Jisui: Digital Book DIY

Who has not copied music and films for personal use? We can all remember taping radio music, cutting cassettes off vinyl, copying CDs and downloading files from the likes of Kazaa. We all tape TV or now simply watch it on demand. We have all updated our media libraries as we migrate to new technology. So what is different about taking a book and scanning it to create your own digital file?

"Jisui," ("cooking one's own meals"), is a new digital book community in Japan which is creating its own digital copies of books. The process is no different to what many publishers do with their back list titles and involves scanning pages of a book through a scanner. The technology has been around for years, so what has changed and why would you break a book to just create a digital copy?

In June, Internet research company Macromill Inc. surveyed 300 iPad owners in Japan and found that 20% had digitized their own books and a further 30% were interested in doing so. The reasons given by the respondents were that, digital versions of the books were not available and that it was easier to read the digital versions of books than paper books whose pages had faded. The numbers surveyed may appear small but we still have to ask what has changed and why do these people feel the urge to perform digital DIY?

First they now have an ereader they like in the iPad and we must remember that the survey was focused on iPad owners. Secondly if there is a dearth of digital content people will always create it themselves. Thirdly the scanning technology has improved and has become cheaper. Forth creating an image file such as PDF from a scan is simple.

The combination of these factors has resulted in an increase in sales of related products. PFU, which is part of the Fujitsu Group, said its June sales of duplex scanners were double that of May. It is claimed that Amazon also saw orders of scanners and paper cutters double from April to June. The interest has even resulted in major electronics retailer Yodobashi Camera setting up an in-store demonstration area to show customers how to digitise books. Another company Jissen, even offers a service to cut books into loose pages for 110 yen per copy and claim to now cut between 1,000 and 1,500 books a day.

Digitization of books by the purchaser for "personal use" is permitted under Japanese copyright law as long as the individual does the reproduction themselves.

Some would suggest that copyright law is out of step with current times. Others that the practise is OK but only if it is ‘for personal use’ The professional pirate has had the capability to do this for years and can even convert captured text into any format and re typeset it for print. Until now digitisation was presumed too expensive for individuals and they didn’t have devices that made digitisation worth the effort. It is not the professional pirate that is the new threat but the individual.

"Jisui" may be confined in the main to Japan today, but it easy to see communities created to follow its example and the obvious outcome will be the sharing of files.

Fighting file sharing on a service is one thing but is often struggling under the reactive take down notices and first finding the content. Fighting copying and sharing content at the local community and friend level is completely different. As the publishing world locks up its digital files behind DRM encryption it be could merely encouraging the individual to bypass that source and go the original book and scan it. After all that is what happening with music until sense prevailed and MP3 was widely accepted.

We may think this is small and insignificant and that we should to focus on locking up the digital files whilst we also continue to fight low prices and make it expensive in the mind of the consumer. We perhaps need to be careful what we wish for and instead consider making ebooks really cheap, available and DRM free. Soft DRM, digital watermarking, makes far more sense than the current clunky hard DRM. But we appear to be hell bent on encouraging consumers to consider a DIY future.

A group of students only need a scanner and one textbook.

source http://mainichi.jp/universalon/clipping/news/20100820dde001040002000c.html

Google Knows Just How Many Books There Are?

It has been interesting to read a Google books blog by Leonid Taycher ‘Books of the world a stand up and be counted’. In it he asks the age old question ‘Just how many books are out there?’ Some would simply respond, ‘who cares?’ Who but the most anal of creatures, or Google, would want to have the precise figure let alone it to the nearest ten?

What is interesting is that in their quest for their Holy Grail they have stumbled across revelations most knew but ignored. They clearly want to capture all renditions and editions of a work ‘as we would like to distinguish between -- and scan -- books containing, for example, different forewords and commentaries.’ They also appear to like the definition “tome” which appears to merely mean rendition, but they like it.
They have discovered that an ISBN may be assigned to anything from CDs to bookmarks to t-shirts and have been so diligent to even have identified one assigned to a turkey prod and 1,000 to tee shirts.

So what is their final number today? When they have checked all covers, for what they refer to as ‘clusters’, the answer drops, from an initial 600 million, to a figure around 210 million. They then must then exclude those tee shirts, audio, videos, microfilm and that turkey prod! The answer then becomes some 146 million. They then touch on the world of serials which they estimate at 16 million, but cautiously note that the number is likely to rise, ‘ as our disambiguating algorithms become smarter’.

The answer today is 129,864,880! We note they went from rounded millions to the nearest ten!

Well we now know yet another piece of useless information and how Google determines its targets. However, we wonder with this level of diligence, why they still could determine the number of orphan works. No doubt they have an algorithm and some army of people assigned to that too!

Guilté as Charged: Maybe?

Hold that guillotine!

In December the French courts ruled that Google was to stop scanning and digitising French books without publishers’ approval. The case was bought by one of France's biggest publishing houses, Les Editions du Seuil, who claimed thousands of its works had been digitised without consent. The court ruled that "Google has committed acts of copyright violation to the detriment of Le Seuil" and also ordered Goolgle to pay 300K euros and a gesture of 1 euro to the SNE Publishers' Association and the SGDL Society of Authors.

We thought that was it, done and dusted, but when you have so many lawyers, much at stake and probably a argument or two up your sleeve its never over. Google has now filed an appeal of a court decision.