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App Gives You Free Ebooks of Your Paperbacks When You Take a "Shelfie"
Peter Hudson writes Alan Henry writes on LifeHacker: "Paper books are awesome, but sometimes there's no beating the portability of an ebook on your phone or tablet. If you have a physical book you'd love to read on the go, BitLit may be able to get you an ebook version for free—all you need to do is take a photo of your book case: a 'shelfie.'" CNET notes that it's not quite as useful as it sounds: "As you might expect from a startup in the e-book space, BitLit currently offers a very limited selection -- only about 75,000 books, so the likelihood of a match is pretty slim. Browsing the library, I recognized very few mainstream authors."
I'm the app's developer... If anybody has any questions, I'm happy to answer them. I should probably get these out of the way first because this is /. 1. Yes it's possible to cheat the computer vision algorithms with the following: A dry erase market and an acetate sheet; a high quality color printer; a dark pencil that you really grind into the copyright page. 2. No you can't get free ebooks by taking shelfies in libraries or bookstores. Not unless you're also willing to write your name into said paper books. 3. If you really want an ebook there are probably easier ways to download one without getting out of your chair. 4. There are 234 publishers on board (as of this morning). They offer about 80,000 titles. 5. About half of those 80K titles are public domain and we give them to you without requiring that you sign the copyright page. 6. Of the half of the 80K titles that aren't public domain about 30% are free and 70% are paid. 7. Of the 70% (of the 40K copyrighted titles) the average discount you'll get is 86% off the digital list price... so when we say "highly discounted" we think that's fair. 8. Of the 234 publishers on board, I can count on two mittens the number who require us to use DRM. 9. The LifeHacker and CNet stories totally blew our servers up and my co-founder and I have been scrambling to get more AWS instances up and the back end distributed across them so that OCR can run faster... but as it stands the shelfie queue is about 13,000 deep... so the 15 minute processing time that it says in the app is wrong by about 6 hours. Summary: Yes you can cheat, but it's probably easier to cheat in other ways. Lots of titles, the majority are free as in beer, and almost all are free as in speech.
...What are the odds people will simply start snapping pictures of the shelves in their local bookstore in order to get free copies?
The user you requested does not exist, no matter how much you wish this might be the case.
Maybe a new, less obvious Nerval's Lobster?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Confused about how it works. 1. So first off, they are not all free, sometimes you just get a discount? 2. How does the actual registration of books work? You have to sign the books unless they are publicly freely available? 3. And it has to be done one at a time? There has to be way to do mass library registrations? 4. You have some algorithm to automatically detect the spine? the cover? of the books already in your collection, the rest will not be detected, and you will have to redo them if they become available?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Indeed the library is thin. Even public domain book are scarce: I could find Rousseau's Emile or Confessions, but not its Social contract, for instance.
And of course it would have country limitations.
In the information era, this is almost insulting, it is were not to be expected.
So, why is that? Is it the publishers that are forcing this? If so, care to name names?
morcego
The pitch was that the company gets to know your taste in books, since you've taken a picture of your bookcase. How much do you think a bookseller (Amazon, for example) would pay to get that data? Another "People who bought this also bought ..."
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The user you requested does not exist, no matter how much you wish this might be the case.
You own the books, so pirate the damn things and have them in the format you want without region restrictions. There is no legal nor ethical problem with this.
Great questions... sorry the actually method wasn't super clear in my first post. Here's how it works: you take the shelfie and the algorithms will identify every book on your shelf regardless of whether or not it's available... so even if you don't have any eligible books, you still get a tool that'll quickly and painlessly inventory your entire library. Once you've taken the shelfie and all the books have been ID'd we'll send you an email with download links to any books you own for which we have public domain ebooks. For any paper books you have which are not yet in the public domain, but which are from the 234 publishers that we've signed deals with, these books will show up in a list of "eligible" titles in the app. To claim an eligible title you have to take a picture of your name written onto the book's copyright page. As we sign up more publishers we will push a notification to the app if you have a title from a new publisher that's part of your shelfie.
I'm an author and I find this horribly violating for some reason.
About how many books can you identify reliably with one picture (taking the average phone camera for these example)? I have over 1500 books on shelfs myself. I don't suppose their is a csv import option?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
this is a shellfie for me:
$ echo $0
/bin/bash
There is no way you have access to every cover ever produced. What sort of success rate do you get, and how much does damage effect it?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The app is currently live in Canada, US, UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa... publishers often sell rights into different markets, so publisher A might own the digital rights to a book in the UK and publisher B in France. We get territory information from publishers in a format called ONIX which makes it easy for us to offer the books that the publishers we've signed with have the rights to offer in the territories that can offer them. So that's one of the reasons we've restricted the area of distribution. The other reason is the language model we use for the OCR in the shelfie. Since we're reading spines and since OCR is never 100% accurate we've got to apply an auto-correct model against a language database. We've used the English language "books in print" database from Bowker for this. There's no reason we can't expand in more time... but we're only a team of 8 of which only 4 are technical. So it's more of a bandwidth issue than anything.
As a book collector, I'd never ruin a book by writing in it, but I can see why this might appeal to publishers as it destroys the resale value of physical books on the second hand market. It is kind of like the way Easton Press provides each new book with a book plate to devalue those books on the second-hand market.
Not a bad idea for people who don't really like physical books, though, and only have them kicking around through necessity.
We don't have access to every cover, but we do have a surprisingly good database of book covers. I think we have about 15 million or so... but we actually only need good cover art for the books from the publishers we've signed with (and they're happy, of course, to give it to us)... for all the other books that we'd identify in a shelfie we're actually using a deep neural network to read the letters off the spine and match that to a database of books in print.
Ahh, thank you.
I live in Brazil, and most of my books are in English.
But I can understand your reasons for restricting the area. You, for once, have a good reason for it.
Thank you. Hope we can eventually get it here.
Cheers,
morcego
"database of books in print."
So nothing that is not new or a classic?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I would guess because the publisher only purchased the rights for the book in certain countries.
The legality of it depends on the copyright laws of the country you live in... I'll let the ethicist from NYTimes magazine answer the matter of whether or not you have the moral authority to pirate an ebook if you own the paperback.
It depends on the width of your books, but usually between 15 and 30. The best images are those shot in landscape mode where the book height is about 90% of the frame height. It's important that both the top and the bottoms of all the books are visible in the frame or else the segmentation algorithm doesn't work as well.
Putting aside the $5000 dollar hardcore collectibles (first editions of moby dick) used books stores and patrons really do not care if someones name is written on the copyright page.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I agree that this isn't for the true bibliophile and it's not for beautiful leather bound first editions. But for mass market paperbacks, it's not as bad. Also for people who don't want their messy penmanship in the book, you can use a bookplate sticker or stamp and the app will accept that as you having "marked" the book. Post-it-notes do not count.
Sorry "books in print" is actually a product/brand name for Bowker's database of book metadata. It's a database of about 15 million records. Although it's expensive for us to license it, they do a lot of work hand cleaning up the records to ensure that spellings are consistent and duplicates are merged.
Brazil is a very good target market for us... It's number 2 after German when we look at target markets with English language reading (but not speaking as a primary language) populations.
That's correct. Often publishers (at the request of authors) will sell the print or digital rights to a book to another publisher in another country. The reason for this is that a local publisher will have better connections and resources for marketing that book in a local market. This is obviously way less true in digital, but it still happens a lot.
LOL... nothing. If I'd paid them then I'd have paid them not to post it on Xmas eve.
I actually like the idea. Think of it - you've got your collection of books sitting in your bookcases, but you're getting old, your eyes aren't what they used to be ... being able to re-read a favorite book in an electronic format that you can enlarge the fonts is going to make a lot of people happy.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Putting aside the $5000 dollar hardcore collectibles (first editions of moby dick) used books stores and patrons really do not care if someones name is written on the copyright page.
Completely untrue. Has a massive impact on the value of "collectible" books, even in the sub-$100 range. Not a biggie on a mass-market paperback (as these are worthless anyway), but kills the value of many other books.
ethicist
You don't need an "ethicist" to answer a question that is completely subjective ("Is X moral?"). Decide that for yourself.
I books on house not read them... news see all happening in worlds and stories
I agree. When I saw your comment it just reminded me of that article in the NYTimes magazine, so I thought I'd post a link to it. Sorry. I didn't want to seem preachy.
I don't own an IOS or Android device.
I have a Palm OS PDA (Clie) with a camera.
I have a digital camera.
I have a few Macs and Linux and Windows machines.
I have lots and lots of books.
What do I need most, and how do I do this?
Hmmm... if you can run an Android simulator on your Linux box and have a good webcam and a powerful headlamp, I could send you the app APK and you could submit shelfie photos that way.
>No you can't get free ebooks by taking shelfies in libraries or bookstores. Not unless you're also willing to write your name into said paper books.
They make disappearing ink...
Yes, they also make BitTorrent clients...
How does the ap determine that a bookplate has been affixed to the page and isn't just placed there to bypass the ap security? I can see taking one bookplate with no sticky on the back into a library or bookstore and simply shooting photos of it on the copyright page of any book one wants...
- In Soviet Korea, only old people loose all their bases to Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits overlords.
The bookplate copyright page photos typically require human verification since the name recognition algorithms aren't turned to look for them... so it's a human validation. If a user suddenly claims 10 ebooks within a few hours using a bookplate, then it probably warrants me (or somebody at BitLit) sending him/her an email asking if there's something fishy going on. We haven't seen much cheating to be honest... I think if people want to get free ebooks by cheating/pirating there are much easier ways.
Have you considered adding BitTorrent support so the ap automatically searched for/downloads torrents for eBooks that are not yet in your library? ;)
- In Soviet Korea, only old people loose all their bases to Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits overlords.
What if my signature happens to look exactly like ©?
No this isn't something that we'll do. As a company we'll always work with the author/publisher and if they don't want to offer the bundled ebook then we won't do anything nefarious or in the nether regions of copyright law to circumvent their wishes.
The author suggested how to work around that in his opening post. Sign a sheet of acetate and place that over the copyright page.
OK. It won't be soon; I'll ask again when I've got the stuff together and have time to try that.
Why did you create that horrible farce of a word? "Shelfie?" Seriously?
It's been mentioned you can try using a piece of transparency paper, or similar. Sign your name on it and hold it over the copyright page.
sounds good... just email me on the info@ account which actually goes to everybody in the company.
Indonesia Etc: Exploring the Improbable Nation and The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS
Her publisher in the UK, Granta, signed up to the programme, but only for those two books and for (AFAIK) no others so far. She pretty much had to bully them into doing it. Once you've signed the book, the e-book is free (bar a small processing fee). the process has worked nicely and though the publisher hasn't pushed it hard, and we haven't yet seen huge uptake, the future looks bright.
We tried to get the US publisher (Norton) interested and they could not be persuaded. Perhaps now with all this publicity they might be.
When it comes to new tech and business methods, the publishing industry might be even more of a sclerotic dinosaur than the movie industry. Don't get me started on the horror that was getting an enhanced e-book (with slides, audio, video etc etc) done.
> so even if you don't have any eligible books, you still get a tool that'll quickly and painlessly inventory your entire library.
Are you data-mining those inventories and handing off the data to the big data profilers/stalkers like BlueKai?
Because it's a the perfect combination of correct-me-if-you-dare-bait and neologism-portmanteau. That, and I couldn't wipe the shit eating grin off my face for days after I thought of it for the first time. Judge me accordingly.
Hi Peter,
We exchanged e-mails a couple of days, but my problem is still unresolved and my Kyocera Event is still showing in the Android Market as incompatible in spite of your saying that it matches all of the requirements. Are there a lot of people having such problems or is my problem relatively rare?
Also the summary and the linked article lists the size of the current library, but I have not been able to find that actual list. Is there a list of available books so that those of us who cannot yet run the app or download their shelfie can see if we have many matches to what you can offer?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Sorry for the delay in looking into the compatibility of your device. When smoke started coming out of servers yesterday Marius and I ran for the (metaphorical) for extinguishers... but I haven't forgotten about checking up on your device. You are the only person who's have a device that "on paper" should work... but that isn't working. Did I already suggest that we send you the APK and you install it directly? That's certainly something we could do. And yes, there is a way for you to check which books are in the system: http://www.bitlit.com/books/
The premise is incorrect, as it assumes all electronic formats are produced by publishers, and that is not true (or isn't always). A person who makes an epub of a book they own and let's me, another owner, download it, is not immoral. Nor am I immoral for partaking of the format shifting. Downloading a publisher's epub without authorization is certainly stealing.
All the best to you. However, I'm not going to deface the paper version of the book, especially a hard cover, just to get a free or cheaper e-book. I'm a reader who likes his books pristine, I don't highlight and I don't take notes in the margins. If I want to take notes that's what note cards or my phone is for. Scrawling in the book is anathema to me. Based on the reviews I saw in the Apple app store, I'm not alone in this. And like one of the other reviews I saw, I also have a largish paper book library. Take that for what you will.
how do you deal with people just writing their name on a piece of paper and putting that on the copyright page? manual verification, including manually reading the copyright page and checking that's the copyright page? just by that it would be too tedious to cheat that way?
(it's already pretty tedious to have to write the name on every book, that kind of takes away the getting the entire library in a snap as I find that it's pretty unlikely for many people to have _any_ public domain books)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Back then "Online Advertisements" were all the rage. Those were animated GIF images designed to influence the behaviour of the users. There were some companies having "pay for surf" business models where you installed a piece of malware onto your computer which would display you banners. You would then get paid money for that. Of course all of those companies went bankrupt as most people simply cheated the software. The disappearance of "Online Advertisements" essentially meant that nobody tried again. Today people probably don't even know that a "banner ad" was.
It's probably the same way with personal data. There is a hype about selling it even though nobody quite knows how to generate money from it. So essentialy a whole generation of companies now collects huge masses of data for the secret services of the world to collect.
To claim an eligible title you have to take a picture of your name written onto the book's copyright page
Ah, so I have to deface my books and take two pictures (one of the copyright page, one of the cover)? No thanks.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
"Shelfie"
I've never wanted to bludgeon someone with a bat more than I do now. Make the trendwhore expressions stop.
I just watched your appearance on Dragon's Den again... soo close. If I ever pitch on that show I'll remember how they shied away from you and hopefully learn from your slight, well I wouldn't call it a mistake.. I think it was David's mistake. I suspect he will regret backing away.
I've been keeping an eye for an app like yours... I would like to see your technology utilized to index Value Village book selections.
Just submit it again in a week or two, I'm sure it'll make the front page again.
Same problem here in Portugal. I have an huge collection of english books. There are many ways to get around the country zone in the Internet age, personally it is not worth the bother. And for many, it is far easier to get a "pirate" copy. That is because of this bonehead policies of trying to transfer an outdated model to a new world that pirate contented is much more user friendly. It is fairly easy to guess who loses in the process because it does not adapt to new technologies, and then has the nerve to cry wolf.
Stealing is when you take something from someone, cut the crap. You are shilling and not good at it.
If you say so. I do not mind buying signed books at a much more discounted margins.
Amen to that. The bullshit people just parrot and seem to like never ceases to amaze me.
They didn't have the book I wanted:
http://athenae25.files.wordpre...
You are welcome on my lawn.
Hello Peter! I was one of the early adopters, and you and I had emailed. I need to follow up on your second email, so sorry, the holidays and all.
The main reason I began using the app is that I can get O'Reilly Nutshell ebooks, and I usually put my name in my reference books anyway. I'm looking forward to seeing more manuals added to further lighten my shelves!
There is a very good reason why we have such a huge English language reading market: if we want to read good books, we have to read in English. Unless you are talking Sidney Sheldon, Agatha Christie, or the latest Hollywood-is-making-a-blockbuster-movie-adaptation novel, you won't find it here. I mean, c'mon, even a good number of Stephen King books aren't available. How lame it that.
Anyway, I rather read them in English anyway. Translations sometimes can destroy a book.
morcego
It's nice to know that hundreds of years after giving away Copyright as a means of eliminating book licenses ... we are back to book licenses.
Oh, wait, sorry, I'm wrong: that's exactly the opposite of "nice to know".
This app demands access to your google account, and despite the fact that it claims only to want your "basic" profile information, I received complaints within minutes from people in my address book that I was sending them "spam" advertising this app.
Also, it uses a Web API to do it, so PrivacyGuard will not help you.
I already have an app that catalogues the books I own by reading the bar code (which contains the ISBN in most cases). It takes a couple of seconds on my cheap phone (Moto G) to scan each bar code - it takes longer to look them up in a DB.
The example they show takes a snapshot of 25 books at once, looking at the spines on a shelf, and then claims to identify all of them by doing OCR on the spine text combined with a database lookup. If that works, it will be quite a bit faster than anything that requires scanning individual books.
That's the theory, anyway. Looking at the reviews, it doesn't actually work well enough yet to bother.
We've been hit by a pretty hard by the LifeHacker and CNET stories over the last few days... the shelfie processing queue is normally about 15 minutes but has been over 6 hours for much of the last 2 days. It's now back to normal as we were able to spin up enough servers to handle the load. But your point about it being faster than scanning bar codes is exactly why we designed the shelfie feature.
There are a few tricks we use to stop people from using a print out of the copyright page. I won't mention all of them here... but one example is asymmetric page curvature... Copyright pages tend to be at the front or back of books as such the shot that captures the name on the copyright page shows the left / right pages with very different levels of curvature.
Fair play. It's not for everyone. And I'm not the kind of developer who begs and pesters people for 5 star reviews, and as such only the trolls typically bother to review the app. Haters are gonna hate (not calling you a hater, just stating in general). If somebody feels the need to give a 1-star review in the app store for a free app that they didn't read the description of before they downloaded it, I'm not going to be able to change that here.
Yup I agree... and for good measure:
http://xkcd.com/488/
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/g...
Thanks so much for being an early adopter. And thanks to Tim O'Reilly (I wonder if he reads comment threads) for coming on board early with the entire O'Reilly catalog. We've also just signed with Packt Publishing and Elsevier. And we have 2 deals in the works with other very large technical publishers whom I can't name yet, but who should come online in January.
Thanks for the feedback on the Dragon's Den episode... I'll be honest, it was a very interesting edit on the part of the CBC. We filmed the episode back in March 2014 and it aired on Oct 15 2014... I was on the sound stage for almost 90 minutes with the dragons and that got cut down to about 7 minutes on air. There were also quite a few things that the dragons said which weren't taped during my segment -- that's one of the things you sign away in going on the show: the CBC can edit anything a dragon said in another person's segment into your segment... basically the CBC is there to make dramatic TV. So I'll leave it at what got shown on TV wasn't very indicative of what actually happened on the sound stage.
I met Elizabeth in the UK at a book conference just before the London Book Fair. She was super enthusiastic about the idea of bundling she literally marched me over to the Granta booth at the book fair and sat me down with her publisher and explained the idea and said (to her publisher) "do this now". Honestly it was a totally amazing experience to see an author so excited about what we're doing.
The only other author who's ever been so excited about doing this has been Joe Hill (Stephan King's son). Joe found out about what we were doing on twitter after he mentioned that he thought you should get the ebook free if you buy the hardcover. Somebody tweeted back at him and he download the app on the spot and used it on Ellen Datlow's Fearful Symetries which he happened to have in his pocket (at the time the odds of a randomly selected book working in BitLit were about 1 in 10,000... so we got lucky). He got pretty excited about the idea and twisted HarperCollins' arm into letting us give away a free ebook copy of Heart-Shaped Box to everybody who owned the print version. He also went on to say some nice things about what we're doing.
Legally speaking in some countries e.g. Australia you are allowed (by those who make up laws) to format shift a paper book into an ebook. However, those same people who make up laws have determined that you actually have to doing the format shifting yourself in order for it to be considered legal. That is, you aren't allowed to download an ebook copy of a physical book you own. I'm an engineer and entrepreneur, so for now I'll donate to the EFF and let Cory Doctorow argue the finer points of the insanity we enjoy and call modern copyright law.
What is interesting is that serialized writing has made a return e.g. Wattpad (and various clones)... are the modern incarnations of the newspapers that Charles Dickens would publish his novels in serial format.
>only about 75,000 books
It's still more than amazon matchbook, amirite?
It's nice to know that hundreds of years after giving away Copyright as a means of eliminating book licenses ... we are back to book licenses.
Oh, wait, sorry, I'm wrong: that's exactly the opposite of "nice to know".
Copyright and its history shows the biggest flaw in democracies. Right at the beginning of discussions of copyright at the beginning of the 18th century, the elected representatives were willing to give publishers infinite copyright (even arguing the BS that it was for the authours/artists) and it was only the unelected upper house that pushed for a limited term (14+14) with the works going into the public domain "for the advancement of learning" after copyright expired as well as copies deposited in the libraries of the 2 main universities.
Now with the upper house being neutered in most western democracies and elected representatives in charge of writing laws, we see copyright being basically extended to infinite as well as other methods being applied to keep a work ever falling into the public domain.
The story of copyright is only one example of the problem of capitalist democratic societies where the government morphs into an institution to protect businesses instead of serving the people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
All the best to you. However, I'm not going to deface the paper version of the book, especially a hard cover, just to get a free or cheaper e-book. I'm a reader who likes his books pristine, I don't highlight and I don't take notes in the margins. If I want to take notes that's what note cards or my phone is for. Scrawling in the book is anathema to me. Based on the reviews I saw in the Apple app store, I'm not alone in this. And like one of the other reviews I saw, I also have a largish paper book library. Take that for what you will.
As an avid reader and lover of the paper book medium, I always find this a strange sentiment (unless you are a collector of valuable volumes obviously). I buy books for the story, not for the investment. As long as it's readable it is perfectly fine with me. I have an extensive 2-wall wide library that I collected over the past 25 years, and it wouldn't be nearly as impressive as it is if I hadn't relied a lot on 2nd hand book stores, in which case there's typically a price written on the inside of the cover anyway, and often a name of the previous owner. A coffee stain doesn't even phase me. But I recognize it for sure, some of my friends would react the same way.
Still as a book lover, I think that like me, you would prefer to buy the paper book over an e-book. As a lover of reading in general, the usefulness of a compact e-reader loaded with a few dozen novels can't be denied either. To make a comparison to music, I prefer a LP in a sleeve or CD in a case with a booklet over a digital file on a cloud server, but that doesn't mean I don't use flac or mp3 files. I rip my CDs myself and transfer them to my portable player as mp3 for on the road and to my harddisk as flac for quick access and indexing. This service seems to open up a way to do the same things with your book collection. It allows book lovers like you and me to keep buying our favourite medium (and consequently keeping paper publishing solvable in a business sense), and still read it as an ebook on the road without being forced to pay the full price a second time. So I think it's a great business plan, and the cost - both financial as well as the 'defacement' of paper books copyright pages - certainly seem reasonable for the service delivered. After all ripping a CD is a lot easier than digitizing a book.
It's a pity that seemingly devices without working flash aren't supported - some of us have adequate lighting.
"...but sometimes there's no beating the portability of an ebook on your phone or tablet."
When did normal books become non-portable? I mean, if you're looking at something like Moby Dick, yes a tablet might have a slight edge. But most books I have are not much thicker than a tablet, and actually smaller in the width and height dimensions.
Also, I do most of my reading in the bath. That brings up the issue of dropping things in the water. I have dropped books in the water before, and if you pull them out quickly you end up with a perfectly readable book where the edges of the pages are wrinkly. Worst-case scenario, if the book is destroyed, I'm out $6 and one book (I buy used). If I drop an eBook or tablet in the water, I might be out anywhere from $80 to $400. I'd also have to wait at least a day, possibly a few weeks depending on money situation, to replace it and resume reading. With a wrinkly book, I can generally resume reading immediately.
In the end, this is what will get people to switch to e-books, like MP3 locker services were needed for people with big personal collections to switch to cloud streaming. Publishers should jump on this, because e-books offer drastically lower distribution costs and many more opportunities for impulse purchases.
It's funny how this is the only unanswered question. I'll assume yes because of that.
Same anon here...
I did some research and came across John Turmel who posted both the edited and unedited versions of his presentation in the Den.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UV0L2hyqAZc&list=PL64F7D147CED62E6B
I do agree with John Turmel that surprising you with a 35 page agreement just before taping instead of in the info packet days earlier is pretty low. Shame on CBC. I wonder how many people call b.s. on this tactic.. and if they eventually get to pitch?
Why can't I make it "try again" on a book that it thinks I have that is in the 80k books you have some rights / discounts on?
Hmmm... I think this is a bug. I'll look into it. Sorry. It's early days, we'll get better. Thanks for letting me know about the bug!
It's fun. It's obnoxious. It's memorable. I like it.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Hi, You can free Read and Download Various Topics Book. check out: http://epdfbooksdownload.blogs...
This is an interesting app and I'm curious to try it out when I get home. Thanks for your work in this, Peter. I know it's hard to get development of something like this truly useful without a critical mass, but someone has to start the shift-space somewhere, and I'd rather see legal alternatives that encourage sales and legal consumption rather than blanket torrenting.
This wasn't your point, I know, but the NYTimes answer misses an extremely critical distinction. When you buy a movie ticket, you are buying a license to see that movie in the movie theater. You do not amass any ownership rights, other than ownership over the ticket. You cannot return to re-watch that movie in the theater or otherwise.
Books, on the other hand, are purchased outright. You can reread the book as many times as you want, scrawl over the pages, burn it, give it away, or sell it. You own the book, and you have limited copyrights in your copy. Likewise, when you purchase a CD, you can do the exact same things to the CD. In the U.S., most lawyers agree (though it is not completely legally settled) that you have the right (or at least legal defense) to format-shift your CD to digital media so long as it is for personal use only. Theoretically, shifting print novels to digital should work the same way.
There are some minor distinctions when it comes to eBooks that the author does miss, however. For one, you are not shifting your own copy of the book to digital format. Comparatively, if you own a CD physically, you probably have the right to format shift that CD to digital space, but it is less clear whether you have the right to torrent a copy of that CD. Why this is is entirely speculative and a great topic for a law journal article, but practically speaking you might be downloading a different copy than the one you actually own; maybe you're getting the remastered version, or it's a slightly different publication with different licensing schemes.
Likewise, when you download an eBook, the eBook version is probably marginally different than the print copy you own. For example, I caved and purchased a copy of the Lord of the Rings in eBook format while traveling. The new publication featured a number of typos that were not in my printed copy. While it pains me to think that I had to pay for the "privilege" of those typos, the fact is that the eBook version is a different publication. As such, by downloading a different copy of what is superficially the same, you may be violating copyright. For example, owning the VHS to Star Wars would probably not give you the right to download the high definition BluRay. You might have the right to download a VHS copy for yourself, and you very likely have the right to rip your own VHS (but less likely your DVD thanks to the DMCA DRM circumvention clause lacking an explicit Fair Use provision) for personal use.
Other countries will explicitly let you rip your own material, but only if you do the ripping yourself. This is because this is a logical extension of the "sweat of the brow" doctrine which assumes certain ownership in copyrights based upon the work put in to obtain it; because you are putting the work in yourself, the work serves as an alternative to the cost you would pay the copyright holder. The U.S. does not recognize this doctrine, so, for now, format shifting exists in a legal gray area. My personal, ethical (non-legal) opinion is that you should have a right to download or format shift a functionally identical copy of something you own (or have license to for the duration and to the specification of the license agreement only), without any significant improvements to the digital copy that could not be trivially added by the user during the format shifting process (e.g. ID3 tagging okay, HiDef files not okay). This is not legal theory, though, so ultimately the decision is between you, your conscience, and possibly a judge.