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Austrian Professor Creates Kindle E-Book Copier With Lego Mindstorms
An anonymous reader writes "Using a Lego Mindstorms set, a Mac, and optical character recognition, Austrian professor Peter Purgathofer created a makeshift ebook copier. From the article: 'It's sort of a combination of high tech meets low. The scanning is done by way of the Mac's iSight camera. The Mindstorms set does two things: Hits the page-advance button on the Kindle (it appears to be an older model, like the one in the picture above), then mashes the space bar on the Mac, causing it to take a picture.' Purgathofer calls the creation a 'reflection on the loss of long established rights.' Check out the Vimeo video for a demonstration."
Legislation to remove the analog holes above the nose and replace then with HDCP approved hardware.
how long before he get's sued / page taken down?
Sooner than that, he'll be grabbed by CIA and kidnapped to Gitmo for harming US national security.
Ezekiel 23:20
The lectures of Peter Purgathofer were one of the reasons I stopped studying computer science in Vienna around 15 years ago. Which in retrospect was big luck, since I changed to chemistry and found my calling there. Thank you, Peter!
The second reason was a most boring lecture I ever attended, "Work sociology and organization psychology", held by a crazy women. I kid you not! No wonder real scientists are looking down on people studying "computer science" in Vienna. The people actually doing computer science are all at the mathematics faculty.
Captcha: undoes :)
It's an art project. It says so in the description. RTFA! :-P
I had to read the summary a couple of times and was still left wondering why would one need that fancy machine to copy e-books -- why not just copy the files, I thought. Then the three letters "DRM" popped in my mind and I realized that he had to construct that all to just circumvent that stupid protection. Ah well, at least that was probably a fun project to work on.
What are you talking about? Robots and/or Legos are always necessary.
Then why is it powered by a kangaroo?
"But they'll be dead soon. Fucking kangaroos."
--
BMO
I'm surprised this works at all. The electronic book system I'm using (not kindle) shuts down your account if your "page viewing is too regular". To get this to work really well, you'd need to throw in some random delays just like a human reading.
OK, how long will it take until the DRM running on the "cloud" OCR provider recognizes what's going on, and puts a stop to this? The Mac should be capable of running a local OCR. What happens at home stays at home... what happens "in the cloud" is everyone's business.
Overall, this would be a cool thing to set up... start it, go to work, then come home and have the whole book on your laptop. Just get rid of the "cloud middleman".
Willie...
Write a small program to flip the pages on the Windows version and take screenshots.
Rube Goldberg would be proud. But there are much easier way to get the job done.
Purgathofer calls the creation a 'reflection on the loss of long established rights.'
The right to make a copy of a book and instantly send it to a million other people all around the world without the author or publisher receiving anything for their work?
Except (at least 6 months ago) Amazon's DRM was very easy to get around. All you needed was a plugin for Calibre and you were set. Still, it seems that even with this guy's physical contraption it is still easier to copy an ebook than it is to copy the physical alternative. I mean, even the route that he took, he could still just set the Kindle on top of a photo copier and duplicate the pages that way. The key thing that was lost in the digital book revolution is the ability to lend.
calibre plus the right plugin could already do that
If you didn't want DRM'ed ebooks, you shouldn't have bought a DRM'ed ebook! You have the right to invest your money as you see fit. You don't have the right to break a contract with Amazon, which you signed willingly, by copying a kindle-ebook. The marked really works as easy as that: buy that, which you value and don't buy which you don't.
Geez, Calibre for Mac + a plugin would be a lot easier and *much* quicker.
Like a Mindstorm machine to digitize a paper book.
Amusing, of course, but irrelevant, because DRM isn't about piracy, and it certainly isn't about rewarding content creators, it's about preventing competition.
As long as you can't read an Amazon Kindle on a Nook, DRM is doing its job. If Nooks and Barnes and Noble are getting driven out of business, DRM is doing its job well.
An automated eBook scanner doesn't do anything to make the eBook business more competitive.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I download kindle books all the time but I don't have a kindle. I download them to my PC, strip the DRM off of them as you can do with ANY DRM. DRM is garbage the instant the content is on your machine and ANY portion of your system has the ability to decrypt the file. Well, my kindle PC reader can read the files. Which means the encryption key is on my machine. Which means all the software has to do is find the key, use it, and then I can convert the file to anything I want.
No special equipment needed and it takes about 2 minutes to convert it from a kindle file to whatever I want.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
One day I was looking at a pile of papers from school I was thinking about saving digitally and recycling. But I didn't have a scanner, and I sure wasn't about to go buy one. But I did have a printer. So I used some DOS command to print a blank document, and I put my papers in the feed. And then I had a Canon camera which I aimed at the output of the printer. I then wrote a script that would print, and then sleep, and then take a picture. The only trouble was that it took about 30 seconds to get everything situated. And at that rate, it would probably take 2 years to scan all that I had. So ultimately, I threw away those papers.
Brilliantly said.
It only takes 2 hours to copy a $2.99 book. Such a deal.
Well, I proposed doing this 4 years ago and all I got was +4 Funny for my (I admit not quite Herculean) efforts.
On the other hand, actually doing it, for the express point of showing how ebook DRM has no real effect on preventing piracy but only hurts the consumer, is much more damaging to the publishing industry. So, it comes down to whether the people who have the big red [GO LEGAL] button in front of them have heard about the Streisand Effect.
I just finished re-reading the Vorkosigan series by Lois McMasters Bujold, and Miles uses a similar technique to tracelessly access secure information from his cousins' office half a planet away. His cousin turned his secure console to face his non-secure console's camera so Miles could read the info that he needed.
There is nothing new under the sun, or at least nothing new that isn't covered by at least a dozen patents.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.