[Beowulf] how Google warps your brain

[Lux, Jim (337C)]

On 10/25/10 7:53 AM, "Robert G. Brown" <rgb at phy.duke.edu> wrote:
> 
 the encoded information.

> Nobody is going to reprint the Saint stories.  They are a gay fantasy
> from another time, a swashbuckling series with a delightful conceit and
> innnocent heart.  The only way they will ever be preserved for posterity
> is <i>if they would come out of copyright</i> so people like me could
> throw them out there into the Internet.

A bona-fide library can make single copies of a "hard to get" work, even in
copyright.  However, they can't "throw it out on the internet".
And, of course, you could scan the book for your own amusement, and make
arrangements that the original book (should it survive) and your scans are
passed on to a single person, which I think would be legal under the first
sale doctrine. And, then, assuming that sometime in the future, there isn't
a repeat of the "preserve the Disney copyright forever" act, the book
*would* fall out of copyright.


It's interesting: I just got an iPad a few weeks ago, mostly as a
reader/web-browser device, and I've been reading a variety of
out-of-copyright works: H. Rider Haggard, Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain.   Thank
you Gutenberg Project!



And, since I am sitting/lying here with a very sore back from moving boxes
of books around this weekend looking for that book that I *know* is in there
somewhere, the prospect of some magic box that would scan all my books into
a format usable into eternity would be quite nice.  I might even think that
a personal "print on demand" would be nice that could generate a cheap/quick
copy for reading in bed(yes, the iPad and Kindle, etc., are nice, but
there's affordances provided by the paper edition that is nice.. But I don't
need hardcover or, even, any cover..)

(or, even better, a service that has scanned all the books for me, e.g.
Google, and that upon receiving some proof of ownership of the physical
book, lets me have an electronic copy of the same...  I'd gladly pay some
nominal fee for such a thing, providing it wasn't for some horrible locked,
time limited format which depends on the original vendor being in business
20 years from now.  I also recognize the concern about how "once in digital
form, copying becomes very cheap" which I think is valid.)