I even bought a house twice as large as I needed just to have space for book and journal storage. But I didn’t mind, because my books and journals were an important part of my human capital. When people hired me they were also hiring access to my library, which eventually grew to 30,000 volumes or more.

But over the last few years, the Internet has radically reduced my need for a large private library. Now virtually every important academic journal is available online. My local library in Fairfax County, Va., has free online access to many journals I was spending good money for. The state library in Richmond has remote access to many more.

Throwing away this capital proved a painful process, perhaps also because “nobody wanted them” when Bartlett tried to give his journals away. Next for the chopping block were his books, and that’s when Bartlett discovered a useful property of Amazon—it can double as an exchange program for the cheap books that you don’t need to have handy:

I quickly discovered that many of my books really aren’t worth much, at least monetarily. This made it easier to part with them, because if it turns out that I actually need one that I have sold I’ll just buy another copy. In the meantime, someone else can store it for me.

Bruce Bartlett (1951) is a historian turned economist who worked for the administrations of US presidents Reagan and Bush Jr.

The company mentions it has “easily” sold more than 25,000 units of the Bebook, and that the countries it sells the most units in are the UK, Germany, France and the Netherlands.

I’ve built two of these things now, and this instructable covers the best parts of both of them. You can build a book scanner using only hand tools plus a drill. I realized that not everyone is comfortable with using all the different hand tools you might need to make it. So I scanned a book on using hand tools that should answer all your questions.

So next time you don’t have to wait forever until a Tolkien estate gives you the opportunity to create your own Lord of the Rings concordance, you just scan the books yourselves . Tip: Abbyy from time to time gives older versions of its very good OCR program Finereader away with computer mags, so keep an eye out for those.

BoingBoing says the cost of these machines are about 300 USD. Atiz sells them ready-made, but then you should add at least one zero to that sum, and possibly double the result.

Unlike for instance the Asus EEE the Medion Akyoa Mini, quickly identified on the web as an MSI Wind, sports a hard drive (80 GB), which makes it both heavier and more powerful. Further features: Intel Atom 1.6 GHz, 1GB RAM, 10″ LCD (1024 x 600), 1.2 KG, webcam, microphone, Windows XP, 802-11n, 400 euro.

Click the thumbnail for an enlargement: a scan of last week’s Gamma product folder.

See also: Roger Sperberg’s 2006: The year of the e-book?

I received the device with a power adaptor and a minimum of instructions. There’s a school of thought that says that reading instructions is a waste of time anyway, and that interfaces should be intuitive and easy to grasp. I don’t subscribe to that philosophy, and not just because it displays a woeful lack of understanding of the way humans and interfaces work. There’s no such thing as “intuitive,” the best thing you can hope for is that an interface is analogous to interfaces you’ve used in the past.

The Sony Reader has no problems on that score. For me it was incredibly straight forward to operate. My friend had told me how to work the power button, and the rest I figured out by myself. I was up and reading within minutes.

The only thing I struggled with was the “Leave the book” function. For some reason it takes a few seconds to go from a novel’s page to Sony’s auto-generated “book cover.” I don’t know if this is a “feature” or if instead I did something wrong. The first few times it was irksome though, because I kept pressing the Up button, and the Reader remembered all those presses.

What the Sony is very good at is just displaying books. It starts up in a second, you can (fairly) quickly jump in and out of the books, there are several interfaces for sorting your library (by name, by date, et cetera), the device remembers where you were but you can also add bookmarks, and leafing between pages is quick enough to be painless. In other words, I never had the feeling I was operating a machine. I was always just reading.

The only time this idea of “just reading” broke down was when I wanted to take notes or search a book for a certain phrase. Lacking a keypad and a touch screen, there’s simply no way to do this with the Reader (to my knowledge—again, I never read the manual). It’s not that I always need to be able to take notes, but when I do the inability to do so is immediately noticeable. Indeed it is probably a testament to the immersiveness of the Reader and its like that getting up to look for pen and paper feels like just too much work.

There are two simple reasons why I wouldn’t buy this device. One is that I have been boycotting Sony ever since they tried to install malware on millions of computers. The other is simply a matter of pricing. I still believe that a digital book reader should cost around 50 bucks, be they euros or dollars. Plenty of Readers, Kindles and Iliads have been sold to prove that not everybody feels the same way I do though. The E Ink devices have clearly resonated with lots of bibliophiles, and now the wait is for the mystery device that will find and bind us all.

It would seem that reading habits are at the basis of a lot of reasons why people would buy one device and reject the other. In order for you to put my findings into context, here’s a list of mine.

• I am a voracious re-reader, and I keep books.
• I realized the other day that I often read books for their atmosphere, which may explain the re-reading. James Bond for instance is great if you want to get yourself in a go-get mood.
• I own a library that is small to book lovers but largish to the general populace (750+ copies).
• I do not suffer from “eye strain” or other fictional eye problems.
• My mind often wanders while reading—my biggest gripe with the 160×160 Palm Zire as a reading device is that I have to scroll back several “pages” before I get to the point where my mind forgot to warn my (browsing) thumb I had stopped paying attention.
• I take notes. Not always—I don’t generally write in books—but often enough that I notice it when I am not able to easily take notes.
• I read in bed a lot.
• I read a lot of second hand books.

And finally, I simply don’t have money for gadgets: if I buy a reading device, it must fill a real need. Perhaps I am atypical for a Teleread blogger in this respect, but with me it’s about the books and not so much the gadgets. If your reading habits map to mine though, if you figure Sony has gotten past its questionable ethics, and if you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up. A new version has been out for a while that apparently has a better screen.

Recent reports suggest that a Russian OCR tool called Cuneiform has been released as Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The unfortunate part, for me, is that all the news seems to sit on the Russian side of the web, and I don’t speak Russian.

The matter becomes extra confusing when you notice that there is an American site that presents itself as the manufacturer of Cuneiform OCR (called Cognitive Enterprises), that still sells the package (albeit a much earlier version), and that keeps remarkably mum about the whole open sourcing its flagship product thing. Does anyone know what’s going on here? Is this open source release legit?

Easily beats two other FOSS OCR offerings

Why is this at all important? Well, I took a gamble and downloaded the software, and my test results with Cuneiform are so far easily superior to those of the other two FOSS OCR offerings, Tesseract and GOCR/JOCR. Without me telling it that it had to recognize Dutch (remember, I don’t know how to tell it that as I don’t speak Russian) it managed to OCR several pages almost perfectly, leaving only 3 or 4 errors per page. The other two averaged more than one error per line, admittedly mostly because of their inability to recognize where a line started and ended. (Language recognition software, be it speech recognition or OCR, tends to pass the annoyance test if it leaves in less than 1 error per sentence.) Good OCR software is hard to produce, and is therefore invariably expensive. A cheap (read FOSS) version of a quality OCR tool has the potential to emancipate the long tail of printed text.

Copyright is a good thing, but the code that enshrines this right is too much of a good thing in its current form. In the digital age, it misses its targets. For hundreds of thousands of 20th century rights holders, it offers no protection, recognition and reward, but only the prospect of oblivion. An adaption of copyright law to the demands of the 21st century is needed urgently, otherwise the building of a digital library of any serious proportion will remain an illusion.

[Because of the difficulty of locating the heirs of long-dead authors, you cannot safely re-publish works that came out a 100 years ago.]

Both institutions and companies are keeping a safe distance from this copyright danger zone, and this will result in unbalanced digital collections. The digital library of the 21st century will have a gaping hole where works of that age should be. Hundreds of thousands of authors will never be found again. For them the chance of an epiphanous find followed by a second, digital life will definitely be gone.

This scenario can hardly be the meaning of a law that should protect an author’s rights. Before anything else, an author has the right to be read. That is why it is high time for an Internet exception for non-commercial use in the Dutch copyright law, one better thought through than the changes of 2004. Since then, heritage institutions are allowed to offer their collections electronically to the general public, but only from within their own building, using an intranet. That’s just not how the Internet works.

The authors continue discussing orphaned works, and how a mixture of Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon orphan works law could produce a best of both worlds: mixing extended collective licenses with the opt-out principle. Collective licenses, also known as levies, are funds paid by the public into one big pot, and redistributed to the copyright holders. In a lot of jurisdictions radio is paid for this way. This makes radio possible: if there were no collective licenses, each radio broadcaster would have to negotiate separate contracts with artists for each track they play. At least, so the theory goes. Opt-out means the author or their heirs has to state explicitly not to want to participate. Copyright law is opt-in by default, but stops functioning in areas where the rights holders cannot be traced, or only with immense difficulty. Something authors seem to have brought upon themselves with their support of the Berne Convention, which outlaws any sensible scheme for tracking authors and their works.

See also: The printed book as a preservation device.

Next week the Amsterdam public library will organise a conference on the meaning of copyright for libraries, where Ernst Hirsch Ballin, the Dutch Minister of Justice, will be one of the speakers.

(Entry first published at 24 Oranges.)

A p-book does not just act as a container of a book, but also as a preservation device. And it does this against heavy odds. Modern, “acid” paper deteriorates quickly, but it is still possible to preserve books printed on such paper for a long time—hundreds of years in some cases.

In theory, e-books can last much longer than that. By abstracting from a physical carrier, books no longer need to be threatened by the weaknesses of that layer. But there are other threats to e-books that are much more insidious.

Threat Level Severe

One of those is the threat of format deterioration, and the politics behind choosing formats. Whether books were stored as word processor files in the 1980s or as XML applications in the 2000s, these formats will die, they will die sooner than you think (if they haven’t already), and in hindsight they won’t be as well-documented as you had hoped. Having access to the bits is not enough; you will still need to be able to understand them.

Of course, you should be so lucky to have access to the bits. The introduction of DRM makes it harder and harder for you to access the files you bought, let alone preserve them for a long time. And if you tried to liberate a book from its DRM, you’d be breaking the law. What’s more, with DRM the publisher can prescribe the uses you are allowed to make of works, so that DRM laws effectively give publishers the right to write their own copyright law.

Accessibility and archiving are at odds with each other. The more you give people access to fragile manuscripts, the more you run the risk of losing these manuscripts through handling. Luckily, the reverse is true with digital manuscripts. The more copies exist of digital texts, the better its chances of survival. Unfortunately, having been thrust in the role of gatekeepers has allowed the darker side of some archivists to surface.

In the late 1990s the Bridgeman Art Library, a company that markets reproductions of art for museums and archives, sued Corel for distributing its reproductions of public domain works without permission. This was much to the dismay of the people in the industry, who saw what was coming and tried to persuade Bridgeman to stop the case. Somebody at the American Association of Museums wrote—though careful to disclaim this as their official position: “In September, we learned that the oral arguments had gone so badly for Bridgeman that the judge stated he was inclined to rule in favor for Corel on the spot. We tried, to no avail, to convince Bridgeman to withdraw from the suit before the expected harmful opinion could be issued. As it turns, Art Resource (whose business includes licensing of reproductions), also tried to talk Bridgeman into dropping the case.”

The “harmful” opinion came, as expected. The court ruled that exact reproductions of public domain works are themselves in the public domain. They lack the originality—a legal term meaning that selection according to taste and experience were involved in creating a work, and not just “sweat of the brow”—that has to have gone into creating a work for it to be copyrighted, and Bridgeman v. Corel is now considered somewhat of a landmark case in the IP world. There’s a lesson though that may get lost in all the legal noise: archivists failed to keep the public away from what it owns.

And so it would appear that leaving archiving to the specialists is not always a good idea, especially not if you want access to what has been archived. Would anybody seriously defend the position that archiving digitally born works can be useful if the members of the public only have restricted access to those works, the way they have access to works in a museum?

Why is this bad?

If you keep your favourite childhood p-book around, there is a good chance that one day you can pass it on to your children. And if they like the book, and keep it, they can give it to their children. No such thing with DRM-ed e-books: you should be lucky if you can still read your e-books five years from now.

This need not be a problem for the casual reader, who may not even want to read a book more than once, but it is a preservation nightmare. Copyright law states that books will one day return to the public domain. One might even condense the meaning of copyright to “ensuring that works enter the public domain”. Unfortunately, with the introduction of the Berne Convention in the late 19th century, copyright law has started to concern itself less and less with how works will make it back to the public domain. And since copyright lasts at least fifty years in most of the world, at the time a book should make it back to the public domain there will be hardly any stakeholders left around to ensure it does, or to protest if it does not.

The e-book apostle may choose to regard the p-book as quaint and over the hill. But in a few years from now, that e-book you’re reading now may only have survived in printed form.

Solutions

There is one simple solution to all these problems: the complete abandonment of copyright law. In the past decades, copyrights have become ever stricter, lasting for ever longer periods of time, and covering ever more modes of expression. All the problems I have outlined before would be far less stringent if copyright were less far-reaching.

The political will for such a radical overturning of copyright law is lacking though. Another legal option would be to create ever more laws on top of laws. Laws that outlaw copyfraud. Laws that force publishers to put digital works in escrow. Laws that prescribe the methods in which digital works should be stored.

Writing such laws is an incredibly difficult job. Scientists are currently looking for ways to battle senescence. In my life-time I will experience the emergence of a branch of medicine that may allow people to reach ages of over 150. Some copyrights already last for hundreds of years, but in a short time that will be the rule rather than the exception. And if we wish to rescue the public domain, instead of letting it turn into a mockery, our law makers will have to write preservation laws unlike any other laws, that themselves should last centuries.

Even then, the deterioration of digitally born works has begun outside the realm of literature. Computer games that were programmed less than twenty years ago have disappeared forever, simply because the mediums they were sold on (floppy disks, cassettes, tapes) were never meant to last long.

At least for books we still have p-versions to hang on to … for now. Even the p-books printed using the cheapest paper and ink will still serve us better in a hundred years than a lot of their e-brethern will twenty years from now.

Baker does not feel the need to attack or pre-emptively defend Wikipedia, and that—together with the appearance of books such as Broughton’s—seems to signal a turning point for the online encyclopaedia. Wikipedia is no longer in need of definition. You can still have very strong opinions about it but they won’t make Wikipedia go away, nor make it any less important. Today, Wikipedia just is.

Via Martin Wisse.

Via Bright (Dutch).

I made no efforts to get a correct transcription—that would have taken 20 hours more of time I don’t have. Let’s hope Project Gutenberg or similar pick up the ball. You will especially come across the following errors in my transcription: “scannos”, missing italicization, and missing paragraph breaks. If you would like to see these corrected ASAP, your best bet is probably to use Wikisource for a collaborative clean-up operation.

At least there are no nasty ownership claims in this work. Some people hatesss them. The file is in valid XHTML 1.0 Strict with a sprinkling of valid CSS 2.1.

See my transcription notes at the end of the file for a list of things that I have done.

Finally, for your enjoyment and abandon-driven perusal here’s a partial New York Times Book Review of this work from 1918:

That extraordinary gift for portraying the faintest shades of character and temperament, the divergencies, little and big, the varying differences in viewpoint existing in members of the same family, which Louis Couperus revealed to us in the three volumes already in this country, is very evident in this new one, “Old People and the Things That Pass.” It is a book more nearly akin to “Small Souls,” perhaps, than to either of the other two, though it has little of the bitter wit which distinguished that very interesting novel, and contains more than a little of the grayness, the effect as of a murky, sombre day, so noticeable in “The Twilight of the Souls.” For nearly all its characters are old people, while of the very few young ones, Charles Pauws, known to the family as “Lot,” is haunted by a nervous, hysterical dread of growing old. Only Elly, Lot’s young wife, longs for “great, faraway things,” and feels within her the call “to strive as far as she could,” finding unendurable the aimless life which contents the man whose soul is “neutral tinted,” who is incapable of “scarlet things,” yet at the last finds himself hiding “an innocent secret * * * torturing as a hidden, gnawing disease.”

It is, however, with two very old people, the man 93, the woman 97, and with a secret which was very far from innocent, that the novel is principally concerned. It was the secret of that which had happened one night in a lonely bungalow among the mountains of Java—a night of fierce tempest and fiercer passions, sixty years before the time the novel begins. [...]

[...] The story is admirably handled throughout, the events following one another quite simply and naturally. But clever and skillfully developed as the plot is, it is in the sureness and subtlety of its psychology, and in the effect which it produces of dark forces lurking behind lives which are nearly all of them failures, that this book makes its strongest claim on the attention of discriminating readers. It is a very sombre, but an unusually interesting novel.

Source: The New York Times Book Review, Sunday March 31, 1918.

Excerpt: “The publishing industry itself, which many believed to be most vulnerable, has nonetheless managed to weather the crisis. Publishers have reissued new editions of early, pre-union novelists—such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Jane Austen, both of whom have previously established successful track records—and have seen no no change in monthly sales.”

(Via Scalzi’s Whateverettes.)

Moderator’s note: A real hoot. Highly recommended. – D.R.

NRC had expected to sell the first 500 devices in a month, and delivery may be slowed down because of this unexpected success.

More interesting for the TeleReaders may be that Alexander Teixeira de Mattos’ classic translation of Couperus’ masterpiece has recently become available in many formats at the Internet Archive. If anyone would like a version that is more accessible (plain text, HTML, PDF), let me know and I’ll try and post one at my other blog. The Dutch version is available from DBNL.org.

Of Old People follows a couple of murderers in their old age, and their children and grand children, and shows how one gruesome act committed many years ago is felt in the family today.

(Picture: Louis Couperus. This entry also published at 24 Oranges.)