Quote:
Originally Posted by TGS
I think the argument is that if you want it on a ereader then it is more ethical to buy the second hand copy and scan it and then put it on an ereader than it is to swipe it off the darknet.
|
I don't believe there's anything wrong with grabbing a copy from the darknet... as long as you own and hold a copy of the book which has been paid for.
It would seem pretty daft to insist that the reader go to all that effort to when exactly the same collection of bits are already available online.
I'm mostly looking at the secondhand purchase from an economic point of view, as laid out in my last post.
Quote:
Originally Posted by HarleyB
OK so for a typical fiction novel that is somewhere between 300 and 500 pages how long is it going to take me to scan it and turn it into an ePub? Can anyone who routinely does this share? I expect I would be a bit slower to start with but a rough guide would be fine.
This is a serious question as I have never considered doing this as I imagined it would take forever.
|
Your imaginings were pretty much correct.
If you removed the pages from the binding and had a decent sheet feed scanner (you can probably pick up an older model quite cheaply secondhand) then you could probably have decent
images of the pages by leaving the scan running on your computer overnight. However those images will be very large files, and wouldn't display well on a typical e-reader (maybe ok on a Kindle DX?). Converting the images to digital text with OCR isn't too hard, but there will be plenty of errors, so proof-reading to get a good e-book version would be
extremely time consuming.
Hardly anyone does this solely for the convenience of reading the book electronically - typically they would do so because they think it's wrong the book is out-of-print, because scanning out-of-print books is a hobby, to share with other fans of the series, for the kudos of being the guy who made the scan &/or to share with their pirate community.