Quote:
|
I don't know anyone who has scanned an entire book
|
The fact that you don't know them does not mean it does not happen.
If you know where to go, you can already now download more books than you can read in the rest of your life in just a couple of hours (and that's not just the Gutenberg stuff, but current titles). Scanning a book and correcting the OCR version takes a lot more time than ripping music, but distribution of the result is a lot quicker because of the smaller file sizes. People will re-upload what they found. So I expect it won't take long before all these books are as easy to find as your favorite music.
Let's compare to the situation in Russia. Over the years a number of online libraries have emerged there, giving access to well over 100,000 e-books, and some of them manage to stay up-to-date with the latest releases. The reponse of the publishers is that they sell e-books through legal shops for a price much lower than the p-book price, and without DRM. Why couldn't that happen here (in the US and in Western Europe)?