Part of the problem with attempting to figure out a workaround for this is that anywhere I've seen the question asked, some good-intentioned person decided to help by suggesting the exact same methods posted everywhere else, without actually knowing why (and on what) those methods work/don't work and how Scribd itself actually works. For example: the link alphamule posted does indeed work on Scribd, for DOCUMENTS only. Which on the Scribd system are NOT handled the same way as BOOKS.
On top of that, the "hack" to get those documents isn't actually a hack at all; it is a built-in service of Scribd that if you want a document without paying then you have to contribute a document that may be of use to others (hypothetically anyway, considering everyone's just uploading random garbage for free documents). Now, when you download a document on Scribd's Android app, it's stored all in one file that is a pdf without the .pdf extension, so adding the .pdf extension makes it a readable pdf that you can transfer and use anywhere else.
However, when you use the app to download a book, instead you end up with a file folder containing nothing but a bunch of .json files that, so far, no one has figured out how to compile into an independently readable format. I am definitely not by any means a digital architect, so I don't know how one would go about doing this. Just taking a guess though, I would imagine it will come down to one or the other of:
1) Someone cracking the Scribd apk to allow for the download of books. Although this may not work at all for actually moving the books elsewhere. I could imagine it tricking Scribd into believing you have a Premium account when you don't and everything that goes with that, including reading and downloading books to the Scribd app for free. However, there still isn't any native way to actually download, keep, and transfer books within Scribd, so there's nothing there for a cracker to crack.
2) Someone with mad programming skills would have to figure out exactly how the Scribd app is taking those json files and translating them into the readable book you see inside the app. It would likely not only have to repeat that process, but also have to figure out how to take whatever "format" you would call that, and then compile it all and spit it all out in a normal ebook format. (For example: like the program Epubor Ultimate, which I use to de-drm Amazon Kindle and Adobe Digital Editions.)
Until someone, far-better at tech than I, decides to figure this out then I guess all of us laypeople are SOL. That doesn't mean I won't continue to vehemently stab around at this system's defenses to see if I can't accidentally brute-force something into working. So, to that end:
@AquilaLorelei, could you post how you went from the json files to mhtml?
@xtptbx, I do this all the time with ABBYY's Finereader from the scanned-image pdfs of books over at OpenLibrary. The difference between them being that OpenLibrary already has all the images in one file and to do this with Scribd you would have to sit and PrintScreen every page of every book just to get started. It would work, for sure. But really kind of unviable if you want to get out more than one book a week.
So, maybe at minimum, we could try for getting the attention of someone with programming knowledge to write a program/script to make a "PrtSc, save to location, turn page" loop to cut out the worst part of that process? I don't know enough about this forum beyond ebook requests; does anyone else think it would be worth it to make a request for this somewhere and put collective $WRZ towards it? I for one would totally be behind that if it means another source of books.
