It's pretty common for people to make copies of their media (music & movies) by ripping them into a new format.

I wonder if there existed an easy way to scan books into digital format, would people do it?  Specifically, you people?  :-)

Just drop it into a hopper and the machine flips the pages, producing either lots of JPEGs or an OCR'd text file.

I'm thinking about all the space taken up in my house by books that I could have back if only they were stored on a hard drive.

But they're so much nicer when you can see them all lined up on the shelves.  Different colors, shapes, sizes.  And the fun of schlepping them when you move!

I'd hope that electronic books don't replace paper, but it'd be nice to have them electronically as well for portability.

When I finally release my book (looking like years), it'll be with a CD in the back with the whole book on it in HTML and PDF.

Who's going to publish it?

I am.

Whats it called again?

http://www.soulsofglass.com

On hiatus once more.

it's still nicer to read a book as a book.  as tiny computers become available that might change - apparently some readers are getting close.

we're a long way from the "drop it in a hopper" stage.  ocr requires checking, and a device to hold a book (any size), turn pages, lay it flat. and scan pages is currently a star trek dream.

i've scanned old bills, papers, etc.  and journals.  we have xerox copiers that can scan and email you a pdf.  that's been handy to get rid of stuff I don't really want, but think I should keep just in case...

I had a break-in, and among all the things stolen were every last removable hard drive. So if you're going to be scanning stuff, you might want to look at a better back up strategy than putting it on several hard drives, as the burglar exposed a common-mode fault to that strat.

A huge row of books against your wall lets people see how smart you are.

Unless they're romance novels.
Then they wonder how you can afford to live in a double-wide.

ward-- Google has refrigerator sized machines that auto scan books. They turn the pages and hold them flat and etc. They are used for their Library scanning project.

A novel solution to the 'ocr errors' problem is to make it a web game, in the same way that they did for tagging images. I saw a talk on this, I don't know if the game is already out and working or if it's still being developed.