munkeywrench
First Post
Or, the pirates can just break the spine of their books and feed the book to scanner with a page feeder.
Okay, so here's the thing with this:
For one, these scanners are kinda expensive and most people do not own them. Most people own your typical flat manual load scanner. A pirate is going to use whatever is in his house first and foremost. Spending a couple hundred on a new scanner just to pirate one book is nonsensical.
The pirate could take it to a Kinko's or similar store, but that would cost money and thus is unfavorable. Besides, most stores that do this would never accept a copyrighted book. The pirate would have to work there or have a friend that does.
Finally, destroying the spine of the book is not popular. A Pirate that actually buys the book wants to keep it for his/her collection. Most pirates will get the book through shoplifting, and will he/she want it in good condition for re-selling (we had this issue when I worked at a local book store). You can re-glue the pages to the spine, but it is difficult and messy. The only real incentive to destroy the spine is if the pirate does not intend to keep the pages or if the pirate wants the pages in a 3-ring binder.
Also, OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. A computer sees a letter and an image of a letter as two completely different things. OCR technology allows for images of letters to be identified and translated into their computer text equivalent. It's like giving a computer special eyes so that when shown the image of the letter "A", it goes "hey, that's an 'A'," instead of "OMG WTF IS THAT THING?"
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