Nursing student here, nearing the end of the program (WOOOOOO!). Most of my textbooks are digital, cuz those were cheaper than the physical versions, but when I log into my ‘eLibrary’ now, there’s a little notification flag that pops up saying access to it ends soon (a month or so after I graduate).

Um… what the fuck?! I’m still going to need access to that material through my nursing career or if I decide to go for a higher degree type.

Most of my textbooks are published by Elsevier, and hosted in an ‘eLibrary’ at https://pageburstls.elsevier.com/ - once the book it open, it’s obnoxiously locked down: copying via ctrl+C does nothing, printing a page or print-to-PDF results in just the sidebar text and page header, but the actual ‘book’ is blank; and trying to save a copy with the Firefox extension “Single File” also results in a blank page. There is a copy feature built in, where you highlight text and a little window pops up with “Copy” and a few other options, but doing this fails to capture images, and makes an absolute mess of tables, which both make up a lot of the material. And I’m sure my usage of the ‘copy’ feature is logged, so if I did that to an entire textbook I’d probably get my account flagged or disabled.

I’m probably the least tech-savvy person on Lemmy, so I definitely don’t trust myself to torrent this shit without attracting a small army of lawers hell-bent on ruining my life… but I do at least want to keep the material I fucking paid for. I know there are places like LibGen, so textbook piracy is very much a thing: whatever tools are used at the start of that process to rip content hosted on a webpage and get it converted to a PDF or word doc or something sound like the things I should be using.

We have a summer break coming up soon, and backing all my shit up might be my summer project… what tools should I use to accomplish this?