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Z-Library to let users share physical books

torrentfreak.com

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Re: Z-Library to let users share physical books

#31

Post by leobg »

petra wrote: post #18
leobg wrote: post #11

They should just make it easier for people to scan books. Or give incentives. Why mail physical books around when all you need is their content? Or just get people to upload photos from the backs of the books in their library. Then extract from those the titles. Match them up against books that are missing in the digital library and are being requested by users. Then send a message to the owner and ask them to scan t…

Scanning a book is as easy as ordering a second hand copy in Amazon to be sent to a book scanning service. But at that price, why bother scanning if you can buy it ?

I never thought of that.

Digital has lots of advantages. You can have it with you at all times on your phone. You can use text to speech. You can export your highlights. Soon, people are going to want to ask ChatGPT about content from books they read, as well as highlights and comments they added.

A physical copy is the worst format that I would personally consider buying. I only do that when I cannot get a digital version. And the first thing I do once I get it is that I cut off the spine and run it through my scanner.

(Then, I spend hours researching the internet for a good e-ink reader :-D)

Re: Z-Library to let users share physical books

#34

Post by patcon »

bitwize wrote: post #30
martyvis wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like the Street Library project here in Australia. Every little suburb and village now has multiple little enclosures that basically encourage to people to put in a book they have finished reading and take if they want. All grass roots driven and seems to work well with very little abuse. https://streetlibrary.org.au/

Little Free Libraries are the USA equivalent: https://littlefreelibrary.org My wife has constructed, and contributed to, a few of these. I see them around town, even in residential areas; and, as you say, there is almost no vandalism or abuse.

You might be interested in how Little Free Library has been taken over by a misguided board of directors

https://nothingintherulebook.com/2019/11/15/listen-to-the-pe...

Re: Z-Library to let users share physical books

#35

Post by suddenclarity »

leobg wrote: post #17
codetrotter wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> send a message to the owner and ask them to scan this particular book. Scanning books take a lot of time. And making an actual high quality scan of a book is difficult even if you have a good scanner. Physically sharing books could make it so that important books eventually get it into the hands of people with the right expertise and equipment to efficiently produce stellar quality digital scans of the book.

You can scan a 500 page book in 20 minutes with you phone, non-destructively. Though it’s not fun and the quality will not be ideal, especially if there are graphics in the text also. For text-only books, quality matters little as long as the OCR can read the text.

I think that's ambitious. I've scanned a handful of books and although I don't know the page count, it's always been multi hour projects. Especially the editing afterwards to mark the text on the page and adjust warp tend to be time consuming. I even had a mounted tripod and remote to standardise.

Re: Z-Library to let users share physical books

#36

Post by suddenclarity »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #21
toyg wrote: post #5

The copyright police will fall on this like a ton of bricks. Publishers already hate libraries (yes they do), the last thing they want is more of them.

I don't understand why they should hate libraries. Libraries get people hooked on books, then they start buying them. At least that's what happened to me. Libraries typically have a limited length you can keep the books before you must return them. If you really like the book then you will want to buy it.

The don't. Libraries are a huge money source for publishers. Libraries and publisher's do disagree about the payment model for ebooks but it doesn't mean they hate them. Far from.

Re: Z-Library to let users share physical books

#37

Post by leobg »

suddenclarity wrote: post #35
leobg wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can scan a 500 page book in 20 minutes with you phone, non-destructively. Though it’s not fun and the quality will not be ideal, especially if there are graphics in the text also. For text-only books, quality matters little as long as the OCR can read the text.

I think that's ambitious. I've scanned a handful of books and although I don't know the page count, it's always been multi hour projects. Especially the editing afterwards to mark the text on the page and adjust warp tend to be time consuming. I even had a mounted tripod and remote to standardise.

Voice Dream Scanner on iOS recognizes pages and text and performs OCR. You just go snap snap snap.

For text that is sufficient. If you want to capture the layout also, or graphics, things get much more complicated. Even just getting headings requires post processing. So yeah, proper ebook vs just extracting the text are two different problems.

Re: Z-Library to let users share physical books

#38

Post by leobg »

kristopolous wrote: post #25
codetrotter wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why mail physical books around when all you need is their content? Because physically mailing books is not copyright infringement. Physically mailing books provides a legal way of sharing the contents of books with more people.

Well we need to change copyright then. I really only care about out of print and rare materials. Passing around a book through the mail that's been out of print for 80 years is rather dangerous when you care about its preservation. For some reason we legally treat these as identical to some mass market paperback trade of say diary of a wimpy kid and that's stupid. If we care about research, preservation of materials,…

Right. This is silly. I’m wondering: If it’s 80 years out of print, is it still protected by copyright at all?

The thing with copyright is, it seems to me: You cannot ask for them to change the rules. You just have to break them. Imagine Google had asked copyright lawyers if they could build their search engine. Crawling other peoples websites, keeping an index of their content, and then make people come to Google because “that’s where all the content is“. Would have never gotten off the ground. But now that Google exists, and even the copyright lawyers use it, it’s obvious that this is legal.

Lawyers and politicians are followers, not leaders. And much of technology is about circumventing their yesterday-values.

What did Peter Thiel say about the Internet? The world of atoms was over-regulated. So businesses fled into the world of bits. It’s a cat and mouse game. Whatever you do, better make sure you’re the cat.

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