In my email this morning, I received a notice from Quora that I had been invited to submit an answer for the following question: Are there any services or business models in which one can trade paperback or hardcover books for digital books, without having to pay full price again? After typing my answer, I thought it was interesting enough to repost here: Not that I've ever heard of—or no model that is legitimate under copyright law, anyway. The idea has been suggested by a number of people as something that publishers should...

Digitization of public-domain works is a good thing, right? Most literature fans would be quick to agree. However, Glyn Moody writes on Techdirt that some of the new public digitization projects have terms and conditions that seem to be right out of the dark ages. The Cambridge University’s Digital Library, for example, places strict limits on what users can do with the books—non-commercial use only, no modification, no passing it on to third parties, and so on. A number of the works in Cambridge’s library date from well before the 1710 Statute of Anne invented modern copyright, suggesting that...

TechCrunch has a piece on a startup called 1DollarScan, a scanning and digitizing company that is offering extremely inexpensive scanning and digitizing services. An expansion of a similar operation in Japan called Bookscan, 1DollarScan’s prices start at $1 for digitizing ten photos or 100 pages from a book. I’m not sure exactly how this service will stand legal scrutiny. Consumers might have the fair-use right to scan and digitize their own books (though some will still argue vociferously against that), but it seems to me that a company that offered this service to other people for a profit is...

Wired’s Gadget Lab has a feature profiling a new, specifically-for-books flatbed scanner, the Plustek OpticBook 3800. The defining features of this scanner seem to be a thin bezel that allows all-the-way-to-spine scanning, and a specially padded liner to eliminate distortion. I’m actually a bit surprised that Wired is so excited over this scanner, given that in the last couple of years we’ve already seen a number of book scanning apparatuses (both do-it-yourself and commercial) that leave a one-page-at-a-time flatbed in the dust. The future of non-destructive book scanning seems to involve digital-camera rigs that can snap shots of two...

One of the downsides of piracy can also turn out to be one of its benefits in the right situation. The fact that it’s easy to scan paper books into e-books means that DRM or even refusing to release e-books can be bypassed by a suitably determined pirate. But to an author who would like to put his backlist into electronic distribution, it can be very helpful. SF/cyberpunk author Walter Jon Williams is such an author, and he reports on his blog that he was able to find scanned copies of most of his books. “So I downloaded my...

Dead-tree scanning just got significantly smaller. Gadget Lab and eBookNewser, among others, are carrying reports on the O-King, a new pocket-portable scanning device. It’s only 1.6 megapixels and has to have a USB power source to work, but its small size and $120 price tag might make it a great companion to a laptop for those with a frequent need to scan documents on the road. Nate Hoffelder at eBookNewser points out: Do you know what it would be good for? It’s small enough when collapsed that you can carry it in your luggage without...

Audrey Watters at ReadWriteWeb takes a look at the contentious issue of e-book vs. paper pricing and whether it is likely to promote piracy. Mentioning Random House’s decision to join the agency pricing crowd, and the ongoing anti-trust investigation in Europe, she links to a Reddit thread discussing examples of e-books priced higher than their paperback or hardcover versions. The Reddit thread is kicked off by one person complaining about the prices on these books (“I love the kindle but this pricing stuff right now is making me question all of it. I have a hard time placing...

Anyone who has seen the movie Sneakers is familiar with the idea of braille screens for reading by the blind. In the real world, however, braille screens are gimmicky, expensive, non-portable devices prone to mechanical failure, and I am told most blind computer users make do with speech-synthesizers instead (be it on their computer, or via hand-held devices like the Intel or LookTel gadgets I’ve mentioned before). But speech-synth does have some drawbacks, especially for reading a book—the voice can be annoying, for one thing, getting in the way of immersion into the book (which is why I...

Google has come to a settlement with French publisher Hachette Livre in regard to the scanning and use of scanned French books for its Google Books project. The deal apparently gives Hachette considerable control over what titles are scanned and used. Hachette will also get to use Google’s scans of its books for print-on-demand and e-book sales. The Bookseller’s FutureBooks reports on the settlement and posts the press release. The Bookseller itself has more backstory, noting that Hachette had filed an objection to the Google Books settlement with the US court in September. Google says that it does not...

Received an email from them about their scanner. It certainly looks convenient. Here's what they say: 1 Scan id cards up to A3 documents and 3D object by one click. 2.Foldaway design, convenient to carry around. 3.USB powered (No adaptor required). 4.With document management software. 5. It is also a real time visualizer You can find their website here....

Aaron Miller has a brief post on the FrontMatters blog about Google’s book digitizing service. You can send in whole boxes of books and get them digitized, OCR'ed, and converted to “a multitude of digital formats.” The only problem, Miller notes, is that the service isn’t available to consumers, but is for publishers only. And it’s not likely that Google will offer it to us, ever. The likely outcome will be that eventually every mouldering tome in our decrepit paper collections will already have been scanned and available — and we’ll have to pay for...

Mediabistro’s GalleyCat has a post about ABBYY FineReader Express, an OCR program that can even use cell phone cameras (though for best results, a 5 megapixel version is recommended, which would seem to limit it to the iPhone 4’s camera). The post mentions it in the context of scanning “orphan works” such as the “hundreds of pages from 1930s novels, periodicals, and self-published materials that couldn't leave the New York Public Library” that GalleyCat editor Jason Boog read through during a project. As a demonstration, it includes a photograph of a page from such a work, a screenshot...