The Revolution Will Be Digitized (By Cheap Book Scanners)

It's always a good sign when you meet a literary character at a conference. Last June, I wrote about meeting a Bilbo Baggins at the Semantic Technology Conference; on Friday I met a character out of a Neal Stephenson novel at D is for Digitize.

D is for Digitize was a small conference organized by James Grimmelmann of NYU Law School. It brought together legal luminaries with people from publishing, business, academia, advocacy, technology, and the press. It had been organized to coincide with the scheduled Fairness Hearing for the Google Book Search Settlement. As it turned out, the Fairness Hearing was postponed, to be replaced by a brief "status conference". The effect of the postponement on the conference was beneficial- with the Google settlement officially on the shelf, the participants were able to have real discussions on the future of book digitization without getting too bogged down in legal argument.

That future was brought into very clear focus by the two digital cameras in Daniel Reetz' do-it-yourself book scanner. Reetz's presentation and demonstration blew away everyone in the room. Like Stephenson's Waterhouse characters in Cryptonomicon
and the Baroque Cycle, Reetz is a tinkerer and a liberator of information. He spent some time in Russia and became accustomed to the conveniences of digital books in a society that doesn't pay much attention to copyright laws. On his return home to North Dakota, he was shocked at the high price of textbooks and the low price of digital cameras. He resolved to build himself a book scanner and went dumpster diving for materials, then posted instructions for how to make the scanner online.

In May, he was awarded the Grand Prize (a laser cutter) in the Epilog Challenge, a competition sponsored by the manufacturer of a laser cutter to promote "open design" manufacturing. The laser cutter has enabled Reetz to refine his scanner design to use precision-cut plywood. His first third-generation scanner, which folds up neatly for portability, was finished just in time for him to bring to the conference. (He had fun getting it through airport security!).

Compared to robotic scanners such as the one manufactured by Kirtas the DIY Book Scanner is strikingly simple. It is built with rubber bands, drawer sliders, white LEDs and two commercial off-the-shelf digital cameras. Some Russian friends of Reetz's have figured out how to hook into the camera's firmware so that scan acquisition can be triggered by pressing a single button. Open source software is used to do image management and post-processing. An operator turns the pages and average throughput is about a thousand pages per hour. The total cost of the scanner parts are under $300, including cameras. For more pictures of Reetz's new scanner, he's posted some here.

Reetz is not the only one building cheap scanners based on his design. A small but vital community is growing around the open-source design. Although book publishers might unthinkingly assume that this group is primarily interested in book piracy, they would be wrong. Several people just want to read books they've purchased in print on their iPhones or Kindles. An engineering student in Arizona is reading disabled and must digitize to be able to read his textbooks. One Indonesian man built a scanner with donated cameras because his town's property records had been damaged in a flood. More than one book aficionado has turned to scanning in response to a too-many-books spousal ultimatum.

For other perspectives on Reetz's presentation, see Harry Lewis' post at Blown to Bits and Robin Sloan's post at The Millions.

In my article on the impact of the Americans with Disabilities Act on selling non-accessible books, I speculated that the as cost of digitizing books drops, society's expectations for the bookselling industry would change. Now that I've come face-to-face with a cheap book digitizer, I realize that much will be transformed. For example, let's assume that an effective book digitizer can be built and deployed for $500. (Even if DIY turns out not to be the way this happens, commercial manufacturers such as ATIZ are likely to be able to meet similar price points.) Then the cost of putting a book scanner in 20,000 libraries would be $10,000,000. If these libraries digitized an average of even one book per day, they could digitize 10,000,000 books in two years. Since 10 books per day should be well within the capabilities of an inexpensive digitizer, the libraries should have no technical difficulties with digitizing 4 million books per month.

If libraries acquired the capability of digitizing millions of books per month, then Google's erstwhile monopoly on digitized out-of-print books could evaporate quickly in an appropriate legal environment. Rightsholders who have been angry at Google for working with libraries on digitization should think ahead to a future in which their works can be ripped, mixed, and burned by cheap book digitizers in millions of homes and offices. The world will be different.

In Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, Randy Waterhouse develops a data haven in a Pacific island country to evade crude laws governing cryptography. I hope that Daniel Reetz doesn't have to retreat to a digitization haven country to able to bring the sensible benefits of book digitization to people who need it.

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It Shall Be Unlawful to Sell Non-accessible Books

Here's an assertion that a few years ago would have been preposterous. Today, it's still pretty far out on the fringe. In ten years I think it will be obvious:

It shall be unlawful to sell books in the United States without making accessible versions available on the same terms.

The reason that this assertion has not been true in the past and may well be true in the future is the continuing progress in e-reader and digitization technology, combined with the structure of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). To review, the ADA forbids discrimination against the disabled, and includes the following in its definition of discrimination:

a failure to take such steps as may be necessary to ensure that no individual with a disability is excluded, denied services, segregated or otherwise treated differently than other individuals because of the absence of auxiliary aids and services, unless the entity can demonstrate that taking such steps would fundamentally alter the nature of the good, service, facility, privilege, advantage, or accommodation being offered or would result in an undue burden;

Offering a book for sale without offering an accessible version can only be considered discriminatory if

1. Making a book accessible "would fundamentally alter its nature" or
2. Making a book accessible would not pose an "undue burden" on the entity offering the book for sale.

Let's look at both of those points a bit.

Today, most people think of digitized books as being rather different things from the print products. The way you use them is different, the way you acquire them is different, and the way they are produced is different. But for many people, a threshold has already been passed, in part due to the adoption of reader devices. I used to wake up to the sound of my early-rising wife flipping the pages of a novel, now it's the click of a button on her Kindle.

Think of scholarly journals 10 years ago. They were printed things that libraries put on their shelves. E-journals were a different thing entirely, and though most of the important publishers were focused on moving their services on line, revenue streams were dominated by print. Ten years later, there is nothing remarkable about having a digital version of a print journal, and while libraries are still considered daring when they choose to do away with print subscriptions entirely, there are few libraries not considering that as a possibility. Many journal publishers now have digital revenue larger than print, and almost all of them view the future as being purely digital.

I don't think it's a huge stretch to think that in 10 years, it will seem natural to think of the digitized book as having fundamentally the same nature as a printed book.

Today, it may no longer be an undue burden to require a producer of a printed book to also produce a digitized (accessible) book. Ten years ago, the cost to digitize a book would have been roughly $10/page. The digitization and conversion process has since become dramatically less expensive. Brewster Kahle estimates the Internet Archive's cost for book scanning at about 10 cents/page, and although you'd also need to add costs for an accessible book delivery system, it's no longer prohibitively expensive. Imagine how cheap it will be to digitize and deliver an accessible book ten years from now!

Already, publishers are making accessible versions of their most popular books available through organizations that provide services for the reading disabled. For example, even though J. K. Rowling refuses to allow the Harry Potter series to be sold as ebooks, accessible ebook versions ARE available through Bookshare and Accessible Book Collection.

If you accept the premise that book publishers will at some point be forced to deeply confront the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act, many features of the proposed (and currently in limbo) Google Book Search Settlement Agreement make a huge amount of sense. As part of the agreement, Google would have been required to develop a service providing access to a huge collection of digitized books for the reading disabled. This would be simultaneously a huge benefit for the disabled and a benefit for booksellers, publishers and libraries, who would most likely be spared the expense and burden of deep ADA compliance. Google has downplayed the notion that the Settlement Agreement would shape the future of the book, but it seems to me that it would most certainly have shaped the future the accessible book.

The critical importance of ADA compliance for the Google Book Search Agreement was confirmed by the Statement of Interest (pdf) filed by the US Department of Justice (DOJ). After dealing with its concerns about antitrust and sufficiency of class notice and representation, DOJ emphasizes its interest in accessibility:

First, the parties have sought to maximize accessibility in a way that will provide individuals with print disabilities with a substantially similar experience as users without print disabilities. In the Proposed Settlement, Google has committed to providing accessible formats and comparable user experience to individuals with print disabilities – and if these goals are not realized within five years of the agreement, Google will be required to locate an alternative provider who can accomplish these accommodations. Along with many in the disability community, the United States strongly supports such provisions.

Second, given the nature of the digital library the Proposed Settlement seeks to create, the United States believes that, if the settlement is ultimately approved, data provided should be available in multiple, standard, open formats supported by a wide variety of different applications, devices, and screens. Once these books are digitized, the format in which they are made available should not be a bottleneck for innovation. Google has made clear in the past that it started this project on the premise that anyone, anywhere, anytime should have the tools to explore the great works of history and culture. However the Proposed Settlement is modified by the parties, this approach should continue to be at its heart.

The DOJ's second point is somewhat puzzling unless you consider technical issues surrounding accessibility. Disabilities come in many varieties, and it is unlikely that a single accessibility service would meet the needs of every reading disabled user. A book that is accessible to a dyslexic would not be accessible to a blind person; only through the use of open, published formats can we be assured that there will be a route to accessibility for every disabled user.

The DOJ expressed concerns about other aspects of the agreement, but unlike many opponents of the agreement, it urged to parties not to lose momentum towards reaching a workable agreement for lawful, large scale digitization of books. The Authors, Publishers, and Google appear to be working to do just that; while they certainly are trying to live up to Google's motto, "Don't Be Evil", there are also laws encouraging them to do the right thing.

Forty years ago, there was no such thing as an ebook. Soon, all books may need to have ebook versions. Another example that over the short term, things change more slowly than you expect. Over the long term things change more than you can imagine. (If you know who said that, please leave a comment!)

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A Reading Miracle. It May Be Legal, but Don't Ask the Grox

Over the summer I witnessed a miracle.

Do you know which book was the first you ever read on your own? I'm not sure about mine, but my younger brother's first was definitely Go, Dog. Go! by P. D. Eastman. He was under 4 years old when he start reading it. If you haven't read it, Go, Dog. Go! is a 62 page multiculturalist masterpiece with engaging illustrations first published in 1961. Here is the complete text of pages 3-9:

Dog. Big dog. Little dog. Big dogs and little dogs. Black dogs and white dogs. "Hello!" "Hello!" "Do you like my hat?" "I do not." "Good-by!" Good-by!"

This summer, I witnessed my own son "reading" his first "book". It wasn't written by a single author and it wasn't published by Random House. It wasn't printed on paper, and it wasn't even what we might call an "e-book". It was a website devoted to the game "Spore" that currently consists of 3,819 articles written by website users, and over the course of the summer, my son read a majority of those articles. Here is a sample passage:

The Grox are a sentient species of cyborg aliens generally considered to be the most evil and hostile in the galaxy. They are most notable for their evil and hostility, but are also notable for their asymmetric, weak impish appearance.

Needless to say, my son's outlook on the world and his ability to explore it have dramatically changed.

This miracle was made possible by text-to-speech (TTS) software. You see, my son has a disability that makes normal reading excruciatingly difficult for him. Through a great deal of work, and some considerable courage, he is now able to read, with great effort, printed sentences and short paragraphs on his own. But as a bright 11-year-old sixth grader, books like Go, Dog. Go! and others that pose little reading difficulty hold little interest for him, and so he won't read the words in printed books on his own. He likes computers, though. At the beginning of the summer, I showed my son how to activate the text-to-speech features of his Mac. Mac OS X has text-to-speech capabilities built in, and because Mac applications are built using standardized text display objects with hooks that allow access to the system TTS services, there's a uniform, cross-application way to have text spoken. (In contrast, TTS on Windows Vista is almost useless!) Similarly, Wiki-based websites present content in uniform ways that made it easy for my son to interact with text.

I was amazed by the way my son began to devour the content that interested him. Every day after coming home from camp, he would spend hours staring at the screen and listening to the Mac's robotic voice speak the text to him. Then he would watch some YouTube videos and play some Spore. I realized that TTS had given my son a way to fully satisfy, for the first time in his life, his hunger for information.

People who see miracles tend to develop intense beliefs. I am no exception. I am no longer an objective observer of digital copyright issues when they relate to access by the reading disabled. When I want to feel some anger (it helps me run faster) I think about people and institutions who try to use copyright law in ways that prevent people like my son from being able to read what they want to read.

After having moral imperatives made clear to me, I've spent some time learning about the relevant technology and laws, and I find that these include many of the issues I've been working on and learning about. For example, last year, before I started paying attention, Amazon faced criticism from authors and publishers who argued that text to speech on the Kindle DX constituted a performance that Amazon did not have the rights to deliver. Could publishers similarly enjoin Apple from allowing my son to use its TTS on copyrighted material? With my new perspective, I cannot talk about this without fuming at the blatant immorality of some of the arguments being made.

When Amazon relented, Random House (publisher of Go, Dog. Go!) asked Amazon to turn off text-to-speech on the Kindle DX for its books, which sparked considerable controversy. This led the National Federation of the Blind and American Council of the Blind to file a discrimination lawsuit against Arizona State University which intended to test the Kindle DX as a means of distributing textbooks. The basis of this lawsuit is the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which bars discrimination against people with disabilities in any public accommodation, a term which would include libraries and bookstores. The ADA has been used to force e-commerce websites to make their websites accessible to people with disabilities.

Unfortunately, the laws on accommodating disabled users have not kept up with changing technology. In 1996, the "Chafee Amendment" changed US Copyright law to allow "authorized entities" to make reproductions of previously published nondramatic literary works for the purpose of producing formats used exclusively by the disabled. Unfortunately, the possibility that all the worlds books might someday be digitized and thus made available to those with reading disabilities was remote at that time. As a result the ambiguity of the amendment's language is enough that the American Association of Publishers was able to argue that the Chafee Amendment could not be used by libraries to help them comply with the ADA. Luckily, organizations like Benetech and its BookShare website are working with publishers to get around this sort of conflict. I hope my son will be able to read the books he needs to read through BookShare.

It's my considered opinion that the Google Book Search digitization project has created the potential for a direct collision between book publishers and the ADA, and that this prospect has played a significant role in shaping the controversial aggrement to settle the publishers' and authors' lawsuit against Google, but that's a topic for another article.

Now that I know a bit more about the potential legal obstacles to my son's reading, I'm wondering what I should be doing to make sure those obstacles disappear. I'm still hoping to see more reading miracles. "Good-by!"

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