diff --git a/NEWS.md b/NEWS.md
index 65a29cfcd..d5a7061e1 100644
--- a/NEWS.md
+++ b/NEWS.md
@@ -8,10 +8,6 @@ border-radius: 128px;
 
 ## v1.11.5
 
-- Features
-    - Reader: add `?hide_text=1` query param for PDF pages — suppresses
-      visible text rendering on badly-OCR'd scans where the OCR layer
-      doubles up against the page's raster.
 - Fixes
     - Fix occasional recreation of comics on docker or network filesystems.
     - Fix double polling of some libraries.
diff --git a/codex/views/reader/page.py b/codex/views/reader/page.py
index 06632130e..10f43a75b 100644
--- a/codex/views/reader/page.py
+++ b/codex/views/reader/page.py
@@ -88,13 +88,6 @@ def _get_page_image(self) -> tuple:
             if self.request.GET.get("pixmap", "").lower() not in FALSY
             else ""
         )
-        # ``?hide_text=1`` suppresses visible text rendering on PDF
-        # pages — useful for badly-OCR'd scans that draw the OCR
-        # layer with rendering mode 0 (visible) on top of the page's
-        # raster, doubling the text. Forwarded straight through
-        # comicbox to the pdffile backend; non-PDF archives ignore
-        # it.
-        hide_text = self.request.GET.get("hide_text", "").lower() not in FALSY
         # Process-wide LRU of open Comicbox archives — the web reader's
         # prev/curr/next prefetch fires 3-5 page hits on the same archive
         # within a second, and ``cacheBook`` mode bursts a whole-book
@@ -103,15 +96,7 @@ def _get_page_image(self) -> tuple:
         # held inside ``archive_cache.open(...)`` serializes extraction
         # because ZipFile / RarFile / PDF backends aren't thread-safe.
         with archive_cache.open(path) as cb:
-            # ``hide_text`` requires comicbox > 3.0.0 / comicbox-pdffile
-            # > 0.5.0; pyright's lock-file-pinned typeshed lags behind
-            # the editable install used during dev. Drop the ignore once
-            # both deps land on PyPI and ``pyproject.toml`` is bumped.
-            page_image = cb.get_page_by_index(
-                page,
-                pdf_format=pdf_format,
-                hide_text=hide_text,  # pyright: ignore[reportCallIssue]  # ty: ignore[unknown-argument]
-            )
+            page_image = cb.get_page_by_index(page, pdf_format=pdf_format)
         if not page_image:
             page_image = b""
 
@@ -130,7 +115,6 @@ def _get_page_image(self) -> tuple:
         parameters=[
             OpenApiParameter("bookmark", OpenApiTypes.BOOL, default=True),
             OpenApiParameter("pixmap", OpenApiTypes.BOOL, default=False),
-            OpenApiParameter("hide_text", OpenApiTypes.BOOL, default=False),
         ],
         responses={
             (200, content_type): OpenApiTypes.BINARY,