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cory doctorow
ting the binding off of a book and scanning it a page at a time,
then running the resulting bitmaps through an optical character
recognition app to convert them into ASCII text, to be cleaned up
by hand. These books are pretty buggy, full of errors introduced
by the OCR. A lot of my colleagues worry that these books also
have deliberate errors, created by mischievous book-rippers who
cut, add, or change text in order to “improve” the work. Frankly,
I have never seen any evidence that any book-ripper is interested
in doing this, and until I do, I think that this is the last thing
anyone should be worrying about.
Back to
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
[COVER]. Well,
not yet. I want to convey to you the depth of the panic in my
field over ebook piracy, or “bookwarez” as it is known in book-
ripper circles. Writers were joining the discussion on alt.binaries
.ebooks using assumed names, claiming fear of retaliation from
scary hax0r kids who would presumably screw up their credit-
ratings in retaliation for being called thieves. My editor, a blog-
ger, hacker, and guy-in-charge-of-the-largest-sf-line-in-the-world
named Patrick Nielsen Hayden, posted to one of the threads in
the newsgroup, saying, in part [SCREENGRAB]:
> Pirating copyrighted etext on Usenet and elsewhere
> is going to happen more and more, for the same
> reasons that everyday folks make audio cassettes from
> vinyl LPs and audio CDs, and videocassette copies
> store-bought videotapes. Partly it’s greed; partly it’s
> annoyance over retail prices; partly it’s the desire to
> Share Cool Stuff (a motivation usually underrated by
> the victims of this kind of small-time hand-level piracy).
> Instantly going to Defcon One over it and claiming
> it’s morally tantamount to mugging little old ladies
> in the street will make it kind of difficult to move
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