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...

The Bookseller is reporting that Albin Michel, Flammarion and Gallimard are suing Google for the scanning of almost 10,000 books without permission.  They are demanding €1,000 per title in damages, bringing the total to nearly €9.8m. The €1,000 per title in damages mirrors the December 2009 court award to the La Martinière group, which sued Google for the same reason, the source said. The French Publishers Association (Syndicat National de l’Edition, SNE) and the French Writers Union (Société des Gens de Lettres, SGDL) joined La Martinière in the litigation. A verdict in Google’s appeal is still awaited. At the 2010 Paris Book Fair,...

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...

I was just looking back at a post I made in August of 2006—my first post here as a regular contributor, in fact. This came well before the advent of the Kindle, and was sparked off by a discussion of e-book piracy on the eBook Community email list. It’s interesting to look back on it in light of the sea change in e-book demand brought about largely by the Kindle, Nook, and (more recently) iPad. The article was a discussion of the relative e-piracy situations between music, movies, and e-books. My thesis was that, at the time the article...

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...

I like to think I'm pretty modern about this whole books-as-near-religious-object thing. I may be an English student, but I'm all for ebooks and the digitisation of resources. I'm almost at the stage where I'd buy an e-ink screened device (I still can't quite get used to that glitchy-looking refresh rate), and for certain resources I can even see why libraries might want to develop all-digital collections (text-books, mass-market paperbacks, technical data, legal documents, etc.), though never at the expense of preserving existing physical materials. The artefacts, after all, can speak as loudly as the words they contain, and not...

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...

We’ve mentioned ReCAPTCHA a time or two—the security effort by Carnegie Mellon researchers that took two problems and made them solve each other: how to make a “CAPTCHA” (an automated Turing test meant to prove that a human wants to access the website rather than a spambot) that couldn’t be solved by a computer optical character recognizer, and how to digitize words in old documents that a computer’s OCR couldn’t puzzle out. By feeding these unrecognizable words to web users, paired with words the computer knew already, it both tested whether they were real people and told...

Want to use your iPhone to photograph and OCR scan printed matter? Your chance may be coming soon. CNet reports that Creaceed’s Prizmo software, a desktop photo-OCR package that includes camera tethering and perspective correction, will soon be coming to the iPhone. No word yet on price; the desktop version costs $40. The app's crowning feature is that it can fix bad perspective, just like its desktop sibling, as well as let users snap photos without having to press the shutter button. Creaceed has devised a system through which users can simply say "take picture,"...

David Rothman pointed me to an article in the Wall Street Journal about Openlibrary.org, a new cooperative initiative between the Internet Archive and a number of public and other libraries. They are creating a digital library containing “more than a million scanned public domain books and a catalog of thousands of contemporary e-book titles” that will be available at member libraries. And a couple of libraries are contributing scans of a few hundred older works that are still under copyright—which is what got Google in trouble. For books that are still under copyright, the library will treat a...

Thanks to Bookofjoe. Note: TeleRead originally covered this scanner in March....