5 ms·

Rare book experts join forces to stop tome raiders

46 points by Thevet 11y ago

hammerandtongs 11y ago
A very ugly crime. To me this also suggests that if you own or control one of these texts that its literally your duty to the rest of humanity to make sure it's scanned and available for free and infinite copying SOMEWHERE. We might lose track of the digital version but without it it's inevitable that these volumes will decay and be lost forever. What is the the general ethical stance about this in the rare book community?
- bkst 11y ago
  The rare book community is the community that has facilitated these crimes. There are more black hats than white hats--no money at all for white hats in this business. Private book traders make all their money by selling unique items to rich people. The rich people doing the buying want to own something special that other people can't have. Bibliophiles are technophobes. They love the paper page, the book binding, the book stacks. They don't love the content of the books, and they don't want to share them. They have "aristocratic" ideas about who deserves to have access to these special items. Every last one of them is a hoarder that wants to have things that others can't have. They hate book scanners. They hate ebooks. They hate digitization. It just threatens their business, their status, their one-of-a-kinds. Rare books is all about prestige and exclusivity. Digitization is a threat to this. I'm a book scanner--someone who loves the contents of books more than the objects--and my kind are scorned like the gargoyles from Snow Crash.
  - arbitrage 11y ago
    You're generalizing quite a lot, and I'm not sure how you expect your divisive viewpoint to help the situation anyway.
    - bkst 11y ago
      I'm not trying to "help the situation" by posting on HN. I'm informing a fellow nerd who asked a question. Rare book dealers don't read HN so I don't see how I could offend anyone.
  - majormajor 11y ago
    What's the state of the art in damageless scanning? Do you still have to rip the pages out in order to get good, fast results?
    - userbinator 11y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_scanning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_scanning Using cameras to take pictures of pages seems to be the most "damageless" option.
    - db48x 11y ago
      https://archive.org/details/InternetArchive-Tour https://archive.org/details/InternetArchive-Tour This is a video of the Scribe machine that the Internet Archive built for book scanning. It uses two commodity digital cameras to image the pages. The computer driving the process is running Linux and gPhoto. They're also working on a tabletop version, which will be easier for smaller institutions to set up and use.
  - wodenokoto 11y ago
    I don't get the logic here. If they love the book and not the content, why do they care if the content is available. Moreover, the availability of pictures of Mona Lisa is a big part of its popularity. Wouldn't you rather own the only copy of a famous atlas, then an obscure one?
    - bkst 11y ago
      >If they love the book and not the content, why do they care if the content is available. They want to have something that others can't have. >Wouldn't you rather own the only copy of a famous atlas, then an obscure one? Some would, but there are plenty who prefer the obscurity. Most aristocrats are more interested in impressing their friends and immediate circle with off-beat style than in starting a popular museum or being seen as gaudy. Obscurity is hip--and sometimes it can even be affordable.
WalterBright 11y ago
Any book that is a "cultural heritage" item needs to be scanned, and it's the duty of the library/museum to do it. The scans don't even have to be that good - a photo with a hand-held iphone is good enough for a quick first pass. If budget is a problem, scan a couple, sell them, and use the proceeds to scan the rest.
- userbinator 11y ago
  I'd extend that to "anything which is now in the public domain". a photo with a hand-held iphone is good enough for a quick first pass Not to mention far less damaging to the original since it doesn't have to be manipulated as much, and quicker too. Distortion is a problem but postprocessing can give good results. The last time I was at a library, which seems like ages ago, there were (paid) photocopiers for those who wanted to copy a page or two. With everyone carrying high-res cameras in their pockets, I wonder if they're still around.
  - WalterBright 11y ago
    People who scan rare books seem to be obsessed with pixel perfect scans, and so what happens is it doesn't get done. A 90% scan is infinitely better than no scan when the library burns down or the books are stolen. Heck, the libraries in the article didn't even know what they had, so they don't know what was lost.
contingencies 11y ago
Part of the impact of these thefts is difficulty of legitimate access by the public. Allow me to explain with an example literally from a few days ago. I turned up in Madrid for a few days, and visited the national library wanting to see what they held both in terms of materials regarding the area of China I am compiling a history on, and in terms of early Spanish records of island Southeast Asian (eg. Philippines) multihull vessels like the vinta. I am forced to go through airport-like security, have my face recorded on an Axis IP-based CCTV camera, sent to a room with three enormous desks each with an official library bureaucrat. I explain my case, and am rapidly informed that should I wish to view anything at all before 1950 then I must apply for a research card. Sure! What does that require? Photo ID - passport, check. Proof of address - what? Bank statement accepted, download one, OK, check. Proof you are from an inexplicit list of recognized national, educational or cultural institutions. I'm an admin for Wikipedia, writing articles specifically on traditional multihull vessels that have hundreds of thousands of pageviews and have been front page featured, but that didn't seem to count. They wouldn't let me in. The 'librarian' (who I feel deserves no such title) actually went so far as to attempt to 'explain' to me - "You see, it's like a club. The universities, the libraries, ...". That very same night, I had dinner after visiting a diplomat in their home. Some friends of theirs were also present, one of whom a reigning library science academic of repute within that field in Madrid and Spain. I explained the horrible experience I had attempting to dedicate some of my minimal time in the city to using their national library. In return, it was explained that the difficulty of using the place is a direct response to the theft of a number of extremely rare texts some years ago, over which people lost their jobs. The problem is frequent, and even international academics all face it. I was of course also offered a letter of reference, but did not have enough time left in the city to visit a second time... so the resources remain unconsulted. (The irony of the fact that we dined on Mahgreb cuisine was not lost on me: the former Muslim rulers of Cordoba/Andalusia were great sponsors of libraries, translation and learning in general.) Moral of the story, then, is perhaps that the real loser is the public: paying for increased security, losing access to the stolen items, but critically - being denied access at all for legitimate inquiry, thereby making a mockery of the purpose of the institutions in the first place. The best possible thing would be to digitize the originals... this removes the need to visit by making them more accessible, allows backups to secure against disaster, theft or loss by other means, and increases the value of the originals (because people know they exist, cite and use them). British Library want some godawful amount like 400GBP to photograph old images they hold. It's daylight bloody robbery, especially coming from these colonial countries that stole their damn holdings. The EU should force libraries to digitize this stuff.
brianstorms 11y ago
If you want to learn more about this kind of crime, I highly recommend a little book by Miles Harvey called THE ISLAND OF LOST MAPS: A TRUE STORY OF CARTOGRAPHIC CRIME. Fascinating whodunit regarding thieves who would go into rare book collections and quietly use a razor blade to carefullytear out an ancient map inside some hundreds-of-years-old book, and often then sell it for huge sums.

46 points by Thevet 11y ago

A very ugly crime. To me this also suggests that if you own or control one of these texts that its literally your duty to the rest of humanity to make sure it's scanned and available for free and infinite copying SOMEWHERE. We might lose track of the digital version but without it it's inevitable that these volumes will decay and be lost forever. What is the the general ethical stance about this in the rare book community?

bkst 11y ago
The rare book community is the community that has facilitated these crimes. There are more black hats than white hats--no money at all for white hats in this business. Private book traders make all their money by selling unique items to rich people. The rich people doing the buying want to own something special that other people can't have. Bibliophiles are technophobes. They love the paper page, the book binding, the book stacks. They don't love the content of the books, and they don't want to share them. They have "aristocratic" ideas about who deserves to have access to these special items. Every last one of them is a hoarder that wants to have things that others can't have. They hate book scanners. They hate ebooks. They hate digitization. It just threatens their business, their status, their one-of-a-kinds. Rare books is all about prestige and exclusivity. Digitization is a threat to this. I'm a book scanner--someone who loves the contents of books more than the objects--and my kind are scorned like the gargoyles from Snow Crash.
- arbitrage 11y ago
  You're generalizing quite a lot, and I'm not sure how you expect your divisive viewpoint to help the situation anyway.
  - bkst 11y ago
    I'm not trying to "help the situation" by posting on HN. I'm informing a fellow nerd who asked a question. Rare book dealers don't read HN so I don't see how I could offend anyone.
- majormajor 11y ago
  What's the state of the art in damageless scanning? Do you still have to rip the pages out in order to get good, fast results?
  - userbinator 11y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_scanning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_scanning Using cameras to take pictures of pages seems to be the most "damageless" option.
  - db48x 11y ago
    https://archive.org/details/InternetArchive-Tour https://archive.org/details/InternetArchive-Tour This is a video of the Scribe machine that the Internet Archive built for book scanning. It uses two commodity digital cameras to image the pages. The computer driving the process is running Linux and gPhoto. They're also working on a tabletop version, which will be easier for smaller institutions to set up and use.
- wodenokoto 11y ago
  I don't get the logic here. If they love the book and not the content, why do they care if the content is available. Moreover, the availability of pictures of Mona Lisa is a big part of its popularity. Wouldn't you rather own the only copy of a famous atlas, then an obscure one?
  - bkst 11y ago
    >If they love the book and not the content, why do they care if the content is available. They want to have something that others can't have. >Wouldn't you rather own the only copy of a famous atlas, then an obscure one? Some would, but there are plenty who prefer the obscurity. Most aristocrats are more interested in impressing their friends and immediate circle with off-beat style than in starting a popular museum or being seen as gaudy. Obscurity is hip--and sometimes it can even be affordable.

WalterBright 11y ago

Any book that is a "cultural heritage" item needs to be scanned, and it's the duty of the library/museum to do it. The scans don't even have to be that good - a photo with a hand-held iphone is good enough for a quick first pass. If budget is a problem, scan a couple, sell them, and use the proceeds to scan the rest.

userbinator 11y ago
I'd extend that to "anything which is now in the public domain". a photo with a hand-held iphone is good enough for a quick first pass Not to mention far less damaging to the original since it doesn't have to be manipulated as much, and quicker too. Distortion is a problem but postprocessing can give good results. The last time I was at a library, which seems like ages ago, there were (paid) photocopiers for those who wanted to copy a page or two. With everyone carrying high-res cameras in their pockets, I wonder if they're still around.
- WalterBright 11y ago
  People who scan rare books seem to be obsessed with pixel perfect scans, and so what happens is it doesn't get done. A 90% scan is infinitely better than no scan when the library burns down or the books are stolen. Heck, the libraries in the article didn't even know what they had, so they don't know what was lost.

contingencies 11y ago

Part of the impact of these thefts is difficulty of legitimate access by the public. Allow me to explain with an example literally from a few days ago. I turned up in Madrid for a few days, and visited the national library wanting to see what they held both in terms of materials regarding the area of China I am compiling a history on, and in terms of early Spanish records of island Southeast Asian (eg. Philippines) multihull vessels like the vinta. I am forced to go through airport-like security, have my face recorded on an Axis IP-based CCTV camera, sent to a room with three enormous desks each with an official library bureaucrat. I explain my case, and am rapidly informed that should I wish to view anything at all before 1950 then I must apply for a research card. Sure! What does that require? Photo ID - passport, check. Proof of address - what? Bank statement accepted, download one, OK, check. Proof you are from an inexplicit list of recognized national, educational or cultural institutions. I'm an admin for Wikipedia, writing articles specifically on traditional multihull vessels that have hundreds of thousands of pageviews and have been front page featured, but that didn't seem to count. They wouldn't let me in. The 'librarian' (who I feel deserves no such title) actually went so far as to attempt to 'explain' to me - "You see, it's like a club. The universities, the libraries, ...". That very same night, I had dinner after visiting a diplomat in their home. Some friends of theirs were also present, one of whom a reigning library science academic of repute within that field in Madrid and Spain. I explained the horrible experience I had attempting to dedicate some of my minimal time in the city to using their national library. In return, it was explained that the difficulty of using the place is a direct response to the theft of a number of extremely rare texts some years ago, over which people lost their jobs. The problem is frequent, and even international academics all face it. I was of course also offered a letter of reference, but did not have enough time left in the city to visit a second time... so the resources remain unconsulted. (The irony of the fact that we dined on Mahgreb cuisine was not lost on me: the former Muslim rulers of Cordoba/Andalusia were great sponsors of libraries, translation and learning in general.) Moral of the story, then, is perhaps that the real loser is the public: paying for increased security, losing access to the stolen items, but critically - being denied access at all for legitimate inquiry, thereby making a mockery of the purpose of the institutions in the first place. The best possible thing would be to digitize the originals... this removes the need to visit by making them more accessible, allows backups to secure against disaster, theft or loss by other means, and increases the value of the originals (because people know they exist, cite and use them). British Library want some godawful amount like 400GBP to photograph old images they hold. It's daylight bloody robbery, especially coming from these colonial countries that stole their damn holdings. The EU should force libraries to digitize this stuff.

brianstorms 11y ago

If you want to learn more about this kind of crime, I highly recommend a little book by Miles Harvey called THE ISLAND OF LOST MAPS: A TRUE STORY OF CARTOGRAPHIC CRIME. Fascinating whodunit regarding thieves who would go into rare book collections and quietly use a razor blade to carefullytear out an ancient map inside some hundreds-of-years-old book, and often then sell it for huge sums.