Hacker News Reader

Comment by lrvick | Hacker News Reader

I looked and looked and looked for an option here, and almost pulled the trigger on book scanning gear.

Eventually I gave up realizing it is an extraordinary effort to personally rip books just to have drm-free digital copies.

Instead I built a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf and filled it.

I read ink on slices of dead trees now, like a barbarian.

View on HN

That's one of my dreams, floor to ceiling bookshelves filled with books. Can't you try 'Calibre' [1] instead of paid book scanning gear? It's GPL.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibre_(software)

That means buying the DRM copies in the first place, further contributing to that system. Also it is a PITA.

Pretty much all e-paper readers are proprietary and track all reading too which is a second order problem.

IMO the long-term solution is attaching an author-payment system widget to pirate sites. It's not illegal to pay authors, so a payment system can't be DMCA'd, and pirate websites pop back up like weeds and can't realistically be stamped out. Magnet links are way too portable for that and anyone can spin up a new VPS with 100MB or so of data (the size of TPB's db IIRC) to keep on going.

Honestly, this is an amazing idea be if for individual creators or studios. It should also have a way to tag specific media that caused them to want to contribute so it is a wallet vote for more like this.

Really all creators should just have anonymous donation options for people that want to support -them- without supporting the toxic labels and DRM situation.

There are ebook scanning services that do a great job. I have used bookscan.us for hundreds of books for years and it works well.

The only issue I have is most of them require the destruction of the book by removing the pages. Many of mine are very rare and collectible now costing hundreds of dollars so it would be a crime to damage them.

Do you know of services that can do this without damage?

I unfortunately don't know of any services that do this non destructively. However, there are scanner designs that Archive.org use to scan rare books. I'll try to find references but I think they'll require construction - afaik, no one sells such a scanner ready to purchase.

Edit: Ask and ye shall receive: https://www.amazon.com/Fujitsu-ScanSnap-SV600-Overhead-Scann... - had no idea this existed. Very tempting - Fujitsu makes solid scanners .

Reply on news.ycombinator.com