstarters for us. LCP would be possible if it were actually open source and available without restrictions, but it's not. From the FAQ:

Is Readium LCP open-source?
[...] Trusted organizations who wish to use LCP to protect their content or access to protected content need to obtain from EDRLab some confidential information and a small binary corresponding to the “production” profile introduced above, and integrate this closed software into their reading application. This procedure is key to avoiding the open-source software being used for hacking LCP-protected publications. [...]

Is Readium LCP available for Web applications?
[...] Web applications do not provide ways to avoid developers having access to their code. Developers can obfuscate information in a Web application and make it harder to find, but it is not possible to include in a Web application a real DRM solution, using secrets concealed in precompiled libraries. [...]

Zotero is open-source software and is a web application at its core. I do really wish we could support library ebooks, but we can't support closed DRM.