I’m 99% sure it won’t have much of a positive impact in sales simply because the majority of ebook buyers don’t care about DRM anyway, only the minority of us bother to strip DRM. So while it wouldn’t be a large drop in sales I do think it would still be a drop. It might not be enough of a loss for them to care, and tbh as you said it would probably only result in a mild increase in piracy while the majority either do library loans or switch to paper.
I don’t think that those of us who care enough to jump through the hoops to strip DRM are just gonna roll-over and accept that the publishers can yoink our entire libraries whenever they see fit, but I do admit most don’t care, but those that don’t care aren’t stripping DRM anyway, they are just relying on the ability to redownload their books whenever they wish from Amazon/Kobo/Nook.
nybble41@programming.dev 11 months ago
On the contrary, tons of books have been digitized from hard copies through a combination of OCR and manual editing. (E.g.: Project Gutenberg.) The same basic process works for both printed books and pages displayed on an e-reader. It’s quite tedious but not exactly difficult. Anyone with a smartphone can submit usable scans, though some simple DIY equipment speeds up the process and improves the quality, and OCR is getting better all the time.
In the worst case the book can simply be retyped. People used to copy books by hand after all, using nothing more sophisticated than pen/quill and paper/parchment/papyrus. Unlike in those days the manual effort is only needed once per title, not per copy.
archomrade@midwest.social 11 months ago
I’m aware of the digitization projects, but not many people have automatic OCR machines in their basement, and manually flipping the page on your scanner is a little impractical for anything more than a 10 page pamphlet 😅
There’s no PRACTICAL way to digitize hardcopies for the average Pirate willing to break copyright law
nybble41@programming.dev 11 months ago
The average person would just download it. Only one needs the equipment to digitize it. And that equipment isn’t as specialized as you seem to think. For printed (mass-produced) books you can just cut the pages from the spine and feed them in batches through an automated document feeder, which comes standard with many consumer-grade scanners. Automated page-turning on an e-reader can be done with a software plugin in some cases, or externally with something like a SwitchBot. Capturing copy-restricted video is frankly much more involved, and that hasn’t stopped anyone so far.
archomrade@midwest.social 11 months ago
I mean, I’d really have to disagree, but that’s fine.
The effort involved with deconstructing a book, batching it through a document scanner, and compiling it with OCR in a EBOOK-compatible format is not trivial. Most consumer-quality OCR software isn’t even that great at recognizing words, new lines, symbols, and hyphenated and line-broken words, let alone recognizing chapters, indexes, footnotes, ect. It’s just not something that would be worthwhile for what it produces in the end, and there are millions more print titles than there are movie and show titles.
On the other hand, with A/V there’s almost always a way to pass playback through a virtual media capture device. Worst-case you have to wait the real run-time in order to capture it, but at the end you at least have a near-original quality file.
If tomorrow all EBOOKs got locked down without a means to strip DRM, I don’t think anyone outside of historical archivists would start spending their time manually cataloguing copyrighted hard copy books to distribute freely. Best-case, only the highest-demanded books would justify that amount of effort, and certainly not enough books to sustain a digital library worth frequenting.