 We're so pleased to have Daniel, who traveled quite a far away with his machine to get here. Daniel is an artist and a PhD student studying visual neuroscience, and he is the steward of the do-it-yourself book community, and Charlie is the one who invited Daniel, so hello, Charlie. So welcome everybody, and I'll turn it over to Daniel. Alright, say a word. I met Daniel at a conference in New York on Google Books, and was struck by what he had to show and say in a way that put the question of the balance of the force of law against the force of impeding technologies as a way of thinking about the relationship between law and technology, and that's a line that we're familiar with thinking about in some way with respect to music. What's the balance between the inability to get to it, to slip the weight of nothing, and the force of law in maintaining the idea of copyright. What I was struck with with Daniel was how he puts the same questions into your mind about books, and does it in a way that's completely physical, and so I was just very impressed, and eager to have him come and share what he had to do with it. So, I suspect a lot of what I'm going to say isn't news, but I'm going to do this with three, this talk is three parts. There's a background, there's what we're doing now, and then there's a future. So, about a year ago today, I was searching Amazon for used copies of textbooks, and I couldn't afford these textbooks new, which is why I'm searching for them used. So, I'm on Amazon, and Amazon recommended to me some digital cameras, which you can see mounted back here. So, these digital cameras, startlingly enough, were cheaper than the textbooks that I needed to buy. So, I did what I always do when I get in trouble. I jumped in a dumpster, grabbed a bunch of trash, and bodged together this book scanner. I did it in three days, not because I'm some kind of exceptional engineer, but because I needed to return the book. So, now, in the end, I didn't return the book, but there you go. So, this type of scanner, importantly, is much faster than flatbed scanners. It's an order of magnitude faster than flatbed scanners, and because of the way it cradles the book in this V-shaped platen, it's very gentle. And so, it's got two, you know, two major advantages. The nearest commercial equivalent is $5,000, and the total cost of the one that I built was $300. Now, I show this to my friend Aaron Clark, and he wanted one immediately, and so I decided, you know, why not? So, I grabbed my friend Noah, and Noah and I worked together sort of obsessively documenting the build of this model. So, this is my second book scanner built just a short time after the first one, and in exchange, Aaron wrote a software program called PageBuilder. Now, PageBuilder was the first host processor for these things. So, these scanners, you know, it's hardware, the cameras still take ordinary pictures, and you need to convert them into nice e-books, and so that was our bargain. So, building the scanner, I sort of, I knew that I had an inkling that it was something important, so I obsessively documented this thing. Right down to taking things out of the trash, and I produced a 79-step Instructable with the help of this friend of mine, Noah Bicknell, which was shared on the website Instructables. Is everybody familiar? It's a website where you share plans and how to do things, and I entered it in the Epilogue Grand Challenge, which is a contest to win a laser cutter. There were 93,000 views during the contest. I'm at 160,000 today, which puts it, I think, 7th or 8th most popular Instructable on the site, and I want a laser cutter, which is a $10,000 giant printer, which you can feed plywood or plastic or other materials into, and it will cut them out according to the artwork that you draw. So, sort of, somewhat hilariously, here's the laser arriving at my workshop, by the way, this is now under water, and, you know, sort of giving it the big thumbs up, sort of hilariously, after I got the laser, I also entered in a contest on engadget.com to win a Kindle, and the contest was to use to make artwork to be laser-etched on a Kindle. I also took the grand prize and got a Kindle, which I promptly sold. So, winning gadgets isn't what this talk is about, though. Actually, what this talk is about is what happened after all this. So, you know, this is sort of three weeks to a month of stuff happening, winning all these contests and having a great time, and all of a sudden people from all over the world started contacting me, telling me their stories about why they needed book scanners. So, in the instructor's comments first, there were some four or five hundred comments from people who were showing up and saying, you know, I really need one of these. Thank you for sharing these plans. I never thought about doing it this way. And these same people started building them immediately. So, I think there were about 10 or 15 people right off the back that were producing them. Some people were producing them within days of the original post, and they were sharing all these improvements back. So, I mean, my design wasn't hard to improve on, right? It's made of trash. And they were sharing back these improvements and talking to me continuously. And the first guy to build a scanner was a mathematician programmer named Rob. We founded this website, diybookscanner.org. So, a little bit about the community. Right now, the site, I think we have about 370 members, give or take. We have about 3,000 some posts. And the first few people to sign up were two mechanical engineers, two programmers, and an intellectual property lawyer, which I found most amusing. And right now, we have between 50 and 80 scanner builds that people have shared with us. I know that there are many, many more outside the forum because I continuously get email people asking me questions about their scanners that they're just not sharing back. So, just to give you an idea of what I mean, here's my first one. And here are some 40 randomly selected builds, that's Tom's build, from the forum. And so, you know, again, it's just a small selection. So, it's the bigger question like who are these people and what are they doing, right? I mean, obviously, they're scanner builders, but our community now comprises digitization experts, librarians, book lovers of all stripes, people who've never handled soldering irons, and the print disabled. And, you know, we've come a long way from the beginnings in a dumpster, right? But what we're doing is taking the mystery out of book scanning. And we want to make all this stuff kind of not a mystery, make it free, make it open source, and make it accessible to anyone, especially the people who really need it. I'm going to tell you about them by telling you their stories. The first story is Rob, the guy that I found in the book scanner site with. So, Rob has about, I think he said 3,000 or 4,000 science fiction paperbacks, that's sort of coming out of every corner of his house, you know, bending every shelf at every turn. And he wants to convert these books using his fair use rights to convert these books into bits and to be able to read them on his kindle. And I think it's like a particularly fitting fate for science fiction. But, you know, this is also, as Charles mentioned, it's the same battle we've been going through from wax reels to vinyl to cassettes to eight tracks to everything else. And it's, I mean, I'm sort of asking the question now, like when are we going to learn to stop buying things in broken formats? So, from there, I'm going to tell my own story, which is the collapse of Menard Hall at NDSU. The office in the bottom center of the collapse, as you can see, was my office and all of my books were in there. They were boiled when the steam pipes opened up and all of my stuff was crushed. And so it was actually, what's that? No, that's at home. So, fortunately, I had digital copies of the most important ones that I had previously made. So, away from the site founders, this guy in the top... Is that for real? That really happened? That really happened. It happened after New York in December. That's really there right now. You can go up and... Yeah. So I work in the back of that building now in the uncollapsed portion. Anybody in the building? Yeah, they fix it. You don't think it had anything to do with you? I'm starting to wonder. No. That's right. Now the books weigh less, right? So the building collapses less. So the next case I'd like to talk about is a fellow named Tristan. So Tristan has these light bulbs in his eyes. And Tristan has problems reading with his eyes. So he hears perfectly normally, he's a mechanical engineering major, but he has just some difficulty reading this way and undiagnosed reading disorder. And Tristan has shown up and designed his own very innovative book scanner to have his computer read to him. So we have another user named... I guess whose name I will not really say is not really polite, but he's paraplegic and he has gone repeatedly to a science fiction publisher asking for a digital copy of a particular series that he'd like to read again, which he also owns the physical books, by the way. And they've refused the possibility of ever producing a digital edition. So he asked his family to come to our forum and build a scanner so that he can read it again. On a little bit more positive note, we have people like Misty DeMeo, who's a digitization assistant at the County of Brandt Public Library in Brandt, Ontario. And she is using DLI Book Scanner technology in a library setting to kind of bootstrap her way to grants and better equipment, right? So there's no reason not to digitize right now. The equipment is good enough. And in fact, her scanner is actually a whiskey box and several pieces of foam board. So you can see the quality is phenomenal and the means are minimal. We have other people... I'm sorry, let me say one more thing about libraries that I think is really interesting, right? I mean, libraries have preserved our books this far. We have all these books that libraries have been saving and preserving and keeping catalogued and carefully, everything. And yet, what's going to happen with the Google Book Settlement or with other digitization efforts is that they're actually going to have to subscribe back to their own collections. So the same people who got us where we are are going to be forced to pay for doing that, essentially. And I think that's wrong. And I think that actually there are distributed models that we could use for scanning. One of the sort of dreams that's come up repeatedly in our form is to have these cheap scanners at the library. And you can imagine, for example, paying your library fees by spending 10 minutes scanning a book, right? Or in exchange for a library card if you're an out-of-area user, you could scan a book. The beauty of it is the most desirable books would be scanned immediately. And you could also, I mean, for example, do your name inscribed in an ex-Liris plate or something in the cover of the digital edition, right? Just a suggestion. So Francesco is another member. Actually, he did most of the scanning before he came to us, but he's such an incredible user. So he scanned six Italian dictionaries in completion and made the full text corpus searchable online. So anybody interested in Italian language has full access to these antiquated volumes now. Another one of our sort of Herculean members is this guy who calls himself Post-Scan Grinder, and he has digitized no less than 36,000 pages of high school yearbooks in exchange for the rights to put them online. But there's this question that's kind of coming up here, which is how do you know what to scan and how do you know when you're scanning legally? Because a lot of people think just the act of scanning is infringing, right? There's a project going on at Tulane University that sort of through a chance internet meeting, DOI Book Scanners and Technology is enabling. So there's a guy named Ben Verotti who's a graduate student at Tulane working on this project called a Durationator. In the fullness of time, the Durationator will be a tool where you enter any work and you can check its copyright status. Tulane has a copy, as far as I know, a complete copy of the original renewal records and which the first ones were destroyed by Katrina and they got a second copy on loan and then they couldn't afford to build book scanners. So when they found us, they built custom book scanners for their volumes and they're scanning them right now as a part of creating this tool that will enable people to more legally scan things. It was kind of a nice loop. But the project that's closest to what I think is the spirit of the DOI Book Scanner project which is really people making technology their way to help themselves is this man named Sirian Daru. So he's one of the very first people to contact me on Instructables. He wrote me a private message and said this is the first message I've sent to anybody on the internet. I'm here in Indonesia and we've had these floods, earthquakes and tsunamis. Everything is terrible and we have these handwritten books that document who owns what land and where and when your house washes away. If you're not in this book, you don't have land. He said this is causing all kinds of unrest and problems. So he ended his message saying I'm going to save up to buy cameras but it'll take me six months. So I took up a donation incidentally with the first intellectual property lawyer to join my forum and we bought him a set of cameras and mailed him to Indonesia. He and his son, Oka, built a scanner using these two cameras and started scanning these books and as far as I know they're still scanning them right now going around to different villages essentially keeping the piece. These books are as you can see unsuitable for photocopying because much of it is handwritten. Normal techniques just don't work here and that's what the DIY scanner does. So what I'd like to tell you, I've sort of given you the past, the ugly beginnings of the project and now I'm telling you the present and I think it's time to talk a little bit about the future and where this is going. I think where it's going is more important than where it's been. There's something really cool going on which is that we're working with a guy, sorry, named Joseph Artsimovic. He's a Russian programmer living in London who wrote a program called Scantailer for flatbed scanners and we're currently working back and forth with him although he's doing the majority of the work to produce kind of the ultimate scanning software for all V-shaped scanners including the commercial ones, including all the variety in our forum and everything else and what this software does is ingests all the images and produces clean and perfect sort of PDFs. I mean this thing, it really is magic when you see the results it can work and there's further magic going on here which is that Rob and another member of the forum named Estati in conjunction with Joseph Artsimovic have been developing what are called de-warping algorithms. So if your cameras aren't perfectly parallel or if there's some lens distortion or other problems in the image, that's sort of not a good way to read a book, right? These guys have been developing de-warping algorithms and you're seeing one in action here going from a curved scan to a flat scan using only the information available on the page. Now the other thing is that the scan that went in here was just a photograph, it wasn't this nice clean text, right? It had all kinds of noise and everything. And this is totally open source, practically magic software that is now sort of a part of this canon. So there's another end of this which is the hardware front and I have the idea that, you know, not everybody wants to jump in a dumpster and build a book scanner, right? And not everybody even wants to build anything. But we're at this really wonderful precipice in history. We're not only at the sort of the point where metal type becomes malleable bits but we're also at the point where 3D models can be instantiated in reality using rapid prototyping equipment. And I just have this little demo which is my laser cut scanner. So this holds up and goes into carry-on luggage and it works as follows. I've got Laurence Lessig's remix book in here, by the way. Flip a page, press the button, the two cameras fire together and we've captured two pages. And that's it. So that was cut by the laser cutter that I won because I view the laser cut scanners. Let's see if this works. Yeah, I have an animation here which I guess I'll let play where you can see it folded up. And so it's sort of this transformer book scanner and I built it specifically to take it on planes and go around a little bit. It has its problems. So the next stage of this process, I built it in a real hurry. I was supposed to speak at the Diaz for Digitized Conference in New York. James Gromen kindly invited me there and that's where I met Charles. And I did it in such a hurry that I had some hundreds, some files with random parts everywhere and all the mistakes that you make when making something like this. I basically produced the scanner seven or eight times in the process of working out the details in my shops like a hit of cut plywood. And what's happened is this guy, Dario de Moura, who works at the University of Brazil, showed up in the forum and had just sort of started creating a 3D model of the scanner from scratch because he wanted one. Since that time, I gave him the original artwork and he spent immense numbers of hours reworking the artwork and making it perfect. And we're now releasing it as of today under the GPL. So this scanner now you'll be able to download these plans, take them to a laser cutting service, or use them on your own laser and produce your own lasers sort of in an IKEA fashion. You just get this slot together thing. Dario, I'm extremely, extremely proud. I hope Dario is watching, extremely, extremely happy and thankful for the work that he's done. So this sort of gets to, you know, even further into the future, right? The dream, one of the dreams, you know, everything I've talked about is scanning. And that's because I believe that scanning is the first step in all these problems, right? If we want to talk about a future of digital books, we have a whole history of books being ingested and brought into the present. And in that way, what we're doing is methodical, right? In a way, it's short-sighted. All books being presently authored are digital, right? But we're talking about that first step of having good scanning equipment. And the idea is, like, if you wanted a scanner, you could, for example, print it out and have it wherever you are. And the software will just sort of accept these things and produce good books. It's illustrated by the fact that we all have bookshelves, probably leaning bookshelves, and many of us have e-book readers, and there is no conduit between the two. In fact, the only legal option you have is to buy the books a second time. And that totally ignores your fair use rights. So, again, as I said before, the other dream of this scanner is to see it as a sort of general-purpose machine, like we see a copier now. Copiers are commonplace, and they have special status in libraries. And why not have a book scanner right next to it? But this is where I'm going to say something that's a little bit crazy, which is that we don't need to hurry, right? Right now, all the mistakes being made by Google and other companies is because they are rushing, rushing, rushing to create a market. They want to create a market that is unassailable, because once you have a market, it removes fair use rights and other reasons. I don't believe Google is out to destroy fair use or something. Don't get me wrong. But this rush to create a market obviously ignores a lot of people, as I've said. And furthermore, we can do this according to who needs what, when. There are certain books that are much better digitized now than later, and we can move along this thing as necessary. The other thing is that, and by the way, even if it took us 10 years, that's forever in internet years, not everything constitutes a market is a big thing I want to say here, but the other thing is some things that are currently not a market are politically unacceptable ideas. And there's a whole load of stuff that you definitely don't want stored in the cloud. You don't want library records created of it. And there are some things that are politically this way. And there are some things like porn, which saturates all technology and drives new technology that you also don't want to be creating records of. So it's, you know, there are these examples like if Google were still serving content in China, think about the snippet build. Does everybody know how snippet view works? Snippet view is an agreement that Google has, and I may state this somewhat incorrectly according to the latest terms of the settlement, but essentially they can display up to 20% of a book as little snippets when you search. And think about what determines that 20%. For example, if you searched for Tiananmen Square in China, would you get the same 20% as you would in the U.S.? And I actually hold this to be an argument not just for not using the cloud, but for having your own copy so that you have a ground truth. And, you know, furthermore, we have things like Amazon's Kindle, which the author's skill has exerted control over because it's a market where they turned off for the vast majority of books text-to-speech. Now the Kindle was already hard to use if you're blind, but it offered one avenue where you could buy into Amazon's library and listen to books. And of course that technology disabled, to be disabled, and I think that's just crazy. And, you know, the other thing is why is it that we're going through all of these cloud services when they've proven that they will delete things? Why is it that we're buying all these pocket libraries of Alexandria that are going to burn? The moment Amazon turns off its servers or the moment Apple's new iPad, when you buy books on it, they'll probably need to be authorized, they'll transfer them to a different device, are they going to work or not? You have to trust Apple. So what I find so maddening is like paper books, by virtue of their existence, by virtue of their physical structure, have all these benefits, right? And actually that's the same thing that most people who love paper books say, they're like, I love the smell, I like to hold it, I like to read it in the bathtub, and I do too, right? And what's so funny, there's a mild irony there, which is that as they get older and their eyes get bad, they'll probably need the scalable fonts that prevent anybody from writing in it, pressing flowers in it, passing it to a friend. No paper book can be remotely disabled. No paper book needs to be turned off on the runway. You know? On the other hand, no paper book connects to the internet and by extension to social networks. No paper book can be freely and infinitely copied and updated. An updated, I think, is an important point when you think about textbook editions. No paper book can easily collect knowledge data about where it's read and how the person is feeling while they're reading it. And I guess what I'm trying to say here is while the paper book has all these advantages due to the physical substrate that it's printed on, electronic books enjoy none of this yet, right? How many electronic books can you write in? How many electronic books can you highlight? How many electronic books can you loan to a friend? And what's so crazy there is when you think about, I sort of missed my slides there while I was going off, but think about the dichotomy of pirates versus publishers in light of what I just said, right? So contrary to the actions of publishers no pirate will prevent you from copying a book, no pirate will prevent the blind from listening to an audio book and no pirate will ever delete your digital book. And also, this is a crazy point, but I just want to make the point that if we don't extend copyright law into infinity, at some point pirate works will contribute to the public domain. But pirates versus publishers is a false dichotomy that's being forced on us throughout this discussion. It's something that's arisen out of the discussion. There are other options and I hope that my project shows that there's one of them that the missing link between the bookshelf and the Kindle is you and if you think you're doing if you think everyone else is doing it wrong, I suggest you do it yourself. Maybe a silly question, but why is it that photocopier can't do things that this can do? The issue with the photocopier is that they by virtue of binarizing what's there, in other words, making it purely black and purely white the details of handwriting are preserved and the books themselves, when they're wet stick to the platen surface so you lift them off and so that we discuss this often in the forums. If you move quickly, I mean this one if I press the button captures everything in about one and a half seconds 1700 milliseconds or something so you can do a lot of pages. 400 pages an hour is a reasonable number because you've got to use the bathroom and you might miss a page or whatever. It's purely format dependent so as raw images an average book takes about two gigabytes because they're just camera images so you're talking 408 megapixel images 200 to 400 megabytes if you save them as a PDF using different kinds of compression you can get that down to 100 if you save it with OCR you could be down to kilobytes that's an output question and this is an input question so I'm not a digitization expert although I talk to a lot of them so take this with a grain of salt most libraries pursue the commercial versions of this type of machine they're called face-up scanners generally and a tease is one major manufacturer as I said in the range of 10 grand and ATIZ and essentially they'll get somebody who's got a master's degree in that to operate the thing and turn the pages and click it's what the Internet Archive built their own scanners actually they're the first organization to build their own they call it the scribe and if you Google Internet Archive Scribe you can see it it's quite a monstrous contraption yeah generally that's the way they go the metadata and everything else there's an unbelievable more ass of systems out there content DM as far as I understand is the most widely used database it's open source but I think it costs money so libraries have to deal with metadata we don't really deal with metadata yet sorry yeah looking about options of how to encourage people library patrons to digitize the books you didn't suggest to replace the copier was one of those readers in an exchange for a copy of a few pages that you need you have to digitize the book and then it will get printed off of the that's very interesting and the only I mean the reason I didn't suggest the user actually getting a copy because I agree with you like actually my in I've never discussed this idea with anyone but my idea would be that there would be a central server and anytime somebody scanned a page or you know distributed servers whatever these pages would go there for storage right and when they fell out of copyright they become accessible and in the meantime if you had a fair use like that maybe you could just get them from the server and so sure there would be a scanner and a printer or a scanner and a copier I think it's a great idea I was talking actually about something a little different I was talking about the fear there only reason for the copy machines in a library I assume is because the patrons want a few copies some small section three pages whatever so that if they replace the printers copiers with scanners then in exchange for getting those few pages the way you get them is you have to scan the whole can they get a free three pages or five pages or ten pages it's a great idea thank you you said that it takes about an hour to scan four hundred pages that's about two books in an hour I was just thinking about three years ago I ripped all my CDs to MP3 and it takes about six minutes three to one CD and you can do other things while the CD driver is ripping them now you got well two books half an hour for a book and you have to concentrate and turn pages is that really worth it if you think about Amazon sells books for what, twelve dollars so you're actually not paying for the book but for the freedom to do whatever you want with your book that's accurate I mean having scanned a load of books I've thought about it really great questions so there are a few things like if you can buy a nice digital edition that isn't for example laden with DRM or otherwise restricting you I don't see any reason why you wouldn't right I mean except that a vast majority of books aren't even yet available that way and so like in my case I have a load of optics books from the 60's that I purchased via Amazon there aren't digital editions and so to have those with me I have to scan them now also remember I think one of the key points of why situations where this technology is really sort of useful is where there isn't a market or there isn't a way to get it so right after well not tomorrow anyway I'm leaving for the far north of Ontario to work with a project called the On Demand Book Service and the intention is in these small First Nations communities in the far north of Ontario where you have to sort of fly in they might get one book that they need to teach something you can't just order them when you need them right it's got to get there so the idea would be to allow them with a book scanner and a binding machine to produce their own books on site there are many many situations in which scanning a book in this fashion makes sense as far as like getting the latest JK Rowling or something no it doesn't make any sense except that by the way she said she'll never make digital editions which ensured that her books became digital editions I would have a different response to that I would say I object to be forced to pay for the same information place right I object to being I like the friend of his that has 3,000, 4,000 science fiction books I probably have a third or a half that many but more important to me I have textbooks from when I was in college and in graduate school I have computer language books and so on and I don't those things 40, 50 dollars a crack minimum I'm not going to pay another 40 or 50 dollars just so I can carry the information around in a portable fashion I object to that in a philosophical sense that kind of book I would definitely state and you know if it sticks in your cry enough then it's worth it to you it's not just the carrier at all here here here yes there's a good spirit in it I guess it's just a question of your own work to your own work, to your own effort and to your own time yes have you ever just like said I'm going to just cut the spine on this book because my time is not worth it if I had a scanner that would do that I would think about it but I do also like the little holding of a book I'm not going to bring my laptop in the bathtub with me I'm sorry it's not going to happen I might consider a little swing arm for the video display I am not going to I have emotional attachments to the things I Heinlein's the moon is a harsh mistress this first science fiction book I can never remember reading I read when I was in 7th or 8th grade and I still have that copy and it is dog-eared and worn and I hope to God I never have to buy another one because I want that book I think that's a really important point too is that many many books are personalized right you got this book from somebody that's got their signature on the top you can't buy that from Amazon since we're being webcast I'd be happy to talk about some of that later the basic the basic idea is that as I understand the legal issue some people may interpret my teaching people to build book scanners as inducing copyright infringement and that I know it's ten years it makes me frown too but unfortunately that is a problem another issue which may or may not have come up I'm a graduate student at a university and sometimes universities feel that they have ownership over things that students make happy to talk about that later have people in your community started sharing books with each other no we there so right I mean why would you that can't possibly be true within your community I within your forum I agree I don't know books let me restate that answer on Instructables.com I scanned a U.S. Navy handbook on how to use hand tools because I figured there would be people who want a book scanner who don't have the skills so I scanned this public domain book and put it up with the Instructable it's not there anymore mostly because it was poor quality made with that garbage scanner so everybody was like give me this crap why would I make this if the quality sucks I have been or in the forum for example when people have problems with a specific page of a book sometimes they'll post that page to see what the issue was with the software or something you know we're not in the in the business of distribution I kind of suspect that the people that contact me privately via email who don't share their designs in the forum might have other uses for their scanners but the people that I work with by and large are really the stories that I told you and I would also say that the discussion on the forum is about the scanner and the creation I'm sorry, talking about you I didn't mean to suggest that the forum had become a center of trading I just didn't suggest that the fact that others who were using the information gathered in the forum probably were digitizing information that they were sharing was that that seems a likely current. Now on the other hand if you accidentally search Google for say O'Reilly books or something you'll find by and large O'Reilly books is a poor example because they actually do sell nice PDFs right but there are other publishers where you can actually the majority of books you'll find have not been scanned they're leaked preprints with crop marks and everything on them right they're not coming from scanners I think that's an important point to make let me ask you a question how many people are contributing to presumably a lot of people on your forum are there for support or to work things out people there are contributing to the design I view the software but the hard part I view a couple answers to that question I view these these again these are not all by any means but these 40 some different designs actually is a kind of distributed proofing of all these I mean like there's a scanner made of styrofoam right and that's actually a contribution because we know it can be made that way and that guy by the way actually gave a talk on it too in Berlin which I was very happy about here's you know this guy I don't know if you can see but there are skateboard wheels running the platen and so in a way the designs have been proofed and I'm trying to apply that right now see if I can make this come up I don't know the scanner was on the front of the CBC today but nobody but the article wasn't about the scanner okay I don't know if I'll get in anyway I'm making a new what I call the new standard scanner so people have been working from this old instructable which is very long and arduous and doesn't reflect all the cool things that people have figured out so I'm making one that incorporates all that so that's 40 or so people that have done hardware make it more like 80 80 will do hardware stuff and then presumably in software software the numbers are less so Rob the original founder made a page post processor Aaron my friend made a page post processor a guy named Spamsicle made one there was a bunch of sort of scattering immediately and then we found Scantailer and it worked so well I mean it was just like a revelation and from there the problem is that Scantailer is such a crazy piece of software that it's taking these guys time to get into it and so just now we're seeing the dewarping with the cooperation of the original author and how much of this stuff do you think I don't know how well you know the commercial alternatives but I mean how much of the stuff that's up here are the kinds of things you find in the commercial ones I guess I don't really know how to answer that the hardware design is you have a v-shaped piece of glass and lights and cameras it's really no mystery the the software side is totally different though like in our case you unload the cameras and you feed the images into Scantailer and you know but there are like a tease uses I think it's called Covax VRS is their image ingestion system and it does stuff and I don't know what it is because I can't afford it I wouldn't buy it anyway a short question are you using CHDK on the cameras? Yeah it's actually SDM so CHDK is a hacked firmware for power shot cameras and it was one of the tricks that made this thing go so now when the cameras they see a little pulse on the USB port and they fire at the same time that was one of the original beautiful things and there's a guy named David Sykes who ported the original camera hack to do stereo photography which this is pretty close to stereo photography and that's how we get that's how we achieve that so then let me pose it has to do with your view of fair use when I'm when I'm listening to where you're seeing the legal line you're imagining someone with a science fiction collection who has a personal desire to have some piece of it in a digital format and engages in a form of self-help with one of your standards to digitize it and the question there is that copy an infringement of the copyright or is that a fair use and it's your assertion that that's a fair use that's right do you think that I don't know I put it to the crowd does that stand up it's the same question if you rip your CV to put it in your iPod I mean nobody's really tested that I don't think the copyright owners really want that test to close to Betamax I think they may not have tested that exact thing but have they tested for example copying vinyl to cassette something much older same thing well I think that that's something that the copyright holders wanted to avoid because they claim that that would be a violation but nobody's ever taken it to court because I think there's a good chance that it isn't I think you probably have a fair use right to change the format of of something you own I would be more concerned about the market claim in fair use principles isn't there some one of the principles is that you're infringing on somebody's market by one of the factors one of the factors one of the four possible that's a negative factor I can't sell you the same thing you've already bought yet again you can convert it yourself but there's there's four factors and I think it is very likely that it would be hard for a court to say gee you bought that CD and you downloaded it to your iPod you've just committed a copyright infringement because that's not a fair use I think that would be extremely hard and I think that if somebody did I think Congress might actually react to that so I think that as long as I mean I built a scanner to scan a microfilm I had because I didn't have a microfilm reader but I had a computer so I just scanned this microfilm and you know it's 1940s I don't think anybody wants to assert copyright but clearly it's theoretically could be within copyright I don't consider that to be anything but fair use I want to look at it on my computer which is easy I don't think it's been tested but I think that it would be very hard if that weren't fair use I think one thing that sort of bothers me right is I'm on the internet and you know there was the CBC or whatever a moment ago looks like the page actually came up and you know I think actually I think Les had talked about this recently but along these lines like I had to download this picture to view it and so I've copied it and once we get into these kind of further ends of copying doesn't it just break into nonsense I don't know how copyright law works in this service you have a license to look at that web page by the fact of them putting it up there most likely even if I buy some pre digitized music and get a copy of that legally on my hard drive I might need to make a copy of it into the memory of the computer to play it but that's a copy I mean there's a court case that says converting it from the disk into your memory is making a copy and violates copyright infringement I mean the problem is the courts have had a very hard time dealing with electronic issues it was really easy when there was a book and if you scanned the book and gave it to copied the book and gave it to somebody that was easy now it gets very very complicated and yet there was a recent decision having to do with centralized Teavos where it wasn't a copy you know but I don't think that's sort of the issue here the issue is I think that as long as you're digitizing your personal collection so that you can dump it to your Kindle or read it in the bathroom on your articulated monitor you're probably not much at risk all right so now take the next step it would now get a world of people who digitize their books with this explosive phenomenon of scanning that makes it so easy to do and then you get David's question do you imagine somehow this distributed archive of scanned digital open bits is not going to be aggregated by someone well that's not the question of course it will be the question is is that legal and the answer is probably no I mean remember that somebody had that great set where as long as you had the CD they would store it on their server this was back in pre-Napster yeah I mean that was the concept and that didn't fly but unless of course you're whatever the people with the digitized Tivo is where suddenly they got away with it because they're doing exactly the same thing but this gets down to what is copyright you say it didn't fly and it's perfectly true it didn't fly the court came along and hit the company for I don't know 50 million dollars it was one of the outrageous things I mean it was amazing so if what we're trying to say is what do we expect nexus that expresses itself through quotes to say that's one thing but if on the other hand we're saying what would be some kind of reasonable way of organizing the way bits are going to work in a free space then it's a very different question actually my point was slightly different which was this little guy got trounced but when the big cable company did it they got away with it now maybe it was because they had better lawyers but essentially they were both doing the same thing which is they were using a centralized server to store material that the end user had proof of right to view they stored separate copies for each viewer that I think is really interesting because there's a seller's privilege here does anybody think that Amazon stocks 12 million copies of whatever e-book they're selling in one file which they're copying out and so in a way there's kind of a seller's privilege there that's implicit technologically speaking they're paying a license though for each copy I mean ultimately I think you're going for a different the question is certainly if someone could show they have a copy of the book that somebody else has digitized I think they have a right to download the digital copy they've got right to that I'm not sure if that's where you're going or if you're just I mean if you're going back to because there's no digital copy of it everybody should have a right to it whether they've licensed it or not and I have some argument with you on that issue but certainly if I have a copy of a Heinlein book and you've digitized it I should be able to copy the digitized from you as long as I can show that look I bought that thing for 25 cents having at the local you know, book fair and in fact I've done that material that I have because I was too lazy to digitize it myself and while I think legally that's there's an argument that it's a copyright violation I think it would be very hard to win on it That's an excellent point I had a CD not too long ago I ripped one of the songs which was scratched I could not get a good image of it I downloaded that song off the internet I felt that that was fair because I owned a copy of it and I think one thing Charlie's pointing is there's a real schism between what the law says is fair and legal and what they're going to hit you in fact there's a horrible decision that says if there's a disc somewhere that's copyright that has a copyright on it you can't even get the reduced penalties because it's somewhere it's protected and what people think is reasonable there was a very funny description of a new service I think on Lifehacker today of someone where you send them all your CDs they send you back electronic companies and then they send them off to the third world and there was this discussion about whether that was legal or not and a bunch of people said of course it was I bought it so I can do whatever I want with it I think that there's a real lack of understanding of what the law is but there's also a normative question of what should people's rights be But effectively that reduces the physical book to a token of it's just like why don't I just buy little wooden coins that say that I own a high line But that's the issue Should the original creator be compensated or not I mean as long as you have a token that says the original creator has been compensated then you should get access to the material But then how would it work I can borrow you can lend me any book you have right for as long as you want then you should be able to lend me a digital copy of your book as well as long as I don't keep the original I don't see any problem with that see that's weird but the question is it all comes back to how do we compensate creators as you know as Professor Fisher says the problem is they didn't think about it it's like they don't even have to produce rational things they can produce outcomes that are so screamingly irrational that we look at them and we all know that they're just ridiculously excessive right and yet we have a congress that hasn't addressed it so it's not a rational thing that you're up against on the other side well no but we have a congress that has given them the tools for these irrational results so congress just keeps backing them up well that's giving them the tools I mean congress could fix it in a stroke of a pen when somebody gets hit with a 14 year old gets hit with a $27,000 fine you know because a circuit court says well you know somewhere there was a disc with a copyright on it I mean if that's not crazy and nobody does anything about it then you've got to wonder what congress is up to except for collecting checks isn't it funny though sorry I was just going to say isn't it funny that author compensation is the least of all this new book technology I mean really I think that's bizarre right now we have this sort of catholic model you've got somebody in between you and God I would like to see that guy removed and we pay the authors directly we don't need printing presses and trucks and all this stuff anymore and yet for whatever reason the majority of authors who have spoken up have sided with the authors guild or I shouldn't say a majority because I don't know that number but many and the authors guild themselves are you know doing things like turning off the Kindle and stuff and yet there's still there's a moral platitude being put out there that we must pay the author I agree but it's not part of this new technology and that's wacky is there a legal distinction between scanning a book as an image and converting it to OCR and allowing it to be searchable that sort of thing it seems like just scanning it as an image is basically a photocopy you can make copies of it easily you're not really changing the format of it but using OCR suddenly you have the data in did Google make that argument that converting it into an index through OCR was fair use was the transformative work but it's kind of weird right it started out as digital text probably and then you make it into digital text and now you've added value or been transformative transformative it's a copy either way so it's not about whether it's a copy it's about whether there's a fair use right to make that copy and you know one of the issues is whether it's transformative or not I mean to the extent that a photocopy is no different than the original work but I think it's very interesting because it does differentiate usage so you could imagine some market drawing a line that's very interesting what you say because you have to imagine the idea of copying them as in terms of the differences in one format I mean if I were to scan my books I wouldn't just want PDFs I'd want to search them online but the PDF should have underlined text if you do it right the default for Adobe is when you scan it it's OCR and it's actually got a pretty good deletion but I think that's a really important point that's totally lost again in all this discussion it's actually the most what will be reading books most in the future will be computers and not humans because I mean that's exactly what Google is doing with them right they're going to train their translation engines for different things it's these quote unquote non-screen uses that are going to dominate and that's another thing that is basically ignored in the public discourse it's like well authors got to get paid so publishers got to get paid but who's doing the reading and I just think it's interesting for me that's the only exciting thing about reading electronically reading on a screen is no fun I prefer a screen so I can do the things I can with my worldwide acknowledgement of copyright infringement when I was in law school I had yay books this heavy and I would copy the stuff we were going to do at home on my home just copy machine and bring the copies in because I didn't want to drag books back and forth and I considered that a perfectly fair use this would have been a much nicer way of doing it but I think that there's tons of fair use applications of this so I think it fits and I don't see how anybody could claim that didn't have fair use or legal right so I don't know how likely somebody is to win on a claim that it's contributory this is a fairly new field and we've seen a lot of action also commercial action have you run into patents is this a field that you've seen with patents so patents they're not too bad actually the majority of patents that remain are on things like page turning mechanisms and stuff that's just too complicated for any individual to produce I don't know the software patent world at all it seems to me like we're probably going to come up on a bunch of software patents relating to ebook reading technology but I don't have a good idea that's spread I mean to me the major bad thing about the ebook industry as it stands is that the books that they're selling don't enjoy the benefits of their medium as I was saying you know it's like you get these books that you can't annotate you get books that you can't have read back to you that you can't copy for your friends sort of we're getting these really broken product at the beginning and the really bad thing is that people will get normalized to that being the expectation of what a digital book is so I think what we're seeing with digital music is control over formats you know the central control of itunes was draconian but it was required to get labels over the hump of let's make this stuff available and then over time that you know a lot of those things have changed and so if you ultimately don't appreciate the licensing rules of itunes then buy from amazon or buy from some other source the other reality is that there will always be people who prefer time to money have more time than money or people have more money than time and so you know there will be people who will happily pay whatever it takes to not have to lift a bunch of pages and scan their own book and over time the price will get smaller the controls will get smaller and that gap will decrease I mean the subtext of your argument though is that we need to submit to more control to get to I'm just saying I don't agree with your conclusion you don't have to submit to anything I'm just saying that over time as demand increases for these digital products then there will be a marketplace that will cause someone to differentiate based on licensing terms differentiate based on formats and that will cause innovation which will ultimately lead to a better product I have to disagree a little bit because people seem to put up with having to watch the FBI warning on DVDs over and over and over again because they can't fast forward past it and if people weren't normalized to that they would say wait I could do that with my VCR and they would all boycott it but you know people accept it In fairness almost every free or open source software DVD player allows you to fast forward I absolutely yes you can turn off the OP flags watching it on a computer but the truth is but the market has not reacted to I mean there hasn't been an uproar such that they reacted and said gee maybe people don't have to watch, in fact it's gotten worse on Blu-ray you now are forced to watch the previews and yet there doesn't seem to be a I don't think I'm disagreeing I think what I'm suggesting is that what's happened is that the community of people basically figured out how to get around this they built their own players very tiny and even though what they're doing is almost certainly violating some sort of license or some sort of deal perhaps on the DVD player as long as it's a small enough community of sort of I don't know that basically the powers that we are having I'm arguing about we've become normalized to being told what we can do with our media I mean I think that there's always this argument like if you buy an iPhone and you fill it with iTunes music or whatever well you can crack it, you can run your own you can run Citi or whatever the alternative app stores I went the hardcore way and I bought the Linux phone well it turns out there are like 10 people in the world who have this phone and nobody does anything with it and it's a great I love this phone but it's sorry it's not practical like the iPhone and I just think that that approach it's definitely not optimal it's like okay well sure we can overcome but that sucks I mean why wouldn't you know if publishers spent all the money making ebooks such an unbelievably advantageous product that we'd buy them outright I mean like why don't ebooks show us things we've never seen before like for example the Ben Fry recently did this project I'll see if I can pull it up it's amazing Ben Fry Darwin so what he did is he took Darwin's origin of species in six editions and showed the passage of different let's see if this will load the passage of different phrases throughout the book so you actually get to watch the evolution of Darwin's ideas visually this is an idea for an ebook sort of situation where the ebook has advantages that a scanner could never give you or imagine that a publisher could show you the hand of the editor which is something that's been forever opaque to end users or there could be an author's cut and why aren't they doing that they're investing their money in all this awful crap that just makes things hard for people I think that there's a much better way to approach this problem which is to make the product incontrovert as you're sort of saying that the lysing in product is so awesome that I can't help but buy it look I have I could have built a scanner and scanned it it's available for you it's available for you it's available for you but again I'm not an idiot because ultimately 10 bucks of my time it took me literally 2 seconds and so how do I value my time and did I would I have liked to annotate it maybe or had it on my laptop whatever maybe but ultimately why do we adore that FBI word because who cares it's just not enough of an inconvenience for enough of us to kick if it was if it came up every 15 minutes I think that there would be a reaction to that that's a problem how many how many you know millions of hours that we spent watching the same FBI I actually I'll do something it's only water torture it was a new format that took away a few that we had previous that really was it when I first saw my first DVD I thought this format will never catch on because I could fast forward before that's what surprised me but I was wrong well it can fast forward on a DVD it's not as fast sometimes well no they disable there's something called operator flags and they disable fast forward on the FBI word and now they disable it on the previous it's quite extraordinary so you actually it takes you 10 minutes to get to the content I mean I can rip the content and see it or I can play it on a player but I'd like to be able to watch it on my big screen I'd rather not have to spend 40 minutes ripping the thing and disable it but I can't get enough people upset about it to change the market part of the problem is the standards keep changing I mean there's no agreement about what is the book standard you've got PDF but a lot of governments now are saying that it's not it's not open source so they're not using it so you know there's all these different formats and you know if you're not a Mac person why do you want to go into the iTunes thing I know you can have iTunes on Windows yeah it's awful though so it's like what standard are we going to write the laws for is iTunes going to be the standard now things are going for XML you know open doc formats I guess do we is it necessary to tie it intimately with the actual structure of the bits or is it better that the law gives you guidelines that sort of say it's got to be this open or you can't restrict something in this way or it can only be restricted in this way it's also what the format can do adding extra value searchability and stuff like that I mean who knows what nobody keeps jamming so much stuff into the PDF format and you know I mean 3D models I remember almost like it's a little Mac download for the reader and now it's ridiculous but who's going to be the standard and now that they're not making an open source you know so you're right but I think there and this is just my approach to everything I guess I'm kind of a one trick pony but you know I would say like open source programmers you could make an ebook format that was so incontrovertibly better than everything else you know like it supported all the features that everybody wants then that would have some chance of adoption although there's deja vu which is actually in many ways much better than PDF and it's totally ignored so I mean I don't know I guess that's all I could say the problem though is that right now the publishing industry is like the music industry you know couldn't get a talk together about the formats so Napster was born and everyone just said well if you're not going to decide we're going to you know they kind of everyone kind of agreed that mp3 is going to be the way we're going to go and then meanwhile you know Rome is burning while they wouldn't decide on how they're going to distribute music and now it's it's crazy and now the same thing is how to move the industry and now publishing you know no one's making a decision we're just going to do it ourselves and you know yeah you think that in some way what's needed is a decision but they can't really decide because I'm going to contradict myself but we don't we haven't really agreed upon a common format you know what how things are going to be distributed and I think that that's part of the problem because they don't know how to write laws or how to you know decide what's fair use with certain formats you better answer your question I just think that right now there's so much stuff up in the air that they just don't know how to you know how to decide and it's kind of funny watching you know these kinds of projects come together because you know they're okay we're not going to write for you now and it's there's a lot of books a lot of information that's not available in digital format and there's a lot of you know information out there that you know would really be helpful if it was distributed and now with the internet around the world you know you get things into the hands of people that really do some good but if there's a digital version I'm not saying we should pirate but it I mean the technology does seem to suggest all kinds of great outcomes that are currently not possible or not legal a couple quick technical questions are those cameras still available are they still you name bucks that are no I bought them last year about this time there are new models SX I'm going to say them on the camera SX200 and A1000 seem to be the best you need to find ones that support the crack firmware or that not cracked that the custom firmware there's no cracking involved I was able to find 590 A590s on eBay that were labeled as broken primarily because the flash didn't work which doesn't matter 50-60 bucks a piece they sometimes show up in refurbished outlets too like they've been available 7 or 8 times for 89 bucks over the last year does the other firmware allow you to support minimizing the EXIF data to depersonalize it if you wish no but the EXIF data is not preserved through the scanning process not preserved any Daniel thank you very much thank you