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>3. I can't copy/paste from my paper books either, at least not in any way that's not also available to kindle owners.

You mean I can chop the spine off of my kindle and run it through that massive scanning/OCRing beast like I did with textbooks? Awesome!

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Talk about limiting access to technology. I think more people can afford Kindle's (and thus their access to the lending, DRM removal and other options) than have access to a "massive scanning/OCRing beast".

The Kindle doesn't have a spine, and it turns pages by the press of a paddle rather than flip of a paper, so it is even easier to scan by machine than a hard book is.

There are machines that accept a stack of (unbound) paper and OCR it all. There's no "batch mode" for Kindle (apart from cracking the DRM, but that's a separate issue).

And a duck isn't an orange. His point was that an OCR machine would be easier to make for the kindle--just have it press the paddles. His point was not that an existing OCR machine for books would work on a kindle.

And all the while are we arguing about creating a digital copy of digital content. Even thinking about OCR here is like priting a screenshot and scanning it back in to send it via mail. Possible? Sure. Useful? Not at all..

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