On 9/12/00, at 3:45 PM, hal@finney.org wrote:
>Whether or not this was truly a concern of David Brin several years ago,
>it has apparently become an issue for the industry as a whole. Still it
>seems that novelists have several years breathing room before they have
>to worry. It is hardly practical today to unbind, scan and text-convert
>books into electronic form.
Au contraire. First, from a technical standpoint, it's trivial. Chop
the spine off a book. Put the pages on a scanner with a document feeder.
Use a batch-mode OCR program. Anyone can do it for a few hundred dollars.
As a member of Science Fiction Writers of America, I receive an email
newsletter. I cannot directly quote from it, but there's a great deal of
concern about Internet piracy of sf authors. And with good reason. Check
alt.binaries.ebook alt.binaries.ebooks
alt.binaries.e-book alt.binaries.e-books
for hundreds of requests for or posts of copyrighted sf.
Also, there appear to be pirates who are deliberately targeting SFWA
members for ripoff. And threatening them with electronically destroying
their lives in other ways.
-- David Lubkin.
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lubkin@unreasonable.com || Unreasonable Software, Inc. || www.unreasonable.com
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> > > > > B e u n r e a s o n a b l e .
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