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Camouflaged Books is the title of a work published on the Post Digital Publishing Archive. Camouflaged Books was created by Jasper Otto Eisenecker in 2014 and it is an instruction manual on how to camouflage books in times of Internet censorship. Eisenecker created the manual after received censorship for publishing off limits gore content on a print on demand service called Lulu. After getting censored, Eisenecker developed strategies to camouflage the gore of his book and he successfully republished the camouflaged version of the same book Lulu had once considered “Inappropriate for general access”. This was made possible through strategies in which Lulu’s proofreader-bots and humans weren’t able to detect the original content anymore, and these strategies are given in Eisenecker manual titled “How to Camouflage Books in Times of Internet Censorship”.

Post Digital Publishing Archive

The aim of P—DPA is to systematically collect, organize and keep trace of experiences in the fields of art and design that explore the relationships between publishing and digital technology. The archive acts as a space in which the collected projects are confronted and juxtaposed in order to highlight relevant paths, mutual themes, common perspectives, interrelations, but also oppositions and idiosyncrasies. The P-DPA is maintained by Silvio Lorusso.

Author Bio

Jasper Otto Eisenecker is a Graphic Designer with an expertise in print and typography-related projects. He attended the University of Applied Arts & Sciences and has a bachelors degree in Visual Communication. His work is research-based, seeing Graphic Design as possibility to reflect upon society-related developments.

Awards and Exhibitions

Winner at international poster competition Mut zur Wut, 2013

Mut Zur Wut exhibitions in public space, Heidelberg and Mannheim, 2013

Mut Zur Wut exhibition at Weltformat Poster-festival in Luzern, Switzerland, 2013

How to Camouflage Books in Times of Internet Censorship

How to Camouflage Books in Times of Internet Censorship is the title of the 11-page manual Eisenecker created. In it, Eisenecker gives the four strategies he used in camouflaging the book he published on Lulu. The manual is broken down into five chapters with one chapter for each strategy in camouflaging books and one chapter for the intro.

Camouflaged Books?!

In this chapter, Eisenecker states that the purpose of the manual is to provide readers with techniques to prevent getting censored when publishing sensitive material. Eisenecker hints that this technique is important in a society where freedom of speech is endangered.

Reversed Reading

Reversed Reading reversed the order of the letters in a word, making it harder to decipher for proofreading humans and bots.

The first strategy Eisenecker introduces is Reversed Reading. What this strategy does essentially is reverse the order of the letters in every word. Although finding the meaning of words that have been reversed can start out as a challenge, it becomes easier as one does it more over time. Also, reversed words are difficult to read for people who do not know the key to encrypt the technique. This technique makes it harder for proofreading humans and bots to find sensitive material, but is only recommended for smaller texts.

Filled Monospace

If one side of a page skips every even letter and the other side skips every odd letter, by holding the page to the light the text becomes readable.

This method relies on the words in the text all having the same width. For this technique, on one side of a page every even letter in a word is skipped and on the opposite page every odd letter in the word is skipped. Both sides of the page are the same text except one side of the page skips only odd letters and the other skips only even letters. Trying to read a page using only one side is nearly impossible, but by holding the page to the light the letters on the other side of the page shine through and the words become whole.

Decoding Duplex

When the original image is copied and mirrored as such, all traces of the original image are eliminated.

This technique is used for camouflaging images, which Eisenecker states are easier to be discovered and banned. The original picture is first copied and mirrored. Once there are two mirror copies of the image, one image is colored green and the other is colored red. Then, the two mirror images are stacked on top of each other. Doing this eliminates all traces of the original picture. Also, by holding a red foil onto the page, the red and mirrored image disappears and we see the real value and censored image.

Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

The final chapter offered a technique to hide the sensitive material from publish-on-demand service such as Lulu. The way to do this is by hiding confidential material in a not so suspicious cover. Also, Gutenberg.org offers a variety of copyright-free books that people can use to hide their sensitive material and texts. By taking sensitive material in hiding it in a unsuspicious book from Gutenberg.org, Lulu proofreaders would inspect the unsuspicious cover and preview pages of the book and be oblivious of the confidential material in the text.