I first heard about this story via Mike Shatzkin in a lengthy piece at his Idea Logical blog, then in a shorter piece by Mike Masnick at TechDirt. Since then, I’ve seen it crop up in a number of different places, and it’s just too beguiling an issue not to discuss. An ethicist at the New York Times, Randy Cohen, has opened a can of worms and dumped them all over e-books with a column in which he suggests it is ethically fine to download an electronic copy of a book (in this case, a book that was not yet...

The new scanner, made by book2net, is the only one of its kind in the US, but there are others in Canada at two other locations. The machine, originally designed for use in the reading rooms of the British Library, was manufactured in Germany. It can capture a JPEG image of an entire newspaper page (or comic book, folio, book, bound volume, etc.) in 0.3 seconds, and it needs only 1.9 seconds of cycling time to scan another page. The scanner has a touchscreen that allows a person to view details close-up, and all it takes to scan a...

Daniel Reetz- an artist and a Ph.D student studying visual neuroscience – recently developed a high-speed book scanning system using open source technology, cheap cameras, and garbage (which we covered here). Now Harvard has a video of a talk by him at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Unfortunately it can't be embedded so take a look here. Thanks to Resource Shelf for the heads up....