Do you consider it to be unethical...

[TGS]

Originally Posted by HarleyB

But what good is a second hand copy of a paper book if I want an ebook to read on my ereader?

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.

[jgaiser]

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.

And we're back to the circular argument. If I buy it used and scan it, neither the author or the publisher receives any money from the sale. If I save a step and pull it down off the darknet, neither the author or the publisher receives any money. Other than your ethics, there is no difference in the end.

I'm talking about out of print books here. My *personal* ethics doesn't allow me to acquire books still in print.

[Harmon]

Originally Posted by jgaiser

I'm talking about out of print books here. My *personal* ethics doesn't allow me to acquire books still in print.

While I understand your reasoning, I think that we've reached the point where we can fairly expect most books to appear in print and in electronic form. So if the author/publisher wants to sell me a book, and if it's one I prefer to read electronically, I'll get it off the dnet if it's not available to purchase in digital form. But if it is available for purchase in eform, I'll buy it.

[HarleyB]

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.

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.

[Strolls]

Originally Posted by jgaiser

And we're back to the circular argument. If I buy it used and scan it, neither the author or the publisher receives any money from the sale. If I save a step and pull it down off the darknet, neither the author or the publisher receives any money. Other than your ethics, there is no difference in the end.

Except that if you buy a book secondhand, the author got paid for it when it was originally sold.

It doesn't matter that the author doesn't get paid directly when you buy a book secondhand. You pay the author indirectly with a secondhand book purchase, and in doing so - rather than pirating the book - you are respecting the author's copyright and supporting the author's right to publish the book.

Part of the value of every paperback I buy new is the fact that I can sell it on. When I buy a book new and pay the author, that's part of the consideration I make - that I can take it to my local secondhand bookstore or put it on Amazon resellers and get 50¢ back per $1 I paid for it. If the author of a book said to you, "here's my book, and here's a copy of my book which you can't sell secondhand, which do you want?" you'd expect to pay less for the copy that you can't resell. So the consideration of being able to resell effectively raises the value of a new book. Whilst not everyone may resell their old books, or may consciously think about this aspect of the transaction, no economist would argue that it's not part of the deal. It does affect the value of books in the marketplace.

Secondand, if you pay $100 or $500 or $1000 for a rare out-of-print pulp paperback, then the author or the publisher will soon start reprinting it. If everyone who said "it's wrong, it's theft, to pirate a $10 bestseller" applied the same ethics to out-of-print books, then the secondhand prices of out-of-print books would rise.

If we take the Deathlands series of novels for instance - many of those are now out of print, some are (I believe) now becoming quite hard to find. If we just download the books that are no longer in print then we give Gold Eagle Publishing no reason to reprint them; if we hunt them down assiduously, accept that we must pay the market value for the secondhand copy as its price gets bid up on eBay... when Gold Eagle Publishing sees the prices rise on eBay then it will think "golly, we'll be able to make a few quid by reprinting this".

There aren't many of us here who would say it's unreasonable to format-shift books you own. Buy the paperback, then download a digital copy from the darknet to read on your Nook. Few of us has a problem with that, I certainly don't, and for those that do it's a different argument that the one I'm making.

If you take the "piracy is theft" attitude to the file-sharing of books that are widely available in bookstores, then it is complete hypocrisy to make an exception for yourself for out-of-print titles. (I'm not speaking directly to jgaiser here, just in general). You have absolutely no right to judge someone else for "stealing" one book and to make an exception for yourself just because you can't be arsed to track down a hard-to-find secondhand copy, or you're too damn tight to pay the market price, same as the other collectors.

Either you support copyright in its current form (I don't) and you obey it in all its rules and intricacies, or you try to have it overturned. But don't support copyright, call other people "thieves", talk about the law and supporting authors... and then make up exceptions to suit yourself.

Stroller.

[Strolls]

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.

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.

[Strolls]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

Books, no... but there are 70-year-old movies turning to dust in their canisters, because the copyright owners won't allow them to be converted to digital without ridiculous fees and restrictions, and won't do it themselves.

And while very few books are being "destroyed" by not being reprinted, they are falling into such obscurity that they're effectively destroyed. Adventure novels set in the context of the Korean War are currently just barely relevant; in another 50 years, nobody alive will remember any of the events they refer to. Collections of letters written to soldiers in the Vietnam war, or newspaper editorials about the ERA movement, still connect to people who are alive today; by the time they fall into the public domain, nobody will be able to say, "see, child, your grandmother didn't always live alone in a house with three cats."

Copyright law is stripping away our cultural heritage, keeping it restricted so that every bit of history and art relating to living people is owned by someone--probably a corporation, because even heirs don't live as long as copyright lasts. The art & science & history of our grandparents doesn't belong to us yet.

Totally agree with you, mate. I'm kinda playing devil's advocate here, and because I detest the self-righteous attitude I see all over the net by those who equate copyright-infringement to theft.

The attitudes displayed by those who are happy to discuss this matter at length on the internet are not (in my experience) representative of the population at large. Things may be different in the USA, but I fix computers for a living, and the number of otherwise perfectly law abiding citizens, housewives and pensioners, who see nothing wrong with piracy, or who say "i know it's a bit naughty, but everyone does it" far outweighs the number of people who feel the need to get on a soapbox about it.

Commercial violation of copyright? Sure, that should be prosecuted. But authors and publishers would do far better by making it cheap and convenient to download books - the iTunes model - than twisting the law to their favour.

Right now, Mickey Mouse is the largest influence on our intellectual property laws, at least as they apply to written works and video media, and that is wrong. I see no need that the grandchildren of Tolkien, Beatrix Potter and A. A. Milne should be continuing to live rich of their legacy.

A copyright of 10 years, 25 years at most, would be far more suitable. J. K. Rowling would not be in the poor house if the copyrights on her books were to lapse today.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by Strolls

Except that if you buy a book secondhand, the author got paid for it when it was originally sold.

It doesn't matter that the author doesn't get paid directly when you buy a book secondhand. You pay the author indirectly with a secondhand book purchase, and in doing so - rather than pirating the book - you are respecting the author's copyright and supporting the author's right to publish the book.

You do not pay anything indirectly if you buy the book in a place were the books they sell have been donated. I also think that the percentage of books ending up in the second hand market is pretty low. If this percentage was near 100% I do not think that publishers would accept it. They accept second hand selling now because it is not so big and it give some advantage for the publishers by making a book more well known.

[Strolls]

Originally Posted by tompe

... I also think that the percentage of books ending up in the second hand market is pretty low. If this percentage was near 100% I do not think that publishers would accept it. They accept second hand selling now because it is not so big and it give some advantage for the publishers by making a book more well known.

It's not up to the publishers to accept it or not - this became legally established in 1908 (in the USA). Books are a physical object which we, as a society, have determined to be transferrable.

Even if only 10% of people resell their books, those 10% of people still do place a value upon that ability, and are prepared to pay more for their books than they would otherwise (if they were hypothetically only "licensing" the read). This affects the supply-and-demand graph - thus publishers are consequently able to charge more and authors get paid more. Likewise if people merely value the ability to donate old books to charity.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by Strolls

It's not up to the publishers to accept it or not - this became legally established in 1908 (in the USA). Books are a physical object which we, as a society, have determined to be transferrable.

Well, accept in the sense that they can continue to publish books with the current model.

[Elfwreck]

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.

Scanning: Chop cover off, less than 1 hr scanning with a document-feeding, duplex scanner. (Scanning on a flatbed scanner: assume 4 pgs per minute with a *fast* scanner and an efficient setup.) I use 400 dpi for books I plan to OCR, unless they've got lots of footnotes, in which case I use 600 dpi.

Deskew, despeckle, otherwise fix scanned images: less than 10 minutes if (1) you've set up the scanning well, (2) you have the right software and (3) you really know what you're doing. Or skip this step & add time to later steps.

OCR: Auto-process: less than an hour with decent (cheap, but not free) software.
Fixing OCR errors: 1-50 hours, depending on a wide set of variables, including target audience (how much do you care if "corn cob" reads as "com cob?"), scan quality (somewhat adjustable, subject to limits of scanning device), typesetting in original ("fancy" fonts are hard to OCR), software being used (easier & faster to correct in FineReader Pro than in Word while flipping through physical pages).

Output & Formatting into ebook: 10 minutes to 10+ hours, depending on how much you care about formatting and what software you're using.

For me personally:
Chop-scan: under 1 hour and I don't care; I'm reading while the machine is feeding pages.
OCR zoning: ~10 minutes to set up so I'm not OCRing the chapter headers & page numbers.
OCR processing: Who cares; I'm watching TV for that part.
OCR Correction: 1/2 hour doing search-and-replace for very common errors (1 for I; arid for and).
Output to RTF.
Remove page breaks; set whole thing to 14 pt Times; save onto Ebook reader & ignore OCR glitches.

Under an hour of pay-attention processing, for a book not suitable for sharing with anyone else even if I were allowed to do so.

For books I've read before & intend to re-read, I'll spend much more time on OCR correction; I don't for new books because I'd rather deal with punctuation errors than spoil the story for myself.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Strolls

I see no need that the grandchildren of Tolkien, Beatrix Potter and A. A. Milne should be continuing to live rich of their legacy.

A copyright of 10 years, 25 years at most, would be far more suitable. J. K. Rowling would not be in the poor house if the copyrights on her books were to lapse today.

I don't particularly mind if the grandchildren of Tolkein and Milne continue to make money on their works. (Don't know how much I approve of it, but I don't mind.)

I mind that, in order for those to continue making money for their heirs, huge collections of pulp detective novels, science fiction stories, westerns, and romances, by authors who have died or vanished under pseudonyms or wrote "for hire" before there was a legal term for "work for hire," are unavailable. I mind that most of the comic books for the last 75 years are locked away from public view, despite nobody's intention to ever reprint them. I mind that I can't buy a garage-sale box of WWII boys' adventure books & scan and share them.

The problem isn't with the mainstream, still-in-print, still-selling materials. If there's an active market, maybe copyright should be extended. (Heh. For a price. Copyright for 25 years for free, and $1000 to register to extend it for a 10-year block. Corporations would have to think about which of their works to keep locked away.)

The problem is with all the works with no notable commercial value, just nostalgia or documentary value, which are being locked up with all the stuff that lets people make money.

[ManosHandsOfFate]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

I mind that, in order for those to continue making money for their heirs, huge collections of pulp detective novels, science fiction stories, westerns, and romances, by authors who have died or vanished under pseudonyms or wrote "for hire" before there was a legal term for "work for hire," are unavailable.

Horray for pulp!

[HarleyB]

Elfwreck - thanks for that detailed response. Not quite as daunting as I imagined but still probably not something I'm going to do in a hurry.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by HarleyB

Elfwreck - thanks for that detailed response. Not quite as daunting as I imagined but still probably not something I'm going to do in a hurry.

Welcome.
Figuring it out is daunting. Actually producing ebooks from pbooks is not difficult, just monotonous and finicky work with almost nothing to show for it if you can't share it. Spending an hour or two converting a book that only takes a few hours to read seems... wasteful.

I've done it; I always feel horribly self-indulgent about it. Chopping a book to scan it and not share it feels like a displaced version of book-burning. I'm not only spending hours of effort on something that only benefits me, I'm destroying an object that could've been shared.