By Edward Nawotka, Editor-in-Chief
A few years ago, before the advent of NetGalley, Edelweiss and other digital book review services, I used to send my print galleys through a table saw, slicing off the spines, and then run them through a sheetfed scanner. I’d read the resulting PDFs on my Toshiba Tablet PC (a 2002 model, now in a landfill along with all those PDFs, so don’t worry publishers). The simple convenience of having digital editions of all those books I used to review for a living and being able to mark them up digitally was a real convenience, and saved a lot of shelf space in my tiny Brooklyn apartment.
Today, if I lived in Russia, Indonesia, Japan or any number of other countries, I could have a commercial service scan my books for me.
In Russia, Bookmate has taken the unorthodox strategy of encouraging readers to scan and upload their own titles to Bookmate’s cloud library, which they can then download for their personal use to various devices.
In Japan, there’s the practice of jisui, scanning your books to free up space (as discussed in today’s feature story), which threw publishers into a fit.
Then you have pirates…oh, and Google Book Search, where you have a breathtaking amount of books and passages of books at your fingertips.
Yet, there is no commercial service in the US — no legal service — that will enable you to scan your books, and keep them in the cloud, Publishers fear the pirates (as they do in Japan) and rightfully so.
Yet, when it comes to music, you can send in your collection of old CDs to Ripdigital and they’ll convert them to MP3s for you. You can do the same for your DVDs.
Books…well, not so much. You do have venerable websites, such as DIYbookscanner.org that will teach you how to produce your own book scanning machine a la Google’s, and one that won’t destroy your books like my method. (I am a fan of the Fujitsu ScanSnap scanners.)
The rationale behind such sites is that it goes without saying that if you own the books, you should have the right to do what you wish with them. And technically, you do. But the very idea of a commercial service that would scan and upload your books to a cloud library in the sky is enough to send most publishers to the emergency room.
I suppose it take a true fanatic to go through all that trouble to slice, scan and upload a book in the first place. Is it really worth the bother? And would it really be worth it to pay someone?
Let us know what you think in the comments.
2 Comments
I think publishers need to loosen their hold on books. I would love to slice all my old books to have them on my Kindle. I would never take the time to do it myself, but would pay for someone else to do it. Especially before I move. When you move, carrying around hundreds of books is far too much of a burden these days. Everything is getting smaller and easier, publishers should take the initiative and help people make this move instead of just being the nagging parent in the background.
Having spent my life selling English in Japan, I sort of feel that publishers, book distributors and retailers, as they now exist, are the equivalent of Commodore Perry’s Black Ships that were so influential in bringing Japan into the wider world. There are still sail boats. There are still powerful book (magazine, etc) publishers/distributors here in Tokyo but the shrinkage began at least a decade ago. Just possibly the 2013 Tokyo International Book Fair (with eBooks, Licensing, and an expanded Creators section for authors, illustrators, and related creators) will see the new out weighing (if not yet burying) the old.