I do not think that buying a printed book gives you any legal rights to the additional benefits of a PDF version. You might be of the opinion that it gives you the moral right to those additional benefits, but that certain doesn't translate into legal rights!
No, you really do have the legal right to change your media from any format to any other format(with all the advantages and disadvantages of each), if you are capable of making the transfer. If 3d books come out in the future, I'm allowed to change my hardcover books into 3d books, even if I didn't pay extra for the 3d version.
This has been covered a couple of times in the thread. You can turn your CD into MP3s, you can transfer your DVDs into video files on your hard drive so you can watch it on your laptop without carrying around the DVD.
The only caveat with this is that the DMCA made it illegal to bypass copy protection. What was happening was that people were ripping their CDs so they could listen to them anywhere and any time without the CD itself. Which the content providers didn't like, even though it was completely legal. So, when they made DVDs, they worked copy protection into the design, to make it nearly impossible to copy the information and used some other technology to make it difficult to copy using a VCR. Hackers eventually figured out the copy protection everyone was able to rip the data off of DVDs in order to use their legal right to transfer data from one format to another. So, the content providers lobbied the government to pass the DMCA, which says that it is illegal to bypass any form of copy protection.
IMHO, it seems kind of backward that we are legally allowed to copy stuff from one format to another, but the people who make that content are allowed to lock them down with copy protection and infringe on my rights as a consumer and the government not only allows them to but makes it illegal for me to bypass the copy protection. And people feel that I'm the thief and the law is moral.
And, according to Imbran, the time it would have taken you to do the scanning, OCRing and bookmarking is far from negligible:
That sounds like a lot more than one dollar's worth of effort to me....
It takes a decent amount of time, and you need to own a program to do it. That's basically it. You often have to destroy the spine of your book in order to get a good quality scan as well. But the process is still: put the book on a scanner, hit the scan button, hit the OCR button, then correct any mistakes the OCR program makes manually.
How much time it takes depends on the size and speed of your scanner and the accuracy of your OCR software. If you can scan 2 pages at once, quickly, and your OCR software makes nearly no mistakes, you can probably do an entire 300 page book in 2-3 hours or so. If you have a slow scanner, take the time to separate all of your pages, or do a lot of proofreading on the document to make sure the OCR did its job, then it might take you 10 hours.
Yes, I admit that if we're talking purely man hours, that it costs around 300 bucks to pay someone to do it. But it only needs to be done once and then sold to everyone who buys it. If you add a dollar to the price and sell 300 copies of it, you've already made your money back.
It's even easier to do if you are the original publisher of the book, because it might be a 30 minute conversion process that no one has to monitor from the original file rather than scanning your own book. No editing, no sitting there constantly putting pages on a scanner or anything. It costs almost nothing at all.
