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I had hoped from the headline that they would be doing something subtle, like replacing some capital "A"s with Greek "Alpha"s, or replacing a single-character "ü" with separate "u" and "combining umlaut". But visible changes that mess with, not just the text formatting, but the actual words of the text, are unacceptable.

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Invisible changes are trivial for a pirate to undo (once they know what is going on). With visible changes, the pirate would have a significantly more difficult time to erase the watermark. My guess would be that, with only a single copy, he would have to destroy the contents of the books a huge amount to hide himself, where as the publisher would only need to destroy a very little amount.

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