Copyright Protection on Electronic Books: Study and Design of a New Approach

In the age of big data, almost everything is digital. Every aspect of our daily lives has gone from analog to digital and almost everything has adapted to the digital age. Cameras, pictures, texts, newspapers, books, etc. have adopted their digital equivalents. Although these changes make our lives easier, they also harbor many dangers and security risks. E-books have taken over because of their numerous advantages, low cost, easy reproducibility, portability, etc. The main drawback to their utilization concerns copyright issues. E-books, especially those in PDF format, are easy to reproduce without the owner’s permission. Thus, it is essential to deploy a security mechanism to protect copyrights and ensure that an ebook is legitimate. In this study, a web application protection system for PDF e-books has been developed. Smart algorithms in cryptography, utilizing advanced encryption techniques based on AES encryption to ensure the integrity of copyright protections and for the steganography covering, based on the Least Significant Bit (LSB) were implemented for this work. This enables us to verify who is the original buyer of a book having all the form fields in our possession to identify the original buyer. Furthermore, a variety of e-book formats, encryption methodologies, cover data approaches and the algorithms supporting the described system copyright protection system are discussed.