The BookLiberator

While publishers, booksellers, authors and agents are busy hacking out the future of e-books, in through the side door comes a gadget that could make copyright holder’s lives more complicated yet, according to this report from Forbes:

Remember the sense of liberation that came from digitizing your CDs and then chucking a decade or two’s accumulation of archaic plastic? James Vasile and Ian Sullivan want to give you that gratification again–this time from rendering into bits your hundreds of pounds of dead trees.

Their invention, on display over the weekend at the HOPE hackers conference in New York: the BookLiberator, a simple contraption of poplar wood, screws, plexiglass, and two mounted digital cameras. Rest a book or magazine on the device’s adjustable base, and set its boxy frame so that the plexiglass spreads the pages flat. Take a picture with each camera, turn the page, and repeat. Before long you’ve created new fodder for your Kindle, iPad, or Sony Reader.

The scanner is quicker than traditional scanners at 15 pages per minute, and the quality of the image is better than with traditional scanners. According to the Journal, “Vasile and Sullivan plan to sell their invention in construct-it-yourself kits for around $120, plus an extra $200 for the pair of cameras–less than 10% of the price, they point out, of advanced book scanning devices.”

All of which puts fear in the heart of those who believe in copyright protections (not to mention manufacturers of scanners). Though Vasile, a lawyer for the Software Freedom Law Center, told the Journal, “We don’t think the major use case for this is copyright infringement. If you want to download a Stephen King book off of bittorrent, it’s already there.”

The Journal continues:

Instead, Vasile hopes that librarians will use the BookLiberator to archive their collections and that college classes will digitize textbooks to allow for easy annotation and “remixing.” “It’s no less legal than a photocopier or VCR,” he says.

But Vasile admits that his brainchild was first known as “BookRipper,” and was partly funded by QuestionCopyright.org, an organization whose favorite slogans include “Radical Copyright Reform” and “Copying Is Not Theft.” A line from Question Copyright’s FAQ: “Q: Isn’t copying a copyrighted work stealing? A: If I steal your bicycle, now you have no bicycle. If I copy your song, now we both have it.”

And “I” have no means of livelihood. But Vasile protests to the Journal that focusing on the copyright infringement aspects of his new device misses the point, “The legitimate uses for this are way more interesting than just free books,” he says. “We want to change the culture of text.”