5 ms·

They should just make it easier for people to scan books. Or give incentives. Why mail physical books around when all you need is their content? Or just get pe

by leobg 4y ago

They should just make it easier for people to scan books. Or give incentives. Why mail physical books around when all you need is their content? Or just get people to upload photos from the backs of the books in their library. Then extract from those the titles. Match them up against books that are missing in the digital library and are being requested by users. Then send a message to the owner and ask them to scan this particular book. Give an incentive based on both the number of requests and the speed of uploading the scan. Could even allow requesters to set their own rewards. “I’d be willing to pay X to get this book scanned before Tuesday”.

codetrotter 4y ago
> Why mail physical books around when all you need is their content? Because physically mailing books is not copyright infringement. Physically mailing books provides a legal way of sharing the contents of books with more people.
- leobg 4y ago
  Sure. But they already run a piracy site, don’t they? The cost and delay of shipping are what drives many people to piracy in the first place, I would argue. If I can have a book for $5 in two days as a used physical copy from Amazon, for $20 now as ebook from the publisher, or for free right now from a piracy site, the choice is obvious.
- kristopolous 4y ago
  Well we need to change copyright then. I really only care about out of print and rare materials. Passing around a book through the mail that's been out of print for 80 years is rather dangerous when you care about its preservation. For some reason we legally treat these as identical to some mass market paperback trade of say diary of a wimpy kid and that's stupid. If we care about research, preservation of materials, having them available for future generations, then really, the sacred holy protection of copyright can take a hike when dealing with those texts. I frequently have to get on planes and fly off to University special collections and sit in some special room where I can't bring in a camera and have to carefully read through something that can't be digitized because we're somehow not smart enough to see a difference between that and a Dan Brown novel you get at the grocery store. Pisses me off. Holistically speaking, what the fuck are we doing? This stuff shouldn't be special and precious. We've had photography for over 180 years, this isn't some strange new phenomena here. I should be able to browse such documents from the same bed I'm lying in now writing these words, not book a plane to fly across country because librarians are justifiably paranoid about some asshole copyright lawyers.
  - leobg 4y ago
    Right. This is silly. I’m wondering: If it’s 80 years out of print, is it still protected by copyright at all? The thing with copyright is, it seems to me: You cannot ask for them to change the rules. You just have to break them. Imagine Google had asked copyright lawyers if they could build their search engine. Crawling other peoples websites, keeping an index of their content, and then make people come to Google because “that’s where all the content is“. Would have never gotten off the ground. But now that Google exists, and even the copyright lawyers use it, it’s obvious that this is legal. Lawyers and politicians are followers, not leaders. And much of technology is about circumventing their yesterday-values. What did Peter Thiel say about the Internet? The world of atoms was over-regulated. So businesses fled into the world of bits. It’s a cat and mouse game. Whatever you do, better make sure you’re the cat.
    - infinityio 4y ago
      Worth noting that Google tried (and failed) to solve this specific problem https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-t...
    - 35208654 4y ago
      > The thing with copyright is, it seems to me: You cannot ask for them to change the rules. You just have to break them. Absolutely. Break them and support the people who facilitate the disobedience. Fuck the copyright lobby, fuck publishers, and fuck anyone who gets in the way of me reading what I want in whatever form I want. The people who are preventing you from reading what you want in the form you want it are not protecting some sacred system of authorship reward. They have no ethos. They are simply protecting the interest of their masters, for pay.
  - hkt 4y ago
    > Well we need to change copyright then. I'd like to recommend a book to you: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780429341489/capitalism-power-innovation-cecilia-rikap https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/97804293414... Sadly it isn't the lawyers who should attract your ire. It is the legislators and the people who fund them.
- Mezzie 4y ago
  Also it's illegal in at least one major national jurisdiction to fuck with people's mail (US). Which means that ironically if you're going to break the law, using the mail isn't a terrible idea.
codetrotter 4y ago
> send a message to the owner and ask them to scan this particular book. Scanning books take a lot of time. And making an actual high quality scan of a book is difficult even if you have a good scanner. Physically sharing books could make it so that important books eventually get it into the hands of people with the right expertise and equipment to efficiently produce stellar quality digital scans of the book.
- leobg 4y ago
  You can scan a 500 page book in 20 minutes with you phone, non-destructively. Though it’s not fun and the quality will not be ideal, especially if there are graphics in the text also. For text-only books, quality matters little as long as the OCR can read the text.
  - suddenclarity 4y ago
    I think that's ambitious. I've scanned a handful of books and although I don't know the page count, it's always been multi hour projects. Especially the editing afterwards to mark the text on the page and adjust warp tend to be time consuming. I even had a mounted tripod and remote to standardise.
    - leobg 4y ago
      Voice Dream Scanner on iOS recognizes pages and text and performs OCR. You just go snap snap snap. For text that is sufficient. If you want to capture the layout also, or graphics, things get much more complicated. Even just getting headings requires post processing. So yeah, proper ebook vs just extracting the text are two different problems.
    - layer8 4y ago
      vFlat Scan [0] automates the unwarping. [0] https://www.vflat.com/ https://www.vflat.com/
      - beej71 4y ago
petra 4y ago
Scanning a book is as easy as ordering a second hand copy in Amazon to be sent to a book scanning service. But at that price, why bother scanning if you can buy it ?
- userbinator 4y ago
  But at that price, why bother scanning if you can buy it ? To give those complaining about copyright the $$$ they're after?
- leobg 4y ago
  I never thought of that. Digital has lots of advantages. You can have it with you at all times on your phone. You can use text to speech. You can export your highlights. Soon, people are going to want to ask ChatGPT about content from books they read, as well as highlights and comments they added. A physical copy is the worst format that I would personally consider buying. I only do that when I cannot get a digital version. And the first thing I do once I get it is that I cut off the spine and run it through my scanner. (Then, I spend hours researching the internet for a good e-ink reader :-D)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - huimang 4y ago
    YMMV but I dislike referencing through digital formats like pdf. With a hardcopy I can bookmark various pages and very easily thumb through / reference it. Searching for exact text is slow though, so I try to acquire both types if I get a hardcopy. For my e-ink tablet/reader, I use an onyx boox and a kobo.
carlosjobim 4y ago
> They should just make it easier for people to scan books. Or give incentives. Who are "they" that you are giving orders? What difficulties have you found with scanning books that "they" could solve for you? Since you write "just" it must be quite easy? What incentives have you provided for people to scan books?

by leobg 4y ago

codetrotter 4y ago

> Why mail physical books around when all you need is their content? Because physically mailing books is not copyright infringement. Physically mailing books provides a legal way of sharing the contents of books with more people.

leobg 4y ago
Sure. But they already run a piracy site, don’t they? The cost and delay of shipping are what drives many people to piracy in the first place, I would argue. If I can have a book for $5 in two days as a used physical copy from Amazon, for $20 now as ebook from the publisher, or for free right now from a piracy site, the choice is obvious.
kristopolous 4y ago
Well we need to change copyright then. I really only care about out of print and rare materials. Passing around a book through the mail that's been out of print for 80 years is rather dangerous when you care about its preservation. For some reason we legally treat these as identical to some mass market paperback trade of say diary of a wimpy kid and that's stupid. If we care about research, preservation of materials, having them available for future generations, then really, the sacred holy protection of copyright can take a hike when dealing with those texts. I frequently have to get on planes and fly off to University special collections and sit in some special room where I can't bring in a camera and have to carefully read through something that can't be digitized because we're somehow not smart enough to see a difference between that and a Dan Brown novel you get at the grocery store. Pisses me off. Holistically speaking, what the fuck are we doing? This stuff shouldn't be special and precious. We've had photography for over 180 years, this isn't some strange new phenomena here. I should be able to browse such documents from the same bed I'm lying in now writing these words, not book a plane to fly across country because librarians are justifiably paranoid about some asshole copyright lawyers.
- leobg 4y ago
  Right. This is silly. I’m wondering: If it’s 80 years out of print, is it still protected by copyright at all? The thing with copyright is, it seems to me: You cannot ask for them to change the rules. You just have to break them. Imagine Google had asked copyright lawyers if they could build their search engine. Crawling other peoples websites, keeping an index of their content, and then make people come to Google because “that’s where all the content is“. Would have never gotten off the ground. But now that Google exists, and even the copyright lawyers use it, it’s obvious that this is legal. Lawyers and politicians are followers, not leaders. And much of technology is about circumventing their yesterday-values. What did Peter Thiel say about the Internet? The world of atoms was over-regulated. So businesses fled into the world of bits. It’s a cat and mouse game. Whatever you do, better make sure you’re the cat.
  - infinityio 4y ago
    Worth noting that Google tried (and failed) to solve this specific problem https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-t...
  - 35208654 4y ago
    > The thing with copyright is, it seems to me: You cannot ask for them to change the rules. You just have to break them. Absolutely. Break them and support the people who facilitate the disobedience. Fuck the copyright lobby, fuck publishers, and fuck anyone who gets in the way of me reading what I want in whatever form I want. The people who are preventing you from reading what you want in the form you want it are not protecting some sacred system of authorship reward. They have no ethos. They are simply protecting the interest of their masters, for pay.
- hkt 4y ago
  > Well we need to change copyright then. I'd like to recommend a book to you: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780429341489/capitalism-power-innovation-cecilia-rikap https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/97804293414... Sadly it isn't the lawyers who should attract your ire. It is the legislators and the people who fund them.
Mezzie 4y ago
Also it's illegal in at least one major national jurisdiction to fuck with people's mail (US). Which means that ironically if you're going to break the law, using the mail isn't a terrible idea.

codetrotter 4y ago

> send a message to the owner and ask them to scan this particular book. Scanning books take a lot of time. And making an actual high quality scan of a book is difficult even if you have a good scanner. Physically sharing books could make it so that important books eventually get it into the hands of people with the right expertise and equipment to efficiently produce stellar quality digital scans of the book.

leobg 4y ago
You can scan a 500 page book in 20 minutes with you phone, non-destructively. Though it’s not fun and the quality will not be ideal, especially if there are graphics in the text also. For text-only books, quality matters little as long as the OCR can read the text.
- suddenclarity 4y ago
  I think that's ambitious. I've scanned a handful of books and although I don't know the page count, it's always been multi hour projects. Especially the editing afterwards to mark the text on the page and adjust warp tend to be time consuming. I even had a mounted tripod and remote to standardise.
  - leobg 4y ago
    Voice Dream Scanner on iOS recognizes pages and text and performs OCR. You just go snap snap snap. For text that is sufficient. If you want to capture the layout also, or graphics, things get much more complicated. Even just getting headings requires post processing. So yeah, proper ebook vs just extracting the text are two different problems.
  - layer8 4y ago
    vFlat Scan [0] automates the unwarping. [0] https://www.vflat.com/ https://www.vflat.com/
    - beej71 4y ago

petra 4y ago

Scanning a book is as easy as ordering a second hand copy in Amazon to be sent to a book scanning service. But at that price, why bother scanning if you can buy it ?

userbinator 4y ago
But at that price, why bother scanning if you can buy it ? To give those complaining about copyright the $$$ they're after?
leobg 4y ago
I never thought of that. Digital has lots of advantages. You can have it with you at all times on your phone. You can use text to speech. You can export your highlights. Soon, people are going to want to ask ChatGPT about content from books they read, as well as highlights and comments they added. A physical copy is the worst format that I would personally consider buying. I only do that when I cannot get a digital version. And the first thing I do once I get it is that I cut off the spine and run it through my scanner. (Then, I spend hours researching the internet for a good e-ink reader :-D)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- huimang 4y ago
  YMMV but I dislike referencing through digital formats like pdf. With a hardcopy I can bookmark various pages and very easily thumb through / reference it. Searching for exact text is slow though, so I try to acquire both types if I get a hardcopy. For my e-ink tablet/reader, I use an onyx boox and a kobo.

carlosjobim 4y ago

> They should just make it easier for people to scan books. Or give incentives. Who are "they" that you are giving orders? What difficulties have you found with scanning books that "they" could solve for you? Since you write "just" it must be quite easy? What incentives have you provided for people to scan books?