Quote:
Originally Posted by Rootman
I hesitate to add that converting a physical book to etext may also violate the publishers and authors copyrights as well. I do not beleive that the "fair use" doctrine applies to text scanned from a copyright source.
Not knowing what country you are in and what texts you want of course YMMV
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In the US, format-shifting for personal use is almost certainly fair use. And I only say "almost" because there's no court cases to base that on, because nobody's been stupid enough to try to sue their customers for it. Nobody's been sued for making cassette tapes of their own albums for their own uses, either. Nor for reading aloud a book and recording it for their child.
Format-shifting for research purposes is somewhat *more* acceptable; that moves the purpose of copying into the "transformative" realm. Note that Google's cache function was ruled to be non-infringing.
Trying to keep from hijacking this into yet another copyright debate... hmm.
Jim should keep in mind that no OCR software is perfect, especially with books with nonstandard language. (Legal, medical, scientific, religious, sf/fantasy, etc.) With an autofeed scanner, the OCR checking becomes the most time-consuming part of conversion. Even with a flatbed scanner, the OCR checking is the most *annoying* part of conversion, because you can scan while talking or listening to music.