Why not purge your bookshelves and format shift to ebook shelves

Following a favorite author on Twitter, @DaveCullen, we saw this page at Oprah.com. When your book collection becomes unruly. It’s time to purge. They have a useful checklist of what might make a book worthy of keeping or tossing when you must regain some space. But they fail to mention a very clear solution to the problem of annoying book clutter. Ebooks barely take up any space. Your home library compressed properly probably fits on a 16GB Flash drive.

Organizing Ideas for Your Bookshelves – Tips for Clutter – Oprah.com.

Initially I wrote this discussing the possibilities and challenges with book scanning. But except for somebody willing to completely destroy a book by stripping the spine in order to feed into an affordable excellent home document scanner, it’s simply too annoying a process to recommend to most people. The books you are thinking of getting rid of are mostly the ones you don’t really want all that much. Otherwise you’d find a way to make space for them.

If you’ve been collecting hardcovers for years and have a beautiful library, you keep those and save space another way, downsize your bed or something. The problem of books for people are the ones they aren’t using, they’ve partially read and didn’t care enough to continue for the time being. Nothing wrong with that. In that case you simply don’t need that book. If you wanted to read it, you could pick it up at the library.

So the answer really is, to get our public libraries to the state where you can borrow books, all books on demand. This could be many years away though. Right now, borrowing ebooks from the library you need a specific device type and the books available are very small. A company called Overdrive powers many of these systems in place at libraries now.  I’m not even sure the rationale behind the available books actually. Maybe every library website is just showing the boring titles that aren’t checked out in an scroller. I do know this, the system is based on artificial scarcity. People will “return” a book and then you can check it out. This is ridiculous. Say what you want about government money systems and how it’s all artificial. But an artificial scarcity of information is just disgraceful. “The book is right there, why can’t I borrow it?”  Because somebody made an agreement somewhere and it was decided to give one group  the control over the information. I’m willing to entertain the thought that libraries should be able to transmit freely working for the public good outside of the control of copyright.

The situation is sad enough to make you want to create or contribute to a pirate culture for books.  At least until balance can be achieved again.  Until then, desperate times, desperate measures. Scanning looks like a better idea because at least I have the power and the control there. I’m not subjected to the whims of Overdrive and whatever legal limitations are being imposed in these library partnerships. (Note I’m not blaming Overdrive, but the system is a farce when you can get access to all the books whenever you want, at least for a temporary amount of time, that doesn’t amount to permanent download ownership.)

Let’s take a look at another favorite author, Lawrence Lessig and examine the copyright / credits page of his book Free Culture published by Penguin.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

Ok, nicely done. Now let’s look at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, of which Lessig is a contributing member and their Fair Use FAQ.

4. What’s been recognized as fair use?

Courts have previously found that a use was fair where the use of the copyrighted work was socially beneficial. In particular, U.S. courts have recognized the following fair uses: criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, research and parodies.

In addition, in 1984 the Supreme Court held that time-shifting (for example, private, non-commercial home taping of television programs with a VCR to permit later viewing) is fair use. (Sony Corporation of America v. Universal City Studios, 464 U.S. 417 (1984, S.C.)

Although the legal basis is not completely settled, many lawyers believe that the following (and many other uses) are also fair uses:

• Space-shifting or format-shifting – that is, taking content you own in one format and putting it into another format, for personal, non-commercial use. For instance, “ripping” an audio CD (that is, making an MP3-format version of an audio CD that you already own) is considered fair use by many lawyers, based on the 1984 Betamax decision and the 1999 Rio MP3 player decision (RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia, 180 F. 3d 1072, 1079, 9th Circ. 1999.)
• Making a personal back-up copy of content you own – for instance, burning a copy of an audio CD you own.

So the courts have ruled in favor of making personal backup copies.  “MAKING” backup copies, not trolling the internet for rogue PDFs and ePub files. There’s no ruling in favor of getting the ebook source from a torrent website or newsgroups just because you own the physical book. My opinion, it’s just a legal issue. My ethics tell me it’s perfectly fine to get the ebook file available somewhere and as long as I’m not sharing it, it’s a convenient backup for me. Not everyone sees it that way. But I wouldn’t feel at all guilty about it. For me to obtain it though, remember it means somebody else is infringing copyright. Unless there in one of those countries who doesn’t recognize it.

If you MAKE your own book scan as a backup. You could freely destroy the original and your digital backup becomes your main copy. And since the only way to store a digital backup is in within a personal “retrieval system” then keeping a small library of backup files on USB, SD cards or what have you, is the only choice.

I write this knowing that it’s within a very strange and sometimes incomprehensible framework known as copyright law. And of course I’m no lawyer and cannot be trusted.  Books shouldn’t be so troubling though. We were all fortunate that CDs were digital content widely distributed on a physical entity. Ripping them to a compressed digital file (mp3) to make portable became so easy, it is now most likely an included feature in your computer’s operating system.

The answer ultimately for the public’s future is within portable connected devices, with cameras, scanning and downloading books.  The other thing is to make these books more affordable and in more hands. Either we want to limit potential, or we don’t. If libraries get to where they can’t maintain their inventory due to funding, and books aren’t there, we have to supplant that with downloads. And these downloads need to be instant. Because people have projects, deadlines, interests. I’m not gonna wait for the 89th person to “return” one of the two available copies of the John Steinbeck book when my kid’s paper is due.  If somebody isn’t getting paid, we work that out without stifling the entire population by artificial means from getting to books to make said population richer and more capable.