7 ms·

How I Beat The Textbook Industry (With A Shoebox Contraption)

18 points by guynamedloren 14y ago

nathanbarry 14y ago
This is exactly what I did as well. Just setup a stand to hold the camera, then sat there flipping pages and taking pictures while watching a movie. I then wrote a simple Photoshop Action to fix the lighting, and separate the two pages. Then I could make sure the page numbers in my PDF matched the book page numbers. The other huge benefit was that I brought just a laptop around with me to classes instead of a heavy backpack full of books.
jstalin 14y ago
Send in the helicopters, police trucks, dogs, and men with automatic weapons, please.[1] 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMas0tWc0sg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMas0tWc0sg
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
kshatrea 14y ago
With reference to the aggressive litigation-based attack philosophy of the publishing/recording/movie industry of your country, isn't it a bit risky to go ahead and write this? If they go ahead and sue you for doing something (remembering the case of the RIAA suing someone and getting a $675k judgement), couldn't your blog be used against you in a case in court?
- RobAley 14y ago
  The "They" would need to be the copyright holders or their agents, and as he wisely doesn't note the particular books he did this with, there is likely no one able to take him to civil court. It appears he hasn't done this commercially, so I don't think there would be a case for a criminal prosecution either.
- ljf 14y ago
  AFAIK most of those that have been sued have been those who /share/ copied material. I don't (think) anyone has ever been sued for downloading copyrighted material from a file host, but they have from bit-torrent, as when you DL from a .torrent file you are also sharing the file back out to other users. The activities described do break the copyright terms in the books, but as long as he didn't share them it's unlikely that anyone would go after him, and if they did it's unlikely that they would make such a high fine stick. The fine is supposed to cover the potential for lost earnings, so in this case he'd likely be looking at a fine of 2k or less. But I'm no lawyer!
shimsham 14y ago
Hacker news?
- andrewflnr 14y ago
  Yes. It was a hack.
mjn 14y ago
DIY book scanning is a fairly active community, mostly organized by people interested in legal scanning of old books without having to cut off the binding to put the book through a sheet-fed scanner. Here's one site: http://www.diybookscanner.org/ http://www.diybookscanner.org/ And here's a 2009 article about how the Google-Books scanning rig works: http://www.npr.org/blogs/library/2009/04/the_granting_of_patent_7508978.html http://www.npr.org/blogs/library/2009/04/the_granting_of_pat...
ms4720 14y ago
its high tech shoplifting, the tech is fine but the morality of the act makes me wonder when he needs to make hard choices professionally will he revert to type and get over or do the right thing. It is odd that someone who is going into an integrity based profession thinks it is cool to brag about being a thief. I do not have any problems with anyone scanning their books for personel use and its legal, but this was not.
- potatolicious 14y ago
  I'm not usually one to defend piracy - but this is a lot grayer than you're making it out to be. What is the morality behind stealing (or in this case, infringing upon) something that you've been forced into having, and which as a whole behaves immorally? Professors routinely get kickbacks for using certain books, textbook publishers routinely publish new "editions" with limited to no changes just to obsolete books in the secondary market. They put in one-time-use keycodes that are required to make use of the book, and since they have exclusivity over their courses, there is no free market choice - students are forced to buy these absurdly expensive tomes of questionable use or cannot get an education. The legality of this is clear, the morality here is anything but. One commenter on the blog post: > "Hopefully, you never write your own textbook. Looks like you found an efficient way to steal that $700 of literature. Probably slightly quicker than raising the cash by mugging or defrauding a charity, but ethically no different." What a load of horseshit. Copyright infringement is not at all like defrauding a charity or mugging someone. Incredibly stupid analogy is incredibly stupid. It's funny though, that when we object so hard when the MPAA/RIAA uses the word "theft" to describe infringement, but when it conveniences us we will use the same weasel word for the exact same fucking thing. And more accurately, I think commenter meant "hopefully you're never in a position to defraud your students by forcing them to buy a book you wrote yourself and are receiving significant kickbacks for from the publisher and abusing your position as a tenured educator for unfair financial benefit", but that's a mouthful.
  - ms4720 14y ago
    First of all he was not forced into this against his will, it was a voluntary choice on his part to go to college and pick his major. no the morality is clear as well, he could have done many other things to protest or just reevaluate his decision and study/do something else. instead he chose to steal and then decided to brag about it. and having read textbooks I would not call them literature in general. and I am sure there were cheaper/free alternative books out there that he could have made due with. my opinion stands he is a thief with a big mouth. he is not much of a thief but still one.
jetti 14y ago
For those who value their time just a bit, I would suggest sites like bookrenter.com where you rent the book instead of buying. It is much cheaper for the basic classes (e.g common CS classes like Data Structures) but I've noticed that for my more advanced graduate classes it's cheaper to buy used off Amazon.

18 points by guynamedloren 14y ago

This is exactly what I did as well. Just setup a stand to hold the camera, then sat there flipping pages and taking pictures while watching a movie. I then wrote a simple Photoshop Action to fix the lighting, and separate the two pages. Then I could make sure the page numbers in my PDF matched the book page numbers. The other huge benefit was that I brought just a laptop around with me to classes instead of a heavy backpack full of books.

jstalin 14y ago

Send in the helicopters, police trucks, dogs, and men with automatic weapons, please.[1] 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMas0tWc0sg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMas0tWc0sg

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

kshatrea 14y ago

With reference to the aggressive litigation-based attack philosophy of the publishing/recording/movie industry of your country, isn't it a bit risky to go ahead and write this? If they go ahead and sue you for doing something (remembering the case of the RIAA suing someone and getting a $675k judgement), couldn't your blog be used against you in a case in court?

RobAley 14y ago
The "They" would need to be the copyright holders or their agents, and as he wisely doesn't note the particular books he did this with, there is likely no one able to take him to civil court. It appears he hasn't done this commercially, so I don't think there would be a case for a criminal prosecution either.
ljf 14y ago
AFAIK most of those that have been sued have been those who /share/ copied material. I don't (think) anyone has ever been sued for downloading copyrighted material from a file host, but they have from bit-torrent, as when you DL from a .torrent file you are also sharing the file back out to other users. The activities described do break the copyright terms in the books, but as long as he didn't share them it's unlikely that anyone would go after him, and if they did it's unlikely that they would make such a high fine stick. The fine is supposed to cover the potential for lost earnings, so in this case he'd likely be looking at a fine of 2k or less. But I'm no lawyer!

shimsham 14y ago

Hacker news?

andrewflnr 14y ago
Yes. It was a hack.

mjn 14y ago

DIY book scanning is a fairly active community, mostly organized by people interested in legal scanning of old books without having to cut off the binding to put the book through a sheet-fed scanner. Here's one site: http://www.diybookscanner.org/ http://www.diybookscanner.org/ And here's a 2009 article about how the Google-Books scanning rig works: http://www.npr.org/blogs/library/2009/04/the_granting_of_patent_7508978.html http://www.npr.org/blogs/library/2009/04/the_granting_of_pat...

ms4720 14y ago

its high tech shoplifting, the tech is fine but the morality of the act makes me wonder when he needs to make hard choices professionally will he revert to type and get over or do the right thing. It is odd that someone who is going into an integrity based profession thinks it is cool to brag about being a thief. I do not have any problems with anyone scanning their books for personel use and its legal, but this was not.

potatolicious 14y ago
I'm not usually one to defend piracy - but this is a lot grayer than you're making it out to be. What is the morality behind stealing (or in this case, infringing upon) something that you've been forced into having, and which as a whole behaves immorally? Professors routinely get kickbacks for using certain books, textbook publishers routinely publish new "editions" with limited to no changes just to obsolete books in the secondary market. They put in one-time-use keycodes that are required to make use of the book, and since they have exclusivity over their courses, there is no free market choice - students are forced to buy these absurdly expensive tomes of questionable use or cannot get an education. The legality of this is clear, the morality here is anything but. One commenter on the blog post: > "Hopefully, you never write your own textbook. Looks like you found an efficient way to steal that $700 of literature. Probably slightly quicker than raising the cash by mugging or defrauding a charity, but ethically no different." What a load of horseshit. Copyright infringement is not at all like defrauding a charity or mugging someone. Incredibly stupid analogy is incredibly stupid. It's funny though, that when we object so hard when the MPAA/RIAA uses the word "theft" to describe infringement, but when it conveniences us we will use the same weasel word for the exact same fucking thing. And more accurately, I think commenter meant "hopefully you're never in a position to defraud your students by forcing them to buy a book you wrote yourself and are receiving significant kickbacks for from the publisher and abusing your position as a tenured educator for unfair financial benefit", but that's a mouthful.
- ms4720 14y ago
  First of all he was not forced into this against his will, it was a voluntary choice on his part to go to college and pick his major. no the morality is clear as well, he could have done many other things to protest or just reevaluate his decision and study/do something else. instead he chose to steal and then decided to brag about it. and having read textbooks I would not call them literature in general. and I am sure there were cheaper/free alternative books out there that he could have made due with. my opinion stands he is a thief with a big mouth. he is not much of a thief but still one.

jetti 14y ago

For those who value their time just a bit, I would suggest sites like bookrenter.com where you rent the book instead of buying. It is much cheaper for the basic classes (e.g common CS classes like Data Structures) but I've noticed that for my more advanced graduate classes it's cheaper to buy used off Amazon.