

How I Beat The Textbook Industry (With A Shoebox Contraption) - guynamedloren
http://madebyloren.com/how-i-beat-the-textbook-industry

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mjn
DIY book scanning is a fairly active community, mostly organized by people
interested in legal scanning of old books without having to cut off the
binding to put the book through a sheet-fed scanner.

Here's one site: <http://www.diybookscanner.org/>

And here's a 2009 article about how the Google-Books scanning rig works:
[http://www.npr.org/blogs/library/2009/04/the_granting_of_pat...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/library/2009/04/the_granting_of_patent_7508978.html)

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kshatrea
With reference to the aggressive litigation-based attack philosophy of the
publishing/recording/movie industry of your country, isn't it a bit risky to
go ahead and write this? If they go ahead and sue you for doing something
(remembering the case of the RIAA suing someone and getting a $675k
judgement), couldn't your blog be used against you in a case in court?

~~~
RobAley
The "They" would need to be the copyright holders or their agents, and as he
wisely doesn't note the particular books he did this with, there is likely no
one able to take him to civil court. It appears he hasn't done this
commercially, so I don't think there would be a case for a criminal
prosecution either.

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nathanbarry
This is exactly what I did as well. Just setup a stand to hold the camera,
then sat there flipping pages and taking pictures while watching a movie. I
then wrote a simple Photoshop Action to fix the lighting, and separate the two
pages. Then I could make sure the page numbers in my PDF matched the book page
numbers.

The other huge benefit was that I brought just a laptop around with me to
classes instead of a heavy backpack full of books.

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ms4720
its high tech shoplifting, the tech is fine but the morality of the act makes
me wonder when he needs to make hard choices professionally will he revert to
type and get over or do the right thing. It is odd that someone who is going
into an integrity based profession thinks it is cool to brag about being a
thief.

I do not have any problems with anyone scanning their books for personel use
and its legal, but this was not.

~~~
potatolicious
I'm not usually one to defend piracy - but this is a lot grayer than you're
making it out to be. What is the morality behind stealing (or in this case,
infringing upon) something that you've been forced into having, and which as a
whole behaves immorally?

Professors routinely get kickbacks for using certain books, textbook
publishers routinely publish new "editions" with limited to no changes just to
obsolete books in the secondary market. They put in one-time-use keycodes that
are required to make use of the book, and since they have exclusivity over
their courses, there is no free market choice - students are forced to buy
these absurdly expensive tomes of questionable use or cannot get an education.

The legality of this is clear, the morality here is anything but.

One commenter on the blog post:

> _"Hopefully, you never write your own textbook. Looks like you found an
> efficient way to steal that $700 of literature. Probably slightly quicker
> than raising the cash by mugging or defrauding a charity, but ethically no
> different."_

What a load of horseshit. Copyright infringement is not at all like defrauding
a charity or mugging someone. Incredibly stupid analogy is incredibly stupid.

It's funny though, that when we object so hard when the MPAA/RIAA uses the
word "theft" to describe infringement, but when it conveniences us we will use
the same weasel word for the exact same fucking thing.

And more accurately, I think commenter meant "hopefully you're never in a
position to defraud your students by forcing them to buy a book you wrote
yourself and are receiving significant kickbacks for from the publisher and
abusing your position as a tenured educator for unfair financial benefit", but
that's a mouthful.

~~~
ms4720
First of all he was not forced into this against his will, it was a voluntary
choice on his part to go to college and pick his major.

no the morality is clear as well, he could have done many other things to
protest or just reevaluate his decision and study/do something else. instead
he chose to steal and then decided to brag about it.

and having read textbooks I would not call them literature in general.

and I am sure there were cheaper/free alternative books out there that he
could have made due with.

my opinion stands he is a thief with a big mouth. he is not much of a thief
but still one.

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jstalin
Send in the helicopters, police trucks, dogs, and men with automatic weapons,
please.[1]

1: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMas0tWc0sg>

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jetti
For those who value their time just a bit, I would suggest sites like
bookrenter.com where you rent the book instead of buying. It is much cheaper
for the basic classes (e.g common CS classes like Data Structures) but I've
noticed that for my more advanced graduate classes it's cheaper to buy used
off Amazon.

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shimsham
Hacker news?

~~~
andrewflnr
Yes. It was a hack.

