Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
My fallback is "buy the pbook... used mmpb, from a thrift store or if I can't find it there, Amazon; pay $1 for the book and $4 for shipping; chop the binding, run it through scanner; OCR the text; no corrections if I haven't read it before, slam it into Word, save as RTF & read it on my Sony."
Author made no money. Publisher made no money. Amazon made more money than it deserves for a $.75 shipping fee. I got a poorly-formatted version to read; if I'm going to re-read it, I'll go back & correct the OCR errors & fix the formatting. I'm out about an hour of labor (I can read while the scanner is running & while the OCR is processing; there's bits of touchup here & there but otherwise it runs itself), but it's an hour doing tasks I enjoy, so I don't feel cheated by that.
I'm aware that producing a good-quality, sharable ebook requires a lot more labor than that... but hey, I can't legitimately share this version, so it only has to be checked to my level of error-tolerance. I'm willing to read at fanfiction.net; my error tolerance is pretty high. I'll glance at the first few pages & see if there are annoying common OCR errors I can fix by find & replace, and otherwise let things slide. I don't care if an occasional period is read as a comma, or if I have to deal with 1's instead of I's in a few places.
While this works for me, it doesn't work for everyone, and I'm really failing to see how this is better for the publishing industry & authors than selling me a $5 no-DRM ebook. Nor how just downloading a version from the darknet is worse for them.
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That's essentially what I am doing except I'm bypassing the OCR (too many books for the number of books involved; apparently, I'm less tolerant of OCR errors than you are) and just reading the PDFs. I'll also do it to new books. It's ethical for me to do so since the original P-book gets destroyed in the process so I'm merely making a legal media shift.