Book scanning: it's not piracy, it's transformational

[kestrell]

Wow! I feel like I'm coming out of the transmedia closet. This is one more for the technopeasants (I have a t-shirt for that). Too bad Googlebooks is all inaccessible, but you can find many of the scanned texts from the university project at archive.org .
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121011/01250620675/court-book-scanning-is-obviously-fair-use.shtml

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

Wow! That's a delightful decision. And for once, a judge finds for us on the basis of the ADA (in part). If I got it right, the other reason was that scanning created a transformed work, because the work was now searchable in a way that print (or braille/audio, for that matter) is not.

[kestrell]

Right, and, aside from the searchability aspect, this includes a lot of the functionality which is the reason I prefer etext with text-to-speech rather than audiobooks or recordings of human readers. It gives the reader a lot more control over the final format, including font size and color contrast, which you would think would be features available in ebook reader devices, but a lot of times these options still don't offer enough options to suit people with visual impairments.