Showing posts with label Scribd. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Scribd. Show all posts

Monday, August 29, 2011

How to hack Scribd to download documents for free

How to download documents for free
I was looking at an online document that SOMEONE ELSE UPLOADED and it was very helpful, so I wanted to download it. Scribd however, wanted to charge a daily fee of around $5 dollars to download the content, when it clearly says someone uploaded it.

Here was the document that I wanted: http://www.scribd.com/doc/90924585/The-Dark-Monk-Excerpt-by-Oliver-Potzsch 
For Public ID's(2012):
*document ID* = 90924585

http://www.scribd.com/mobile/documents/*document ID*/
or 
http://www.scribd.com/mobile/documents/*document ID*/download
Insert the number id in the here ^
Sometimes using the first download link is better because it creates a download button. It should should show a download link.  

Update(2/18/12): For Private ID's:

Example URLs:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/39976170/Anthro-2B-Midterm-Study-Guide http://www.scribd.com/doc/33840335

Right-click > View Page Source > Save as to a document on your computer *Make sure you do this to get the entire "Generated Source" (I used Mozilla FireFox)

 I saved this as "doc.html" Open the file "doc.html" > Search for "page.u" You should see something like "// page.uuid : 3kw800775slntll" 
page.uuid = "3kw800775slntll"
Now search for the page.uuid or "3kw800775slntll" and you should see something like: "http://html2.scribdassets.com/3kw800775slntll/pages/542-d2422da938.jsonp"

The URL can range from "html1.scribdassets.com" to "html4.scribdassets.com".

Here is a simple Linux Bash Script to download the images:
Make SURE you change the *page.uuid* to your page.uuid.
cat "doc.html" | grep pages | cut -d"/" -f6 | cut -d. -f1 | grep -vi scrib | while read ID; do wget "http://htmlimg1.scribdassets.com/*page.uuid*/images/$ID.jpg"; done;
However, once you find the page.uuid, you can substitute it in the URL. "http://htmlimg1.scribdassets.com/*page.uuid*/images/$ID.jpg"

Update(2/25/12): For Protect(Preview) ID's:

When there are previews on Scribd, they are trying to selling a document and other allow users to few select pages.  Downloading these would be illegal and the script above only downloads the images of the "protected" documents.